What every one of us tends to forget is that Christianity has only been a monolith for about 1,000 years — maybe not even that long.

During the first few decades after the Crucifixion, the Jesus Movement was a revival movement within Judaism. Judaism, in turn, was one of maybe a hundred different religions in the Mediterranean area alone, and it was not one of the biggies, like, say, the Diana-worship that dominated the Greek city Corinth.

By about 100 C.E., there were two or three dozen different versions of what is today called Christianity. Some of them followed the apostles Peter and Paul; some of them followed the apostles Thomas and Mary the Great; some of them followed other, lesser-known apostles, disciples, and holy people. Most of the versions that did not win the "cult wars" are today lumped together under the rather pejorative umbrella of gnosticism. (See the excellent book Rethinking Gnosticism for more on the subject.)

The apostle Paul started out life as a good Pharisee, just as Jesus himself probably did. His letters to various far-flung congregations — for example, to those who had to contend with the Diana-worshippers in Corinth — show little knowledge of the facts of the life of the man from Nazareth, and virtually no interest in them. I can't remember off the top of my head, but of the roughly 27 instances in which Paul mentions the human Jesus, roughly 90 percent of the time Paul is talking about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Paul shows not the slightest awareness of the core of the human Jesus's message: the simultaneous imminence and immanence of God's Domain.

All religions grapple with the question of Ultimate Reality — i.e., Godde — and the question of why we humans suffer and what is to be done about it. In trying to explain his essentially Jewish message to people who knew little or nothing of Judaism, Paul found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, up until about 650 BCE, Judaism taught that everything comes from Godde, both the good and the bad. (Isaiah 47:10: " I form light and create darkness, I make weal [shalom] and create woe; I YHWH do all these things.") On the other hand, during the Babylonian Exile, Judaism picked up a heck of a lot of Zoroastrianism by osmosis, and "thus spake Zarathustra": Godde is purely good; all evil comes from an opponent to Godde of equal or almost-equal power. The Persians called this anti-Godde Satan.

(I mentioned Manicheism: The Persian prophet Mani invented a form of Christianity that was more like a hybrid of Christianity and Zoroastrianism. St. Augustine was a Manichee for something like eight years before he got tired of not being allowed to have sex. [The Manichees taught that since Godde the spirit is purely good, all things fleshly must be purely evil, and sex must be the worst evil of all. And since women cause men to think lustful thoughts, women are the embodiment of the worst evil of all.] A LOT of the legacy that Augustine left Christianity is pure Manicheism, including the part about Satan being an anti-Godde.)

So Paul found himself trying to explain to Christianity-newbies: (a) there is only one Godde in the entire Universe. (b) Godde is pure goodness, or as the author of 1 John said, "Godde is love." Therefore (c) sin, evil, and death must have come from somewhere or someone other than Godde. But (d) there is no anti-Godde.

So Paul resorted to Genesis 2-3, the second creation story, and explained that Godde created the first human being, ha'adam (Hebrew for "the person"), in Godde's image, and through the sin of disobedience, the man and the woman transformed themselves into something innately evil. Paul didn't have the concept at the time to say, genetically, but he did envision parents creating their children's souls.

Paul had a very pure vision of Godde having become a human being, and I believe that Godde did become a human being. But I think Paul was grasping at the fringes of a very, very complicated idea, and he had to oversimplify it for the newbies in his audience. No shame to Paul for being imperfect; only Godde is perfect.

Paul's vision of the Jesus Movement was also heavily influenced by the oppression of the Roman Empire. Remember, when Paul was just starting out as an apostle, it was roughly 40 C.E. or so, and life was about 100 times tougher in Israel than it was for the Polish Jews under the oppression of Nazism. Those suffering the Romans' terrible, terrible oppression needed a Savior, someone to keep them sane, someone to keep them going. Well, Paul had just the candidate. All he had to do was mine the Hebrew Scriptures — all he had to work on — for prophecies of a Chosen One, a Promised One.

But to get back to your question about whether the earliest Christians believed that Jesus was Godde's son: In the late 200s, most of the dozens of different versions of Christianity fell into one of two groups. There were those who said that Jesus was of a similar substance to Godde's — the fancy Greek word is homoiousis. In the other camp, they said that Jesus was of the same substance as Godde — the fancy Greek word is homoousis.

Meanwhile, there were still the hundreds of other religions, Diana worship, Isis worship, Mithra worship (Zoroastrianism), Zeus/Jupiter (Latin for "God the Father"!), Baal, Apollo/Helios, Minerva/Athena, Tanit, Astarte, Molech, Chemosh. All of them looking down on this upstart new religion the way they must have looked down on Christian Science a hundred years ago, or Quakerism 300 years ago. The Roman Empire persecuted anyone who identified her- or himself as a Christian mainly because they still wanted a scapegoat for the great fire of roughly 64 C.E., plus whatever other problems scapegoats are good for.

Constantine decided he was a Christian in 312 C.E., and made Christianity the official state religion a year or two later, and everything changed — especially Christianity. No one would dare tell the emperor that exerting power over those whom Godde loves is wrong, or that he should give away everything he valued more than the love of Godde.

Constantine basically declared Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire so that he could unite its far-flung holdings. As someone wrote about Sweden recently, and he was probably quoting someone famous I don't know about — "one faith, one king, one religion."

Constantine was troubled when he heard about the quarrelling between the homoiousis crowd and the homoousis crowd — such a fundamental quarrel was bad for the one-religion business. So he called for the first great church council, which was held at his summer palace at Nicea. And the rest, as they say, is history. The homoiousis crowd lost the battle, although to this day Eastern Orthodoxy is much more homoiousis-oriented than we westerners are. And today, theologians joke about "the iota that changed the world."

Christianity started out as a revival movement within Judaism — Jesus telling the Syrophoenician/Canaanite woman that he came only for the lost sheep of Israel. About 10 or 15 years later, Paul adapted this revival movement to focus on sin-guilt-redemption, and for that, he needed a Redeemer. (I am not saying that Paul was wrong, btw!)

So, Paul changed Jesus' basic message in subtle ways. Constantine changed Jesus' and Paul's basic message in very dramatic ways. I believe that the Christianity that has evolved after Constantine would have been totally unrecognizable to either Jesus or Paul. I think Jesus in particular would have been horrified both by the unspeakable crimes that are committed in his names (the Crusades, the ghettoes of the Middle Ages, the Holocaust, all anti-Semitism, all colonialism, yadda yadda yadda, the list is enormous) and by the perversion of his basic message.

Jesus's basic message can be boiled down to: (a) Godde's domain is both imminent and immanent, that is, it's both right around the corner and it's already here. (b) The essence of Godde is love. (c) In response to Godde's love, you should release yourself from your subjection to anything you value more than Godde's love. If you love money more than Godde, then give away everything you own. If you love your family more than you love Godde, then "let the dead bury the dead." If you love glory more than you love Godde, then remember that in a thousand years, no one will have the slightest idea who you are. If you love power more than you love Godde, then transform yourself into one of the powerless.

A big part of Jesus's message that Paul did get right was, we are all equal in Godde's eyes — "there is neither inside clique nor outside geeks, there is neither rich big shot nor lowly wage-earner, there is neither male nor female; for everyone is just folks in the sight of Godde" (Gal. 3:28).

And so what happened? The emperor Constantine decided that the new religion on the block, Christianity, had the big advantage of keeping its practitioners focused on being good people, rather than, say, upsetting Constantine's political apple cart. So he declared himself to be a Christian and made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. And voila, instead of being a religion where everyone is just folks in the sight of Godde, we have a religion in which a patriarchal hierarchy is embedded in its very fabric (Godde / the Emperor / the Pope in charge; on the second tier, Roman senators / cardinals / archbishops; on the third tier, Roman centurions / bishops; on the next tier, (male) priests; on the next tier, men in general; and then young men, boys, male slaves, women, girls, and female slaves).

Instead of a religion where we have dedicated ourselves to fighting the evils of this world — abuse, oppression, marginalization, poverty, sickness, alienation — in the name of Godde's domain, we have a religion in which men quarrel over who gets to sit on Godde's left hand (women need not apply in the "kingdom" of the "Father" and the "Son"). Thanks to Constantine, we have a religion where people commit horrendous crimes because they imagine Jesus wants them to, or because they imagine Godde needs protecting from people who disagree with them.

The Vincent of Lerins definition of the basics of Christianity (what must be believed by everyone, everywhere, for ever) is very nice, but I'm not at all sure it's either true or valuable.

Is Jesus of the same substance as Godde, or merely of a similar substance? Dozens of people whom we venerate as Christian martyrs believed the latter, which is today dismissed as being a part of the Arian heresy. (Our very own St. Nicholas may have been canonized at least in part because he punched out an Arian at the Council of Nicea!)

Does Godde love all of Godde's creation equally, or are billions of innocent children suffering the flames of eternal damnation (in which I don't believe for a single minute, btw) because they never even heard the word "Jesus"? — as the fundangelicals and others insist.

Does Godde love all of Godde's creation equally, or are billions of homosexual men and women suffering the flames of eternal damnation because the fundangelicals disapprove of the job Godde did with their hard-wiring?

Does Godde love all of Godde's creation equally, or are women inferior because we have vaginas instead of Godde's holy and invisible Penis?

Am I condemned to the flames of eternal damnation because I disagree that I should worship the Roman Catholic Magisterium or the Mormons' "Apostles" above Godde?

I do not believe that Jesus died because Adam and Eve deliberately and with malice aforethought transformed themselves from Godde's good creation into something hard-wired to be evil right from the intrinsically evil womb. As Paul implied and little Augie taught outright. (I do believe that Paul hated himself because of his own homosexuality. But that's for another rant!)

I do believe that Jesus died so that Godde could prove, once and for all time, that if Godde truly exists, there is no death.