St. Paul, the earliest extant Christian writer uses the phrase in this sense, and so do the evangelists Matthew, Mark and Luke. Luke indeed, from start to finish, also calls Jesus a prophet, somebody who speaks for God. They do not believe that Jesus was God per se.

These writers, with the possible exception of St. Luke, were all Jewish and would have been horrified to think that God had sired a son like the pagan deities. They do believe that Jesus enjoyed special status, but there is always a distinction between Jesus the man and God the Father of us all. Thus the very early Christian hymn quoted by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Philippians says that because of his obedience and humility, Jesus was raised to a uniquely high level and given the title Kyrios (“Lord”) “to the glory of God the Father” (2:11).

In his gospel, written later than the others, John has a different take on Jesus. He sees him as a pre-existent being, the Logos or Word of God, who had become human and descended to earth as God’s ultimate revelation to humanity. The term Logos was not unique to John; other Jews were thinking about God in a similar way. Philo of Alexandria (d. c. 45 CE) uses the term; other writers saw God’s Wisdom, which enabled him to create the world, in much the same way (see Proverbs 8).

Our words are uniquely our own; they express our inmost being; they are the means by which we reach out to the rest of the world and make things happen. But our words never express our inmost thoughts exactly; they are not the whole of us; there is a clear distinction between our thoughts, fears and inchoate desires and the words we use to try to express them. So even in John there is still a distinction between God and Jesus.

God is inexpressible ~ far beyond the capacity of human beings ~ but we can get glimpses of God, when he adapts himself to our limited human minds. Jews at this time also spoke about God’s “Shekhinah” or his “Holy Spirit” to distinguish our limited experience of God’s presence on earth and within us. For John, Jesus is the incarnate Shekhinah. When we look at him, we have some idea of what God may be like.

Later, it took Christians seven hundred years to decide what they meant when they said that Jesus was the Son of God. By this time, Christianity was no longer a Jewish faith and Greek speakers did not understand these Jewish terms correctly, so many people were confused.

Eventually the East and West evolved two entirely different notions of Jesus. In the West, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury evolved one notion of Jesus during the eleventh century. The sin of Adam had been so great that only a God could atone for it; but because God was just, he knew that a man, who was responsible, had to atone. Hence God decided to become human and died to save the world. The Greek Orthodox did not like this idea, because they felt that it made God weigh things up like a human being; it was too anthropomorphic: God transcends this type of limited human thinking. And there is also something abhorrent about God sending his son to die a horrible death as a human sacrifice ~ I think.

So the Greek Orthodox, who don’t really believe in the Original Sin theory, evolved a more Buddhist notion of Jesus. The idea was first stated by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662). He did not believe that Jesus came to earth to save us from our sins. This would have happened even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first fully deified human being; he surrendered to God so completely that the divine infused his entire being, through and through, in the process of theosis (“deification”). And we can all be like him; we can all be deified too if we give up our egotism and greed ~ even in this life.

It is similar to the Buddhist notion of Siddhatta Gotama, the Buddha. He was the first fully enlightened human being in our historical era; he is so closely identified with Nirvana that when we look at him ~ composed, peaceful, in control, compassionate ~ we see what the inexpressible Nirvana can be in human terms. And we all have the capacity to achieve Nirvana ourselves -- even in this life.

I see the Christmas story and the deification of Jesus not as a statement of historical fact or an abstract religious doctrine. Like all religious teaching it is a call to action. When St Paul quotes that early Christian hymn in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-11), he was not giving his converts a lesson in the doctrine of the Incarnation. He was telling them how to behave.

He introduces this hymn by a call to action: “You must have the same mind as Christ Jesus!” (Philippians 2:5) he tells them, and he quotes the hymn not to make a metaphysical, dogmatic point, but to tell them how they themselves must live. They must be like Jesus and “empty themselves” (Philippians 2:8) of their egotism, pride and self-importance. You must, he tells them: “Leave no room for selfish ambition and vanity, but humbly reckon others better than yourselves. Look to each other’s interests and not merely your own” (Ibid. 2:3-4). Only if you behave in this way, will you understand the meaning of the life of Jesus, Kyrios Christos.