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According to the usual account emerging from historical-critical study, there was a development in christology whose traces can be more or less clearly discerned in the New Testament writings. Put very generally, the result of this development was such that the man Jesus, who either knew himself to be the promised king of the last days appointed by God or else was held to be such by the earliest Christian community, became a heavenly, divine being, to whom one ascribed preexistence, who was already active in the creation of the world, who became man, died, and rose again, ascended into heaven, and was there enthroned at the right hand of God. As such, he was worshipped as God by the church, was understood to hear prayers and to dispense miraculous powers, and was expected to come again, to hold judgment and to vanquish the cosmic powers, death and the devil, that are hostile to God. The course of this development, which is characterized by such concepts as, "Messiah" and "Son of David," "Son of God" and "Son of Man," "Kyrios" and "Logos," as well as by the stories of Jesus' miraculous birth, transfiguration, resurrection, ascension, and so on, is well known and need not be detailed here. Suffice it to say that its end was the injunction that "we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God" (2 Clem 1:1).

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