Note 106 — Chapter II

Footnote 106:

(return)

There is the less need for treating this more fully here, as no New Testament Christology has become the direct starting-point of later doctrinal developments. The Gentile Christians had transmitted to them, as a unanimous doctrine, the message that Christ is the Lord who is to be worshipped, and that one must think of him as the Judge of the living and the dead, that is, 'ως περι θεου. But it certainly could not fail to be of importance for the result that already many of the earliest Christian writers, and therefore even Paul, perceived in Jesus a spiritual being come down from heaven ( πνευμα) who was εν μορφη θεου, and whose real act of love consisted in his very descent.