Each of the three positions was distinct. The Nestorians imagined Christ’s divinity as a kind of benign possession, a god’s mind in a mortal’s body; the monophysites envisioned a magical new kind of being; the Chalcedonians put forth a logical construct, yet still quite difficult to grasp and comprehend, and they made this incomprehensibility into a virtue, at least as far as they could. If the scriptures were contradictory and confusing, they represented not conflict, but rather a lofty, divine logic that mortals could not grasp, and became evidence of the truth of a logically paradoxical doctrine. The figure of Jesus was smothered by these different representations of Christ, and the gospels dropped back to second place in such attempts to resolve the discordances of scripture into a philosophically satisfactory doctrine.29
Paradox and irony do not easily win a mass audience away from confident assertion and certainty. Churches that call themselves orthodox or catholi