Is Jesus God?
Delusions of grandeur are hardly uncommon around the world, but it is rare for anyone who invokes a divine status to gain a significant following, particularly in our modern world. For those who claim to be God, our usual MO is not to worship them, but to reserve a white padded room and prescribe psychological treatment.
So what are we to make of Jesus of Nazareth? Certainly, Christians seem convinced that Jesus is more than merely a prophet or spiritual guru, claiming rather that he is the invisible God made visible. That God wrote Himself into the story of humanity by becoming incarnate in Jesus.
Of course, this claim that Jesus is God is hotly contested. Some critics reject Jesus’ divinity out of hand, arguing that even if God does exist, it is ludicrous to believe that He could even become human. And others reject Jesus’ divinity by arguing that this central tenet of Christian theology was a legend that developed over time in the early church, and that Jesus never even claimed to be God.
So what does the Christian story say about Jesus’ identity? Did Jesus believe he was God, or was that a later invention? And is it rational for you to believe that Jesus is God?
For the sake of this article, I’m going to have to assume the gospels are generally reliable, so if you have concerns over their historical value, there are a stack of resources we can point you to. But according to the gospels, the evidence of Jesus’ words and actions reveal that he clearly believed he was God.
In his extensive ministry of miracles and exorcisms, Jesus displayed an unparalleled power over sickness, the chaos of nature, and malevolent spiritual beings, restoring beauty to the blind, dancing to the lame, music to the deaf, and freedom to the captives. The limits of Jesus’ supernatural power meant that he could even plunder the grave, reaching down into death to bring loved ones back to life.
When it comes to things only God can do, Jesus claimed the authority to forgive sins directly, circumventing the accepted institutions set up through the Jewish Torah. And just in case you don’t think this is such a big deal, the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day disagree. According to the gospels, every time Jesus forgave someone’s sins, the Jewish leaders sought to condemn or kill Jesus as a blasphemer, recognising that by pronouncing forgiveness Jesus was claiming to be equal with God.
When it came to his direct teaching, Jesus often invoked titles and biblical prophecies that directly identify him with God, like in his trial before the Sanhedrin where identifies himself as the Son of Man from Daniel’s prophecy who would come on the clouds of heaven and rule with divine authority on a throne alongside the ancient of days. Most famously, in both the synoptic gospels and in John, Jesus identifies himself as the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush, claiming both his own pre-existence and to speak as the one revealing God himself.
In case that isn’t explicit enough, not only did Jesus claim to be one with the Father to his disciples, on several occasions he even willingly accepted worship from them after his resurrection from the dead, which is something you see angels and other prophets quick to eschew as only God is worthy to be worshipped. So the words and actions of Jesus, scattered right throughout the four gospels, clearly reveal how Jesus believed he was God.
Jesus’ disciples, too, certainly believed and taught that Jesus was God.
2 Peter 1:1 opens with the words,
“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have re lived a faith as precious as ours…”
Likewise in Titus 2:13, it says,
“while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ…”
In fact, Paul’s letters, written decades before John’s Gospel, make numerous claims to Jesus’ divinity. In the Christ hymn of Philippians 2 it describes Christ as pre-existent, as being in very nature God, prior to his incarnation and execution on the cross, which then leads to his exaltation to be worshipped by all creation. In 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:16, Paul further claims that everything that has come into existence was created by Jesus, equating him with God as the Creator.
As you comb through the New Testament, there are dozens of explicit or implicit references to Jesus’ divinity by the Apostles, summed up most clearly in the opening lines of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.”
Now there is no doubt that as time went on after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the Apostles and the early generations of Christians after them developed in how they articulated Jesus’ divinity. They had to come to terms with what it means for Jesus to have claimed to be God, how that fits into Jewish monotheism, and how God can, in fact, become Jesus. But to claim that John has a high view of Jesus’ divinity that is absent in the earlier gospels or Paul’s letters is simply false.
All the raw materials of Jesus’ claims to be God is there from the first chapters of the New Testament, even if it took the Apostles and early generations of Christians a while to construct the proper theological edifice to give them full expression.
Remember, Jesus’ claims to divinity would have been just as much of a shock to his first century Jewish disciples as it was to the Sanhedrin who masterminded Jesus’ condemnation for blasphemy. For them to overcome their inbuilt religious categories, and be willing to embrace Jesus as God incarnate, it must have taken some seriously compelling evidence to get them over that hurdle.
So what was that evidence? The resurrection of Jesus.
That Jesus claimed he would conquer death after atoning for sin, before being brutally executed, only to be seen alive again by the apostles after his tomb was discovered empty, that historical reality is what catapults Jesus’ claims to be God from being an utterance of the psychologically unhinged to being worthy of rational belief.
