ABSTRACT
The Chalcedonian creed of 451 CE states clearly that Jesus was
truly human. It opens: ‘We then, following the Holy Fathers, all
with one consent teach people to confess one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, to be both perfect in divinity and perfect
in humanity, truly God and also human with a rational soul and
a body, consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and also
consubtantial with us in his humanity, wholly like us apart from
sin’ (quoted with slight changes from W. A. Curtis, A History of
Creeds and Confessions of Faith in Christendom and Beyond, Edinburgh,
1911, p. 71). I take this credal statement to mean that Jesus had
no power to do anything a saintly human being could not do.
