The Adoptionist Trap

Long before church councils settled on a single definition of who Jesus was, early Christian thinkers were trying to solve a very basic timing problem: when, exactly, did a man from Galilee become the Son of God?

One answer was adoptionism, the view that Jesus was born fully human and only later promoted to divinity. Depending on who you asked, the promotion happened at his baptism, or perhaps at his resurrection. Figures like Theodotus of Byzantium argued that Jesus was born of a virgin, yes, but didn't cross into full divinity until after he rose from the dead. Early groups like the Ebionites were also frequently painted with this adoptionist brush, though history mostly remembers them through the writings of their theological enemies.

This low Christology—the idea that divinity was something acquired rather than eternally possessed—stood in stark contrast to the high Christology of incarnation. Eventually, early Christian leaders and councils rejected adoptionism entirely, drawing a hard line around the orthodox standard of an eternally begotten Son.

Yet studying these early disputes comes with a heavy asterisk. Most of what we know about adoptionists comes from the people who hated them. Without primary sources written by the groups themselves, historians are left reading the arguments of their opponents, trying to reconstruct lost perspectives from the margins of polemic.

Some modern scholars even argue that 'adoptionism' is a modern construct that smooths over a much messier, more diverse landscape of early belief. The neat categories of heresy and orthodoxy might help explain what the winners believed, but they risk flattening a time when the very nature of Jesus was still up for grabs.