I am currently reading Paul W. Kahn’s recent book Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton University Press, 2007). Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. He regards the Bible as myth and appears to be especially influenced by Sigmund Freud and, among more recent thinkers, Elaine Pagels in his reading of the biblical texts.

It is interesting, then, to see how this scholar perceives the early Christians’ view of Jesus Christ. He writes:

“For the new community of faith, Christ is the miraculous appearance of the Word within creation. He is described as himself a text, the logos–not like the law, a lingering marker of God’s presence, but the thing itself; not a made image of God, the product of a creation, but the divine Son. To the traditional community of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, such a claim could not help but appear blasphemous, for it denied the fundamental gap between man and God…. The gap has been overcome in the person of Christ, who is both man and God. Thus the Nicene Creed specifically declares that Christ is ‘begotten, not made’” (pp. 78-79).

Kahn recognizes what many in the liberal biblical studies guild do not: that the Nicene Creed’s doctrine flows quite naturally from the church’s reflection on the New Testament view of Christ as the divine Son.