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When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome. By Richard E. Rubenstein. San Diego: Harcourt, 1999. xviii + 267 pp. $14.00 (paper).
About twenty years ago a scholar rather subversively wondered aloud at an academic conference, "Why is Contemporary Scholarship so Enamored of Ancient Heretics?" (Studia Patristica XVII.l). The answer often lies as much in titillation as in antinomianism. In When Jesus Became God, Richard E. Rubenstein is after neither of these but rather something deeper and more complex: "in exploring the sources of religious conflict and the methods people have used to resolve it, I wanted to examine a dispute familiar enough to westerners to involve them deeply, but distant enough to permit some detached reflection" (p. xiii).
Of all the Christological disputes of the early Church, the Arian crisis (or, as this volume demonstrates, crises) that consumed much of the fourth century-and many of its inhabitants-is undoubtedly the most famous and, for Rubenstein, "an American Jew" (p. xii), the most problematic: he believes that there was a "closeness" between Judaism and Christianity that was broken at the conclusion of the Arian crisis when "Jesus became God" (p. xiv). Unfortunately, this thesis visibly and invisibly undergirds the entire volume and leads to serious historical and theological misjudgments.
Rubenstein intends his work for a "popular" audience (whatever that term means now) and he has succeeded in writing a lively, engaging narrative that is reasonably accurate in its details. Since he is not a patristics scholar, Rubenstein is dependent almost entirely on secondary sources, but he has chosen his...