It is sometimes claimed that the earliest Christians thought only that Jesus was a prophet or a great moral teacher - and that it was not until much later that they started to claim that he was God incarnate. In Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code, for example, Leigh Teabing claims:
Until , Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death.
This is simply and incontrovertibly not the case. In fact, so wildly remote is it from the case, that there is strong evidence to suggest that some of the earliest Christians struggled not with the idea that Jesus was really God, but that he was, in addition, a man.
