Did Jesus Really Claim to be God? This question flows out of the question we asked last week, because some people will grant that Jesus the man really lived, but that he perhaps lived as a itinerant teacher or a social trouble-maker, but that was it, and only decades after his death the myth of Jesus’ deity grew. It is sometimes claimed that Jesus would roll over in his grave if he found out that people were worshipping him as God. And so that is the next important question - did Jesus himself, really claim to be God? This is important, as one New Testament and ancient Judaism scholar, Brant Pitre, suggests:

The answer to this question has enormous historical and theological implications. If Jesus did not think he was God, then one of the central claims of Christianity, indeed, argueably the central claim - that the one true God became man in Jesus of Nazareth - comes crashing to the ground. But if Jesus did speak and act as if he were the one God, then we are forced to make a decision. Either he was a liar who knew he was just a man but spoke as if he were divine; or he was a lunatic who thought he was God but was grossly mistaken; or he was who he claimed to be - the one true God come in person. (“Case for Jesus: the Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ”, Pitre, 119)

The question is a difficult one to answer, because it can be approached from different angles leading to completely different conversations. The tricky part, when you are having conversations is identifying with angle is being taken and not jumping from one conversation to another.

The Historicity Angle: Can the New Testament (especially the gospels) be taken as historical sources conveying accurate information regarding the life of Jesus Christ?
The Textual Angle: Are the texts that we have access to what was originally written, or were they later manipulated by the church to manufacture proof of Christ’s divinity?
The Interpretive Angle: Do the New Testament writings even demonstrate that Jesus claims to be divine? Is that the correct interpretation of the texts? I’ll be spending most of my time today responding to the third angle, but let me first quickly address the other two angles.

The Historicity Angle: Can the New Testament (especially the gospels) be taken as historical sources conveying accurate information regarding the life of Jesus Christ? We’ll we spoke of this question a bit last week, explaining that while, yes, the New Testament letters and gospels are committed to their presentation of the life and work of Jesus Christ, this alone does not disqualify them from being valuable as historic sources. All biographers are inherently biased - a Union biographer may paint a more flattering picture of Abraham Lincoln than a biographer who had been part of the confederacy, but it would be absurd to question the historicity of Lincoln for that reason alone, or to throw them out as historical sources for that reason alone.

I will offer one extra thought regarding the value of the New Testament sources regarding this question of Jesus’ claim to divinity, that I think is important to keep in mind. Every single one of the writers of the New Testament present themselves as Jewish men who became followers of Jesus. This is important to our discussion today because if there were any group of people less likely to attribute divinity to a human being, it would be men like such who wrote the New Testament. Judaism stood unique in the ancient world in proclaiming the vast separation, the chasm, between Holy God and mortal man. To ascribe divinity to any other than the Lord would be considered by the Jews to be damnable idolatry. Now while it is true that the Jewish people had an early history of turning from the Lord to worship the gods of the peoples around them, idolatry of this sort is not recorded in the hundreds of years leading up to the time of Christ. Yet somehow, early Christianity took root first among the Jewish people. So if the authors of Scripture do indeed describe a divine Jesus, this is historically very significant. As one historian said, “In the study of history, where there is smoke, there is usually a fire.”

The Textual Angle: Do we have now what they write then? This question has been answered definitively, “yes”. Christians are honest about the textual integrity of the Bible. Every ancient manuscript of the text that is found is exhaustively, collected, catalogued, and compared to all other texts to ensure that the words you hold in your hand are an accurate translation of the words that were originally written. The science, called textual criticism, has exploded over the past 100 years, and with every manuscript found, our confidence in the originality of the words we hold has only increased, particularly as we compare the textual evidence of the New Testament with any other document in the ancient world. The copies of the scriptures that we possess are both many and early. In the entire New Testament, only a few passages are disputed. There is attempt to cover this up - every modern bible will have a footnote marking the disputed passages. The key point for our discussion today is that the textual evidence offers absolutely no support for some sort of grand conspiracy that the church later added manufactured texts to bolster a picture of Christ’s divinity. None of the texts that we’ll be looking at when we discuss the interpretive angle are disputed as being authentic. If you are interested in learning more about the science of Textual Criticism, Dan Wallace, the world’s leading expert in the field, offers a free online course at: https://www.biblicaltraining.org/textual-criticism/daniel-wallace

The Interpretive Angle: This is the approach I will spend a little time on today, looking at the texts themselves to understand as to whether they even record Jesus claiming to be God.

Now, as perhaps some of you already have found in your own reading of scripture, this is not as easy a question to answer as we might wish it to be. You will search the scriptures in vain for Jesus to make an unequivocal statement - “I am God, i am the Lord Almighty, I am the creator of Heaven and Earth” - he doesn’t do that. And people pounce on that - here is an example of a Muslim preacher, who says he’s a former Christian, making much of the fact that Jesus never says, I am God, worship me.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDFJrKwsU6I) Now i really agree with the last thing he said: “we cannot take Jesus out of the context of what Jesus said himself, and make Jesus what we want him to be.” I agree with that entirely. That is what I mean by calling this, the Interpretive Approach.

So when we come to the Biblical text, that is the question - who does Jesus present himself to be? And perhaps a better question is, what sort of being does Jesus claim to be? This is important because I see so many articles and blogs and debates which people - like the gentleman in the video - who presuppose their own understanding of God upon the words of Jesus, and then argue that Jesus does not claim to be God, according to their understanding.

If God were the God of simple monotheism, for example, the Islamic understanding of God, then we would expect Jesus to claim without qualification that He alone is God, that there is no one greater than himself, and that there are no other beings who can claim divinity. So that they will take Jesus’ words, in John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I”, or “and say, “See there! Here Jesus explicitly denies that he is God.” And, yes, if the question is, “Did Jesus claim to be God according to that conception of God, that they presuppose”, I will agree wholeheartedly, “No, he did not.” So if you read the gospels expecting Jesus to claim this definition of “God" for himself, you will walk away saying Jesus never claimed to be God.

Yet that is not how to interpret scripture, or any other text for that matter. We cannot come into conversations with people or with texts insisting on redefining everything they say, we must actually allow people to define their terms. To answer the interpretive approach, one must ask, “What is Jesus claimed to have said”, and “what response is recorded to what Jesus said”?

If you go to the scriptural texts and ask what sort of being does Jesus claim to be, you find that Jesus claimed a category for himself that is historically unique to the religious imagination of any ancient or modern worldview. He claims that He is divine with the Father, even while claiming that he is distinct from the Father. and that this distinction does not negate or minimize his divinity. That is a much more nuanced claim, which requires us to be more careful in hearing his claim.

Jesus’ Claims in John’s Gospel: There is very little debate that John intends to present Jesus as the divine son of God. There are many instances in John’s gospel I could pick, in which Jesus makes claims which were understood by his hearers as being claims to be God. For example, in John 6:41 and 51 when Jesus says, “I am the bread that has come down from heaven.” Or in John 8:12 in which Jesus, on the last night of the Feast of Tabernacles, in which huge lanterns were lit signifying the light of the Lord, which led them in the wilderness, and into this scene Jesus stands and proclaims, “I am the light of the world” to which people cry out that he is a liar, and that he might have a demon. Or later in that same chapter when Jesus says that he pre-existed before Abraham, by using the most provocative language, “Before Abraham was, I am” - which most scholars see as a direct taking of the Divine Name of the Lord unto himself - that’s the way that his hearers heard him, for they picked up stones to stone him for blasphemy. Yet John 10 perhaps illustrates the point I am making best:

John 10:22 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”

John 10:31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. 32 Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” 33 The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”

Look at how carefully Jesus explains his identity - “the Father is greater than all” (Jesus is distinct from the Father) and “I and the Father are One” (Jesus is divine with the Father).

Even this passage might be ambiguous - what does Jesus mean by I and the Father are one” except that John records how the people responded to Jesus’ words. Remember, as the speaker said earlier, “we cannot take Jesus out of the context of what Jesus said himself, and make Jesus what we want him to be.” So let’s look at how Jesus’ hearers responded in that context: his hearers understood exactly what he was saying, telling Jesus, “we are going to stone you … for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Jesus making a distinction between himself and the Father, even maintaining the greatness of His Father over all, but that distinction does not in any way negate or minimize His claim to divinity, as evident by those who wanted to stone him for blasphemy.

So that is the record of Jesus’ claims in John’s Gospel, but nearly everyone concedes the John’s Gospel is written to present a divine Jesus. They will say that, as the last Gospel written, John develops and creates a divine Jesus that you don’t see in the other, earlier gospels. This was the view of agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, who I do rag on from time to time, but I have to give him credit, he demonstrates at times a willingness to change his mind on things when he is convinced of the evidence. He writes on his personal blog about a change of mind he had:

Until a year ago I would have said – and frequently did say, in the classroom, in public lectures, and in my writings – that Jesus is portrayed as God in the Gospel of John but not, definitely not, in the other Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I would point out that only in John did Jesus say such things as “Before Abraham, I am” (8:58; taking upon himself the name of God, as given to Moses in Exodus 3); his Jewish opponents knew full well what he was saying: they take up stones to stone him. Later he says “I and the Father are one” (10:30) Again, the Jews break out the stones. Later he tells his disciples, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (14:9). And in a later prayer to God he asks him to “glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world was created” (17:5).

None of these sayings, or anything like them, can be found in the other canonical Gospels. John is clearly portrayed as a divine being in John, but only in John (I would have argued).

Yet it was in doing research for his book, “How Jesus Became God” that this well-known agnostic scholar had a change of mind.

In doing my research and thinking harder and harder about the issue … I finally yielded. These Gospels do indeed think of Jesus as divine. Being made the very Son of God who can heal, cast out demons, raise the dead, pronounce divine forgiveness, receive worship together suggests that even for these Gospels Jesus was a divine being, not merely a human.

And, indeed, this is the picture we see in each of the gospel. Again and again the gospels record that the Jewish people hearing Jesus’ claims heard exactly what he was claiming - that He in fact was God. I do not have time today to get into his actual trial at the end of his life - yet each of these earlier gospels record that the charge that the Jewish leaders held against Jesus was indeed blasphemy. Matthew gives us a good description of this central fact of Jesus’ trial before the Jewish high court:

Matthew 26:63 But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” 64 Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” 65 Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. 66 What is your judgment?” They answered, “He deserves death.”

It is easy to misinterpret Jesus’ referring to himself as the son of man as a statement of his humanity, but notice that the Jewish priests understood exactly what he was saying and pronounced it to be blasphemous. This is first, because the phrase “You have said so” is an idiom, probably meaning “It is as you say”, meaning, yes I am the son of God, a phrase that they took as meaning that Jesus was claiming himself to be equal to God, a blasphemous claim deserving death if untrue.

Perhaps the most ironic commentary I ever heard on the claims of Jesus came from a man who attended our church for a few weeks. This man claimed to believe in the scriptures, but did not believe that the New Testament taught that Jesus claimed to be God. He considered himself a Jewish believer, who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but not divine. I went to visit him and had lively debate showing hm from these passages and others that the New Testament writers believed that Jesus claimed to be God and presented him as divine. “Nonsense!” he told me. He said, “You don’t understand the Jewish mind. Jesus could not have possibly claimed himself to be God. If he did, the Jewish people would have had him killed for blasphemy!”

So what? Let’s go back to that original quote I cited at the beginning of my message:

Pitre is referring to the trilemma which was first posed by the mid-nineteenth century the Scottish Christian preacher “Rabbi” John Duncan (1796-1870), and popularized in China by Watchman Nee in his book, “Normal Christian Faith” (1936) and in the Western world by the great apologist C.S. Lewis in his Mere Christianity (1942).

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. (Mere Christianity, 55-56)

Later Lewis expanded on his reasoning:

We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met him. He produced mainly three effects — Hatred — Terror — Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Ultimately, once you meet Jesus, you know He’s God and worthy to be worshipped.

For the Christian, one challenge I would leave you with it this: continue to grow in your handling of scripture and in building your theology from Scripture. So many of the questions that we have, or challenges that we are presented with by unbelievers, melt away as we look more closely into the texts. Ask questions and wrestle, especially with the hardest passages.

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