They were a little of both and a lot of neither. They were not qualified to discuss even the nature of number, much less the nature of Jesus. They were not first-string representatives of the spiritual culture of their time. After Paul the Apostle, the first authoritative representative of Mediterranean culture of whom we have records, excepting Origen and Dionysius the Areopagite, is Jerome of Rome and Bethlehem. Those who preserve it, namely, scholars, are not those who make it or those who can make it.
Scholars are librarians.
They are not progenitors. Those who make history, such as rulers, theologians and monastics, are an entirely different sort of personality from those who catalogue it. Those who catalogue history keep what they can understand. They discard what they cannot understand. Most of what progenitors do scholars cannot understand.