I should probably at some point provide a sketch of how my book How Jesus Became God will be structured and organized (I don’t *think* I’ve done that yet; I need to look).  In any event, in the second to last chapter  I show how by the fourth century there was a broad consensus that Jesus was God in a very concrete sense: he was co-eternal with God the Father (there never was a time before which he did not exist) and was “of the same substance” with the Father, and therefore was actually equal with the Father.  In the final chapter, I go into the ramifications of this view for various polemical relationships Christians were in: with pagans (whose emperor used to be a competitor-divine-man with Jesus), with one another (as more Christological controversies erupted), and with Jews.   Here’s a part of my section on what the effect of the claim that Jesus was God had on the relations of Christians and Jews.

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To discuss the rise of Christian anti-Judaism in antiquity would take an entire book – or rather it has taken an entire book, lots of entire books, especially in the aftermath of the holocaust.  Here I want to consider just one aspect of the topic.   The Christian belief that Jesus was God had serious ramifications indeed for Jewish Christian relations in antiquity, because it was widely thought that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death.  If the Jews killed Jesus, and Jesus was God, does it not follow that the Jews had killed their own God?

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