I just finished the recent book by Frédéric Lenoir, "How Jesus became God" (Fayard, 2010). By reading this book, what struck me most is that it gives striking relief to a strange feature of human psychological functioning, a trait that is the unconscious origin of the most important events that mark the history companies. This trait is innate in this vice that makes men confuse their ideas, feelings or the product of their imagination with reality. Confusion between words and the thing would have said Hobbes. How is it that these men of the Church, the bishops of that time assembled in multiple conferences at the call of the Emperor Constantine and his successors in the 4th and 5th centuries, have not understand that their divergent beliefs about the nature of Jesus were only beliefs devoid of any objectivity. The only fulcrum of these convictions was of biblical texts, supposedly revealed, but so little clear and certain that they were open to various interpretations. Based on these different interpretations, play a personal logic did the rest. The explosive cocktail that resulted from these divergent views were defended with much more passion and violence that they were uncertain and fragile. The reality was forgotten in favor of the passion and the conclusions of the discussions resulted in reciprocal excommunications that would have only been comical if they were accompanied by dismissals and exile, sanctions imposed by emperors according to their own politically interested option. When you see how this cultural storm nearly two centuries was impregnated with fanaticism basis of the most basely human feelings that are, we say that we must have faith to the well hung continue to believe that the letter of 'credo 'which was the result comes from the Holy Spirit and therefore represents reality as God himself wanted to reveal to men. But, as the author points out in its last pages, current believers, very much like those of the early days of Christianity, much less care about the conciliar dogmas that message of love which bases their attachment to the person of Jesus.
On some form of details, this book suffers from the weakness that hit the authors as prolific as Frédéric Lenoir and who write so fast. On the bottom you have to be grateful for having had the courage to remind our time incredible ideas bubbling caused by the phenomenon Jesus.
