Research Paper on:
Christology/Who do you say I am?

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
"Who do people say that I am?" Peter answers that Jesus was the Messiah (Marthaler 74). In Greek, "Messiah" means christos, the "anointed one," that is a "person who is  singled out by God for a special mission" (Marthaler 74). Marthaler goes on to discuss the popular vision during Jesus era of the messiah, which was to envision the promised  messiah in nationalistic terms. After Jesus death and resurrection, the disciples began to perceive a more "spiritualized notion of the messiah (Marthaler 75). As this suggests, the realization of Jesus  divinity was a gradual awakening rather than a sudden revelation. The infancy narratives that were added to accounts of Jesus birth are evidence that later generations of Christians realized that  "Jesus was messiah from the moment of his incarnation" (Marthaler 75). However, it still remained for Christians to puzzle out the complete answer to Jesus all-important question and the true  nature of Jesus Christ. As Christianity spread, its message was considered radical by many people, as the concept of a divine being taking on flesh, enduring pain and dying  for the sins of the world did not fit with Greco-Roman ideas of divinity. Gnostic believers, for example, frequently differed with the traditions established by the apostles and believed that  Jesus was more divine than he was human (Meacham 40). The issue that underscored the early ecumenical councils, once incidental rivalries, "political machinations and abstract theological reasoning" are pushed aside  is still the question that Jesus asked, "Who do people say that I am?" (Marthaler 85). One faction believed that "The godly quality in Jesus...was the spiritual power of the  Father," which reduced the relationship between Father and Son to human categories and thus made it easier to comprehend (Marthaler 87). The most controversial issue, however, was the heretical