Is there, or was there, a Christian denomination that believes, or believed, that Jesus Christ was "just a normal human"? I have met several people that came in contact with Christianity as adults. Their perception is that Christ was a human preacher that voiced his concerns in a time of corruption, abuse by authorities, dishonesty, crime and debauchery. This makes me wonder if in the time of Christ some of his followers had similar impression and took him as a role model, but not as a divine entity.
Historically, there have been a number of sects that denied the divinity of Jesus, claiming that he was a man, and nothing more.*

In the first few centuries of Christianity, most of these groups held the Christiological heresy (from the point of view of mainstream Christianity) called Adoptionism, also known as dynamic monarchianism. Its basic tenet is that Jesus was merely a man, and that he became the Son of God by adoption at some historical moment: generally the Baptism in the Jordan, at the Resurrection, or the Ascension.

The most famous adherents of this heresy were Theodotus of Byzantium and Paul of Samosata. This was also the theory, apparently, of the Ebionites, who were a group of Jews living in the first and second century, who considered Jesus the Messiah, but not the natural Son of God (as orthodox Christians do).

These early sects have long since died out; however, in later centuries, there have been many individuals who have considered Jesus to be a great moral teacher, or a wise philosopher, but not God. This, for example, is generally the attitude of Deism (a philosophical position toward religion that became common in the Enlightenment period, roughly 1715-1789, ending with the French Revolution) toward Jesus.

Perhaps the denomination that comes nearest to an explicit denial of Jesus’ divinity is Unitarianism. Historically, Unitarianism professes an explicit denial of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. (In this sense, the Unitarians re-proposed a doctrine similar to Monarchianism. Historically, Monarchianism—the denial of the Trinity—has two possible Christological implications: either Adoptionism, as described above, or Modalism or Patripassianism, which does not deny Jesus’s divinity, but denies that Jesus’s Person is distinct from the Father.) As a general tendency, Unitarians have tended to downplay the supernatural aspects of Jesus’ life and ministry, so they generally do not acknowledge his Divinity, in the orthodox sense. (The denomination does not impose a definite creed, and so there is a wide variety of beliefs and opinions.)



* Attentive readers will observe that I left out the most important historical denial of the divinity of Christ: Arianism. The reason is that Arianism is principally a Trinitarian heresy; that is, Arius and his followers denied that the Word—the Second Person of the Trinity—is God like the Father. They did not, however, deny the supernatural character of the Incarnation, nor that Jesus was more than merely a man. (In fact, their Christology was closer to that of Apollinaris of Laodicea, which tended to deny Jesus’ full humanity.)