Who Did Jesus Claim to Be?

The objection that Jesus never claimed to be God is heard in many voices, and a good answer begins by hearing which one is speaking. A sceptical student who has read Bart Ehrman means that the earliest Gospels do not show Jesus calling himself God, that the explicit claims are in John, and that the belief developed after his death. A Muslim friend means something different. The Qur'an honours Jesus as a prophet, the Messiah, a word from God and a spirit from him, born of a virgin; but it says that he is a servant of God (4:172), it warns Christians not to say three (4:171), and at 5:116-117 it records Jesus denying that he ever told people to worship him and his mother as gods beside God. To her, the claim that Jesus is God is not merely mistaken history; it is shirk, the gravest of sins, attributing a partner to God. A Jehovah's Witness at the door means that Jesus is the first and greatest of God's creatures, who existed before the world, but is not God Almighty. And some within the church mean that the divinity of Christ is a way of speaking about his significance rather than a claim about who he is.

The New Testament Survey lesson Who Did Jesus Claim to Be, in its module on Jesus, has already examined the main texts: the Son of Man and Daniel 7, the range of meaning in Son of God and Christ, the I am sayings in John and the scriptural background of the phrase in Isaiah, the charge at the trial, and the evidence that the earliest church worshipped Jesus. It gives both the sceptical reading and the traditional reading of each at full strength, and it insists on Mark 10:18 and 13:32, where Jesus deflects the word good and says the Son does not know the hour. Read it before you teach this. This lesson does not repeat it. It asks how the case is made in apologetics, which of the standard arguments hold, and how to answer each of the four voices.

One principle governs all of it. The question is not only whether Jesus said a sentence of the form I am God. Almost everyone agrees that he did not say that in so many words in the earliest sources, and the traditional reading at its best does not claim he did. The question is who he understood himself to be, as shown by what he said, what he did and what he assumed, and whether the church's confession of him as Lord and God is a faithful reading of that or a departure from it.

The best-known argument in this area is the one usually called the trilemma. It is often credited to C. S. Lewis, who gave it its most famous form in his wartime broadcasts on the BBC, published as Mere Christianity in 1952. Lewis argued that the one thing we must not say of Jesus is that he was a great moral teacher but not God. A man who said what Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher; he would either be mad, on the level, as Lewis put it, of a man who says he is a poached egg, or else something far worse; or else he would be who he said he was. Lewis did not invent the argument. The Scottish Hebrew scholar John Duncan, in conversations published after his death in 1870, put it in almost the same form: Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or was himself deluded, or was divine. And the inquiry showed that its options were argued in Jesus' own hearing: his family said he was out of his mind, some said he had a demon, others asked whether a demon could open the eyes of the blind.

The argument's real strength is negative. It shuts one door that many people want to leave open, the door marked a good teacher and nothing more. If Jesus claimed what the Gospels report, forgiving sins against others, demanding a love greater than for one's own family, making a person's final judgment depend on how he responds to Jesus, then he was not a modest teacher of ethics, and anyone who admires his ethics must reckon with his claims. Stephen T. Davis, a philosopher at Claremont McKenna College, defended the argument in a careful form in 'Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God?', published in the Oxford volume The Incarnation (2002). He did not claim it proves that Jesus is divine. He argued that, granted that Jesus claimed to be divine, belief in his divinity is rational and the alternatives are not more plausible. Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (1994), widened the options to include the view that Jesus was a guru teaching that all are divine, or that the claims are myth, and argued against each.

The argument also has real weaknesses, and a student should know them before a sceptic points them out. The first and greatest is its premise. The trilemma works only if Jesus actually made the claims, and that is exactly what a sceptic disputes. Ehrman's reply is that the options are not liar, lunatic or Lord but also legend: the high claims were placed on Jesus' lips by later believers. Against someone who already trusts the Gospels the trilemma is strong, but against someone who does not, it assumes what it needs to prove. That is why it cannot stand alone. It depends on the historical work of the earlier lessons in this module and on the texts the New Testament Survey lesson examined, and it is only as strong as the case that Jesus did say and do what the Gospels report.

The second weakness is that the options are not exhaustive even if the premise is granted. The philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder, in an article in Faith and Philosophy in 2004 titled 'Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God? ... Or Merely Mistaken?', argued that a person could come to believe something false about himself through a chain of reasoning that seemed sound to him, from powerful experiences of God's presence, from works of healing, from his reading of the scriptures, without being either dishonest or mad. Sincere error is not lunacy. Third, the language of lunacy has dated badly. Many people who suffer mental illness are wise, kind and morally serious, and the argument should not be made in a way that suggests otherwise. Fourth, students in many parts of the world know that founders of religious movements have been regarded by their followers as divine or as messiahs, and that some of those founders were neither obviously frauds nor obviously insane. So the bare claim does not settle anything.

These weaknesses do not destroy the argument; they place it. What distinguishes Jesus is not the claim alone but the claim together with the life, the teaching that even his enemies respected, and above all the resurrection. Paul says that Jesus 'was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead' (Romans 1:4). On the Christian view, a man who made these claims and was then executed would have been refuted by his death, if death had been the end; the resurrection is God's verdict on the claim. So the trilemma is best used not as a proof on its own, but as one step in a cumulative case: it shows that Jesus cannot be simply a good teacher, the earlier lessons show why the resurrection is the best explanation of the evidence, and the two together point to the conclusion that he was who he implied he was. Used that way, it is honest and strong. Used alone, it invites an easy reply.

The stronger form of the argument does not rely on John, and does not rely on Jesus saying the words I am God. It relies on what the earliest sources show him doing and assuming, which a sceptic who discounts John must still account for. The New Testament Survey lesson gave several examples, the forgiveness of sins, lordship over the sabbath, the stilling of the storm. Here are others that apologists press, each with its sceptical reading, so that you can use them honestly.

He chose twelve (Mark 3:14), and promised that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28). The number is a claim to be reconstituting Israel, and Jesus does not place himself among the twelve; he stands outside and above them, as the one who gathers Israel. The sceptic's reading is that this is a messianic claim, the claim of a prophet or king of the end-time, not a claim to be God, and that is a fair reading; the twelve show his authority, not by themselves his nature. He began sayings with Amen, translated Truly I tell you, a usage that Joachim Jeremias argued has no real parallel in Jewish literature, where amen ends a statement in response to another's words. He did not cite authorities, as the rabbis did, nor say Thus says the LORD, as the prophets did; he said But I tell you (Matthew 5:22) and set his word beside the Torah. He called people to follow him (Mark 1:17), and made their standing before God depend on their confession of him (Matthew 10:32) and their shame or loyalty toward him and his words (Mark 8:38). And in the parable of the tenants, told in Mark 12, the owner of the vineyard, after sending many servants, finally sends his one beloved son, a figure distinguished from all the prophets before him.

Notice the shape of this evidence. No single item is decisive, and the sceptic has a reply to each: a prophet could speak with authority, a messianic claimant could choose twelve, the parable could be the church's. The apologist's case is that together they form a pattern. Jesus acted with an authority that, in the Judaism of his day, belonged to God: to forgive, to reinterpret the law in his own name, to make people's final destiny turn on their response to him. The sceptic's case is that this pattern is the pattern of an end-time prophet or Messiah, which was a human figure. The question between them is whether the authority Jesus assumed goes beyond what any human agent of God, even the Messiah, was thought to have. That is a real disagreement, and the honest answer is to show the texts, explain both readings, and say which you find more convincing and why.

John 8:58, the anchor, belongs at the end of this pattern, not the beginning. A sceptic who thinks John's discourses are the church's meditation will not be moved by it, and the New Testament Survey lesson explains why serious scholars hold that view. But for a reader who has followed the synoptic evidence, the saying states openly what the earlier pattern implies. When Jesus says that before Abraham was born, I am, the hearers in John's story pick up stones (8:59), which tells you how the evangelist expected the words to be heard.

The last line of evidence is the speed and setting of the earliest devotion to Jesus, and the New Testament Survey lesson describes it: the Aramaic prayer maranatha, Jesus written into the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6, the knee bowing at his name in Philippians 2:10-11 in words Isaiah 45:23 reserves to God, the calling on his name in Romans 10:13. The apologetic point is about what has to be explained. The first Christians were Jews, strict monotheists who would die rather than worship any other god. Within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, in letters written to churches that already knew these practices, they were praying to Jesus, singing to him, baptising in his name and confessing him as Lord in words that belonged to the God of Israel. The older scholarly account, given classically in Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos (1913), held that this devotion arose gradually in Gentile churches under the influence of pagan cults. Larry Hurtado's One God, One Lord (1988) and Lord Jesus Christ (2003) argued that the evidence shows it arose very early, among Jewish believers, as a sudden mutation in Jewish worship, and he proposed that it was triggered by powerful religious experiences that the first believers understood as God's command to honour Jesus in this way.

Give the other positions their strength. James Dunn, in Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? (2010), agreed that Jesus was given an extraordinary place in early Christian devotion, but argued that the earliest Christians generally worshipped God through Jesus rather than worshipping Jesus as God, and that the full language of Jesus as God came later. Ehrman, in How Jesus Became God (2014), accepted early high claims about Jesus but argued that the earliest was a belief that a man had been exalted to divine status at his resurrection, which developed into belief in a pre-existent divine being. Richard Bauckham, as the New Testament Survey lesson describes, argued that the New Testament writers place Jesus within the unique identity of the one God. These are scholars of the first rank, reading the same texts. What all of them grant is that something unprecedented happened in Jewish monotheistic devotion very early, and that it centred on Jesus. Why it happened is the question the resurrection answers, if the earlier lessons are right.

Now the four voices. To the sceptical student: grant that the explicit claims are clearest in John, show him the synoptic pattern of section 4 and the early worship of section 5, and ask what best explains both. To the Muslim friend: begin with what you share, that Jesus is the Messiah, born of a virgin, a word from God, and listen to why she believes that worshipping him is shirk, because her concern is the honour of the one God, and so is yours. Explain that Christians do not believe in three gods, nor that a man became a god, but that the one God has come among us in his eternal Word; the Module 5 lesson Talking With Muslim Friends takes this further, and it says plainly that where leaving Islam is dangerous, a Christian must never press a friend toward a step that could cost her safety. To the Jehovah's Witness: show that the disagreement over John 8:58 is about grammar on which honest translators differ, as the inquiry found, but that the larger question is whether the one who is worshipped in Philippians 2 and Revelation 5 can be a creature; the Module 5 lesson False Teaching and New Religions goes further. And to the voice within the church: ask what it would mean for the Gospels, for prayer and for Christian hope if Jesus were only a symbol of God's love rather than God himself come in love.

And to each of them, the same courtesy. You are not trying to win. You are trying to show, as accurately as you can, who the Jesus of the sources is, and to leave the other person able to meet him there. The question Jesus asked in Mark 8:29, Who do you say I am?, was asked of his disciples, and it is still asked of every reader. Your job is to make sure the question is heard clearly. The answer belongs to the person who hears it.

Add the sixth paragraph to your page headed My defence: Jesus. It answers the objection: Jesus never claimed to be God. Write it for the voice you are most likely to hear, sceptic, Muslim, Jehovah's Witness or church member, and say at the top which one it is, without writing anyone's name. In no more than 150 words, name the objection fairly, give at least two passages from Mark or Matthew from section 4 with one sentence each on what they imply, give one fact about early Christian worship from section 5, and end with Jesus' question from Mark 8:29.

Then read your whole page through, all six paragraphs: whether Jesus existed, whether the Gospels can be trusted, whether the text has been changed, why you believe he rose, the alternative where you live, and who he claimed to be. Underline any claim you cannot now support from a passage or a fact in this module, and either find the support or cut the claim. A short page you can defend is worth more than a long one you cannot.

Finally, test it. Ask a believer you trust to take the part of a questioner for fifteen minutes, choosing any of the six questions and pushing back as hard as he can. Answer from your page, in your own words. Afterwards, write down the one question you found hardest and the one answer you most need to improve. Keep this page; the last lesson of this track, Your Defence of the Faith, will ask for it.