Who Did Jesus Claim to Be

It is the phrase Jesus uses of himself constantly and almost nobody else uses of him at all. It occurs some eighty times across the four Gospels, essentially always on his lips, and outside the Gospels it appears as a confession only once, in Stephen's vision in Acts 7:56. That distribution is the first fact to account for, and it is a strange one. If the church invented the title, it forgot to use it.

The sayings sort into three groups. Some concern present authority: the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. Some concern suffering: the Son of Man must suffer many things, be rejected, be killed, and rise. Some concern a future coming in glory, drawn from Daniel 7. The three groups pull in different directions, which is part of why the debate has lasted a century.

Three readings compete. Geza Vermes argued from Aramaic usage that bar nasha could function as a modest circumlocution, a way of saying a man in my position, and that the titular sense is a Christian overlay. Rudolf Bultmann held that Jesus spoke of a coming Son of Man who was someone other than himself, and that the identification came later. A third position, held by Darrell Bock, Larry Hurtado, N. T. Wright and many others, takes the phrase as a deliberate allusion to Daniel 7:13, where one like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days and receives dominion, glory and kingship, and a kingdom that will never be destroyed. A word about the BSB at this point, because it takes a side the Aramaic does not. It prints Daniel 7:13 as 'One like the Son of Man' and capitalises He and His for the figure in verse 14, with a footnote giving 'Or one like a son of man'. Aramaic has no capitals, and the phrase there means, literally, someone like a son of man, which is to say like a human being. The capitals read the figure as a titled, divine or messianic individual. Many scholars read him instead as a symbol for the faithful people, since Daniel 7:18 and 7:27 give the kingdom to the saints of the Most High (the BSB capitalises His and Him in 7:27 too, which is another reading of the pronoun rather than a feature of the Aramaic), and on that reading the lower-case phrase is the right one. Both readings are serious, and the capital letters are a verdict on one of them. The idiomatic and the allusive senses are not mutually exclusive; a phrase that sounds unremarkable and carries a scriptural charge is precisely the sort of thing a careful speaker might choose.

One further body of evidence is regularly cited and should be handled carefully. The Similitudes of Enoch, chapters 37 to 71 of 1 Enoch, present a heavenly Son of Man figure who sits on a throne of glory and judges, and 4 Ezra 13 has something comparable. If the Similitudes predate Jesus, then a titular Son of Man figure was already available in some circles. But their date is disputed, and no fragment of them was found among the Enoch material at Qumran, which some take as evidence of a later origin. Students should cite them with the date question attached.

Modern readers hear Son of God and think of the second person of the Trinity. A first-century Jewish hearer had a wider range. Israel as a nation is God's son in Exodus 4:22. The Davidic king is God's son in 2 Samuel 7:14 and Psalm 2:7, which is coronation language. Heavenly beings are sons of God in Job 1:6. The righteous sufferer calls himself God's son in the Wisdom of Solomon. From Qumran, the Aramaic text known as 4Q246 speaks of a figure called son of God and son of the Most High, and scholars still argue about whether the figure is a messiah or a blasphemous pretender.

So the title by itself does not settle the question in either direction, and any argument that treats it as self-interpreting is unsound. This cuts both ways. A sceptic cannot show that nothing more is meant simply by showing that the phrase had a lower range of use; a traditionalist cannot show that deity is claimed simply by pointing at the words.

Christ, that is Messiah, the anointed one, similarly. In the expectations visible in the sources, the anointed one is a human deliverer, most often a Davidic king who would restore Israel, sometimes a priestly figure, sometimes both. Nothing in the standard expectation requires the Messiah to be divine, and nothing in it expects him to be executed. That is why Peter's confession in Mark 8:29 is immediately followed by Peter rebuking Jesus in 8:32, and by the sharpest words Jesus speaks to anyone in that Gospel.

Two sayings should be kept in view throughout this lesson, because they are the ones a careless argument will skip. In Mark 10:18 Jesus deflects the word good with the reply that no one is good except God alone. In Mark 13:32 he says that no one knows the day or the hour, not the angels, nor the Son, but only the Father. Traditional theology has always had answers to both, drawing on the distinction between what belongs to him as God and what belongs to him as man. The point here is not that the answers fail, but that a student who has never been shown these verses and made to sit with them has not been taught this topic. They are in the earliest Gospel and they are not there by accident.

John gives seven sayings with a predicate: I am the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way and the truth and the life, the true vine. Each is a claim to be the thing itself rather than a signpost to it. And then there are the absolute uses with no predicate at all, at 8:24, 8:28, 8:58 and 13:19, and again at the arrest in 18:5-8, of which 8:58 is the sharpest: before Abraham was born, I am (BSB, which footnotes the Greek as literally 'before Abraham was, I am'). The narrative's own comment on what that meant is in the next verse, where they pick up stones.

The scriptural background is worth getting right. Exodus 3:14 in Greek reads ego eimi ho on, I am the one who is, which supplies the theme but not the bare form. The closer parallel is in Isaiah 40 to 55, where God's self-declaration ani hu is rendered in Greek by a bare ego eimi, at Isaiah 43:10 and 43:25 and elsewhere. John's absolute usage matches Isaiah's more exactly than it matches Exodus, and this is widely agreed across the theological spectrum. The BSB's English is worth watching closely here. In Isaiah 43:10 it prints 'I am He', and in 43:25 'I, yes I, am He', where the Hebrew ani hu really does contain a pronoun. In John 8:24, 8:28, 13:19 and 18:5 it prints the same 'I am He' for a Greek phrase that has no pronoun, so the echo of Isaiah is visible in the English there. But in 8:58, the saying most often linked to Isaiah and Exodus, it prints 'I am!', so that one looks different in English from the others although the Greek is the same. Some scholars take the 'He' versions as plain statements of identity, 'I am the one', and others hear in every one of them the divine self-declaration of Isaiah. The English cannot settle between them, which is why the lesson sends you to the Greek.

Now the sceptical reading, given at its strength. The high claims are concentrated in the Gospel written last, sixty years or more after the events. The Jesus of John speaks in long self-referential discourses; the Jesus of the synoptics speaks in parables and short sayings about the kingdom of God and hardly ever about himself. The style of the Johannine discourses is the style of the Johannine narrator and of 1 John, which is what one would expect if a single author composed them. The synoptic Jesus silences those who identify him, deflects the word good, and disclaims knowledge of the day and hour. On this reading the church, worshipping Jesus and reflecting on him for two generations, wrote its confession back onto his lips, and John is the mature form of that confession: profoundly true to what the church had come to believe, and not a transcript. Scholars of the calibre of E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Paula Fredriksen and Bart Ehrman hold versions of this, and they hold it because of the distribution of the evidence, not out of hostility.

Now the traditional reading, also at its strength, and note that its best form does not start with John. It starts by asking what the synoptic Jesus is doing rather than what he is calling himself. He pronounces a paralysed man's sins forgiven, sins not committed against him, and Mark has the scribes state the problem out loud: who can forgive sins but God alone. He claims lordship over the sabbath, which is God's institution. He sets his own word alongside the Torah six times in one chapter of Matthew without justifying the right. He stills a storm and his disciples ask who this is, that even the wind and the sea obey him, which in Psalm 107 is what God does. He walks on the water and says ego eimi, in Mark, not in John. He speaks of having come, as though from somewhere. And in a saying shared by Matthew and Luke, and therefore not from John, he claims that no one knows the Son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him: a saying so Johannine in sound that a nineteenth-century scholar called it a meteorite from the Johannine sky. On this reading John has not invented the claim; he has made explicit what the synoptic material already implies, in a form suited to readers who needed it said outright.

There is a further move within the traditional reading that avoids the whole question of self-designation. N. T. Wright has argued that Jesus enacted rather than announced his identity: that he did in his own person what the scriptures said God himself would do, returning to Zion, judging the temple, gathering the exiles, forgiving sins outside the sacrificial system. If that is right, the absence of a formal declaration of deity in the synoptics is not evidence against the claim but the form the claim took. Critics reply that this reads a great deal out of actions that admit other explanations, and that a thesis which converts silence into evidence is very hard to falsify. Both halves of that exchange are fair.

In Mark 14:61 the high priest asks directly: 'Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?' The answer combines two texts. 'I am,' and 'you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power', which is Psalm 110:1 (Power is a respectful way of saying God, and the BSB footnote offers 'Or the right hand of the Mighty One'), and coming with the clouds of heaven, which is Daniel 7:13. The high priest tears his clothes and asks why they need any more witnesses; they have heard the blasphemy.

There is a real difficulty with the word blasphemy here. The Mishnah, at Sanhedrin 7:5, defines blasphemy narrowly as pronouncing the divine Name, and on that definition claiming to be the Messiah is not blasphemy; it is a claim that could be wrong without being blasphemous, and several men made it in that century without a high priest tearing anything. The Mishnah is late, around AD 200, and may not describe the working practice of a Sadducean council in AD 30, so the objection is not decisive. But it needs an answer.

Darrell Bock's study of the sources argues that the offence lay not in the messianic claim but in the second half of the answer: a man claiming that he would be seated at God's right hand, sharing the divine throne. Second Temple and rabbinic sources show real anxiety about any figure seated alongside God, and a claim of that kind made by a prisoner before the council would be heard as an outrage against God's honour whether or not it met the later technical definition. That is a serious argument and it is the strongest case for taking the scene as broadly historical.

The sceptical account of the same scene is equally coherent. No follower of Jesus was in the room, so the tradition cannot rest on a witness. The scene is structured exactly as Mark needs it: the question Mark's readers care about, asked by the right person, answered in the plainest terms Jesus ever uses, at the climax of a Gospel that has kept the answer suppressed for fourteen chapters. Luke splits the question in two and softens the answer; John has no such scene at all. And the charge that actually reached Pilate, and that was written on the board over his head, was a political one: king of the Jews. On this reading Mark has given theological form to a proceeding whose real content was sedition.

What both readings agree on is that Jesus was executed on a charge with a royal and messianic shape, and that his own answer at some point in the proceedings was taken by the authorities as intolerable rather than merely mistaken. That is common ground, and it is not trivial.

Whatever happened in Jesus' own words, the church's answer came remarkably fast, and this is the area where the evidence is clearest. Paul's letters, our earliest documents, contain material that is earlier still. In 1 Corinthians 16:22 he closes a Greek letter to a Greek church with an Aramaic prayer, maranatha, which the BSB renders 'Come, O Lord!'. The Aramaic can also be divided as maran atha, 'our Lord has come'; the imperative reading is the usual one and fits the prayer at Revelation 22:20, but a student should know the other division exists. An Aramaic invocation addressed to Jesus, preserved untranslated in a Greek congregation, means that people were calling on him in the Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem church before the Greek mission began. In 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul takes the Shema, the confession that the LORD our God is one, and writes Jesus into it. In Philippians 2:6-11 Jesus is in the form of God and receives the acclamation that Isaiah 45 reserves to the LORD alone. In Romans 10:13 Paul applies to Jesus a verse about calling on the name of the LORD. John's Gospel ends with Thomas saying my Lord and my God.

Larry Hurtado built a career on the point that the decisive evidence is devotional practice rather than titles. Within the first two decades, in Jewish communities that refused worship to anything other than God, Jesus was being prayed to, invoked, hymned and baptised into. Richard Bauckham argued the same period differently, that the New Testament writers include Jesus within the unique identity of the God of Israel rather than placing him on a scale of divine beings. Bart Ehrman's account in How Jesus Became God accepts much of the early dating and argues nonetheless for development, from an exalted human figure to a pre-existent divine one, and a group of scholars replied to him in a volume of their own the same year. It is a live argument conducted at a high level, and a student can read both books in a fortnight.

Then come the centuries of working out. The fourth-century Arian controversy was not a dispute about whether Jesus was divine but about what kind of divine, and Nicaea in 325 answered with homoousios, of the same substance as the Father. Chalcedon in 451 set the boundaries for saying that one person is fully God and fully man without confusion, change, division or separation. Those councils are not the New Testament, and pretending that their vocabulary is on Jesus' lips is a mistake. What they claim to be doing is protecting what the New Testament says from explanations that would empty it.

So where does the question stand? Here is an honest summary. That the earliest church worshipped Jesus, very early and within a Jewish monotheistic frame, is about as well established as anything in this field, and is granted by scholars who do not share the church's faith. That Jesus in John claims divine identity in the plainest terms is not in dispute; what is in dispute is the relation of those discourses to his own speech. That the synoptic Jesus acts with authority Judaism reserved to God is a real feature of those texts, and the argument is over what follows from it. That Jesus said in so many words, in Galilee in the late twenties, that he was God, is not something the synoptic evidence establishes, and the traditional reading at its best does not claim that it does; it claims something different, that the implicit claim is there in the actions and the authority and that the explicit statement is its faithful development.

Do not give your students a verdict, and do not pretend you have none. Show them the texts on both sides, including Mark 10:18 and Mark 13:32, including John 8:58 and Mark 2:5-7. Show them where the disagreement actually sits, which is not over whether the church worshipped Jesus and not over what John says, but over what stands behind them. Then tell them what you believe and why, in that order, and make it clear which part is the evidence and which part is you. A student who has been taught that way can be argued with for the rest of their life and will not be frightened.