Replies

One word might be misinterpeted, but an entire paragraph ?

Mat 1:. The Birth of Jesus Christ

¹⁸This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
²⁰But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,^[3] because he will save his people from their sins."
²²All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"^[4] --which means, "God with us."
²⁴When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. ²⁵But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus

This is a fascinating old, old argument. Gibbon speaks of it in his classic ’The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ The following is as good a description as I have found .

http://mb-soft.com/believe/txo/arianism.htm

Excerpt from the site:

Arianism was a 4th-century Christian heresy named for Arius (c.250-c.336), a priest in Alexandria. Arius denied the full deity of the preexistent Son of God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. He held that the Son, while divine and like God ("of like substance"), was created by God as the agent through whom he created the universe. Arius said of the Son, "there was a time when he was not." Arianism became so widespread in the Christian church and resulted in such disunity that the emperor Constantine convoked a church council at Nicaea in 325 (see Councils of Nicaea).

Led by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, the council condemned Arianism and stated that the Son was consubstantial (of one and the same substance or being) and coeternal with the Father, a belief formulated as homoousios ("of one substance") against the Arian position of homoiousios ("of like substance"). Nonetheless, the conflict continued, aided by the conflicting politics of the empire after the death of Constantine (337).

Three types of Arianism emerged: radical Arianism, which asserted that the Son was "dissimilar" to the Father; homoeanism, which held that the Son was similar to the Father; and semi-Arianism, which shaded off into orthodoxy and held that the Son was similar yet distinct from the Father.

After an initial victory of the homoean party in 357, the semi-Arians joined the ranks of orthodoxy, which finally triumphed except in Teutonic Christianity, where Arianism survived until after the conversion (496) of the Franks. Although much of the dispute about Arianism seems a battle over words (Edward Gibbon scornfully observed that Christianity was split over a single iota, the difference between homoousios and homoiousios), a fundamental issue involving the integrity of the Gospel was at stake: whether God was really in Christ reconciling the world to himself.