Did Jesus Claim to be God? (and the trilemma)

Faith & Science Conversation
44

Yes, historical arguments make probability based judgments and lots of them. I am not a fan of strict historical apologetics. I can only show what is most likely to have occurred historically. That is not the level of proof apologists and skeptics like to argue over.

I am content to show that the best historical evidence available is complete consistent with orthodox Christian belief about Jesus. I make no grandiose claims that arguments based off a potentially anonymous 2,000 year old document are going to convince a staunch skeptic Jesus rose from the dead as opposed to sorcerers stealing the body of a holy man for its magical powers.

At the end of the day, I simply defend the basic gospel message. Faith and salvation is between a person and God. I just to do my part to smooth speed bumps on a historical level and I think this also bolsters Christian confidence as well since people like Ehrman and critical scholars are fond of claiming Jesus didn’t think he was divine and touting it as academic consensus.

Vinnie

1 Like
45

Hello again…hard to know where to do the “reply” on such a long message. In Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew (2006) she commented that if Jesus did not believe himself/Himself to be the Messiah, he/He was the only one not to do so…In other words…she accepts (by inference) that His disciples did not develop the notion of His Messiahship out of thin air…I have heard her at various Biblical Archaeology Society seminars as well…

3 Likes
46

You might but that does not make it right,

Which is why scholarship is not the main tool of faith.

The witness is from believers. That in itself denies scholarship or even concrete proof.
Scripture is written by people and records their understanding and view. That gives a certain amount of latitude in itself.
At some point we have to leave proofs and certainty and make that leap of faith. Christ is/was divine, whether everyone identified or understood it or not. There are plenty now who do not believe it, why not allow for some when He was on the earth?

Richard

47

Is there anyone here, believer or no, who does not know that the gospels, Acts, six epistles, Hebrews and Revelation, at least portray Jesus as divine?

48

That is a different question though for a lot of people. Did Jesus and others see him as the Messiah vs did Jesus think he was God. A heavenly messiah was a thing but I wouldn’t equate messiah with divinity in the sense I am using. But I would make the same argument for divinity as she would for messiahship.

Vinnie

1 Like
49

Well…the term “messiah” might be different from divinity. But not in that culture. Long story.

50

I’d say there was a diversity of messianic expectations at the time with a heavenly being being one of them.

1 Like
51

Reading the Gospels I would say that the heavenly being was not one of them.

And that was the whole point: Jesus did not fulfil their expectations even though it was there in their Scripture.

I guess we never learn.

Richard

52

You would have to do more than read the four gospels to know Jewish messianic expectations in the first century. That’s like reading Origin of Species and claiming to know everything about Biology.

1 Like
53

No I would not.

Whether OT Scripture showed the divinic expectations or not, the Gospels tell of how Jesus was received and what the people thought at that time.

Richard

54

The gospels do not represent the total views of all Jews at the time. Even the OT scriptures are not enough to tell us about all Jewish messianic beliefs. There is a ton of other literature not in the OT that is relevant. The OT canon was not as firmly settled in the first third of the first century as it was today. Yes, things like the five books of Moses were accepted by basically everyone but there was a lot of diversity in other areas.

It’s okay to disagree but you don’t have to disagree just to disagree.

2 Likes
55

That cannot stop his compulsion.

1 Like
56

Yes. When read in the context of second-Temple Judaism, what emerges is that Jesus so thoroughly acted and spoke as Yahweh in the flesh that His ministry lasted as long as it did.

He didn’t say anyone gave Him authority, He said He had that authority.

This is why I threw some of the “critical” methods in the trash: they allow anyone to make up whatever they want, my favorite being the guy who claimed that the book of Joshua was a tourist guide to piles of stones in the Promised Land.

2 Likes
57

If Jesus was God why would he use such a weird choice of words about his power to forgive sins? Why say that “I have authority of earth to forgive sins”? No. “I am God. I forgive you of your sins.” The choice of words indicates that the author of the Mark did not believe that Jesus was claiming to be God, but merely God’s representative on earth who had been given special powers by God to forgive sin.

It’s as plain as the nose on your face folks. Jesus’ does NOT claim to be God in this passage.

58

Please stop being a YECer by insisting that the text has to be read like it was written to satisfy your personal understanding of what an objective news report should look like. In the context of second-Temple Judaism, that was a claim to be God.

1 Like
59

It isn’t just me.

Christians are still arguing about the divinity of Jesus to this day. It took 300 years for the proto-Trinitarians to finally decide on this issue. Here is evidence presented by non-Trinitarian Christians today that Jesus claimed that God had given him special powers, not that he was God:

  • No explicit “I am God” statement: There is no point in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke where Jesus explicitly says “I am God”.

  • “I say to you”: Some scholars note that Jesus consistently uses “I say to you” rather than the typical prophetic “Thus says the Lord,” which implies a distinct authority that is not necessarily seen as divine identity.

  • Authority is “given”: Arguments that Jesus claimed God’s authority, such as the power to forgive sins or to be “Lord of the Sabbath,” are often contextualized as him acting with delegated authority from God, similar to how a king gives authority to his son.

  • Late Gospel evidence: Non-trinitarian views often point out that the explicit claims of divinity appear in the Gospel of John, which is considered the latest of the Gospels and therefore a later development of Christian theology.

60

Agreed. The three scenes above and the ones to come show this very well along with many other aspects of scripture. Critical scholarship has been very poor overall on this subject.

Here is the beginning of part three where we will look at some uncontroversial verses where Jesus acts as God:

Hating ones Father and Mother and the Divinity of Jesus

In the first century, parables included short narrative stories but were not limited to them. Pitre writes: “In early Judaism, the word “parable” was also used to refer a wide range of thought-provoking sayings, from brief maxims to puzzling questions, including riddles.” [Jesus and Divine Christology] One such example occurs in Matthew 10:37–39 and Luke 14:25–27)

Matthew 10:37: 37“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, 38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Luke 14:26-27: 26 “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Jesus is not telling people to hate their parents. In fact, he teaches us to love our neighbors as we love ourself and more radically to even love our enemies. Furthermore, there is no evidence early Christians were anti-family. In Matthew and Luke the substance of what is narrated is the same. The “hate” of Luke is a widely recognized idiom for “love less” (Matthew). Notice that Jesus says this to a crowd in Luke. The audacity of a carpenter from Nazareth telling a crowd of people they must love him more than their own parents. Admittedly, because Jesus tells people in the verse that follows, that they must take up their cross, long before he was crucified, some might consider this a post-easter creation of the church. But even if the line about taking up the cross was a later embellishment by two different evangelists, it does not necessitate that the harsh verse about hating ones father and mother was also an invention. John Kloppenborg writes the following in The Formation of Q:

“Of a quite different character are the three sayings which follow: 14:26; 14:27 and 17:33. The evidence suggests that the three were originally independent sayings which were only secondarily joined. The first saying (14:26) occurs twice in Gos. Thom., once in conjunction with the cross saying” (55) and once by itself (101). Mark has parallels to the second and third (Mark 8:34-35) while John 12:25 records a version of the third saying alone. The three sayings concern discipleship, not sectarian polemics, and it is undoubtedly this common thrust which accounts for their association.”

Furthermore, we have no real reason to think Jesus couldn’t have uttered such a saying about taking up a cross regardless of whatever added significance it may have taken in the later Church or Christian writings. In the same work, Klopenborg goes on to dismiss the tempting notion of viewing “carrying ones cross” as a post-Easter creation:

“Although it is tempting to argue that the saying is a church construction which has Jesus’ cross in view, Bultmann rightly points out that [image]excludes the view that ‘the cross” had become a special Christian cipher for martyrdom. The saying may reflect Jesus’ anticipation of the possibility of his own death and that of his followers. Or the saying could refer more generally to the necessity for preparedness for suffering and martyrdom. . . .

. . . Despite the uncertainty surrounding the original significance of the word, both the immediate and the wider Q contexts indicate that “to bear his (own) cross and come after me” serves as an admonition to preparedness for martyrdom and more generally as an enjoinder to self- renunciation. Both 6:22-23b and 12:4-7 indicate that martyrdom is a possibility to be reckoned with and accepted, while 9:57-58, 59-60, 61-62; 12:22-31, 33-34; 14:26 and 16:13 advocate a self-renunciatory posture which takes the form of denial of material, social and familial obligations.”

In this passage Jesus does not say to love God or the kingdom more than family. He specifically says to love him. His audience must love him more than their children. What kind of human tells someone, let alone a crowd of strangers, they must love him more than their own parents? This tends to bring C.S. Lewis’s trilemma to my mind where Jesus is limited to being either a liar, a lunatic or Lord:

“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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” [Mere Christianity]

Jesus can hardly be a great moral teacher and say such things if untrue and it’s clear we cannot claim he did not have an extremely inflated sense of himself even in the synoptics. For those who think Jesus never claimed to be divine, this saying puts them in a bind. Did Jesus, a mere human also think the sun rose just to illuminate his greatness? Imagine if the president of the United States or the Queen of England told me I should love them more than my parents or children. I would tell them to leave me alone in far less pleasant terms which consist of a four letter word followed by three letter one.

Duty to ones parents and “honoring they father and mother” was a very serious obligation not only in a first century Jewish context, but to the entire ancient world. For Jews at the time of Jesus, honoring one’s father and mother was second only to honoring God himself. We could quote mine ancient literature until till the cows come home on this point: Deut 5:16, 21:18-21, 27:16, Pov 1:8-9, 6:20-21, 10:1, 15:20, Sirach 7:27-30, Pseudo-Phocylides 8, Philo of Alexandria, Special Laws 2.224–225, 235–236, Josephus, Against Apion 2.206, Str-B 1.705-9, Sib. Or. 3.593-94, Ps-Menander 2, Xenophon Memorabilia 4.14.19-20; Ps-Isocrates Ad Demonicum 16; Menander Monosticha 332; Polybius 6.4.14; Ps-Pythagoras Carmen Aur. 1-4.

In its Jewish context then, Jesus is putting following Him on par with following God which is quite the claim to dignity.

Dale Allison writes: “Although Jesus upholds the imperative to honour parents (15.4 6; 19.19), there is a hierarchy of demands. Just as the first part of the Decalogue, which concerns the honour due to God,precedes the second, which has to do with social relations, so too is it in the synoptics: discipleship to Jesus trumps parental obligation; cf. 4.18-22; 8.18-22.”

Craig Keener write: “Some radical philosophers demanded such loyalty to philosophy and some rabbis to Torah, but few teachers demanded such loyalty to themselves. Jesus told disciples that whoever loved parents or children more than him were unworthy of him (Matt 10:37//Luke 14:26)…. Many viewed honoring one’s parents as the highest social obligation; even if some spoke of honoring one’s teacher more, no Jewish teacher would speak of “hating” one’s parents by comparison. God alone was worthy of that role.” [Historical Jesus of the Gospels]

In A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Jacon Neuser writes, “For, I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking…. In the end the master, Jesus, makes a demand that only God makes.”

Brant Pitre correctly concludes: “In short, when Jesus’s riddle-like demand that his disciples place him above their parents and families is interpreted in a first-century Jewish context, it shockingly implies that Jesus sees himself as somehow equal with the one God of Israel.” [Jesus and Divine Christology]

While a few prominent works on the historical Jesus simply ignore the verse in question, the vast majority of researchers consider it or something like it to go back to the historical Jesus. The teaching coheres remarkably well with other hard teachings (“let the dead bury the dead”) and deeds (leaving behind his family to preach and calling disciples to follow him in the middle of their workday and leave their families behind) of Jesus. In short, this statement, which is on very secure historical grounds, is a clear example of Jesus requiring total and complete allegiance over and against everything else. In other words, Jesus requires his followers give to him that which belongs to God alone. Lunatic or Lord indeed.

We will continue with some other verses tomorrow…notably one that many claim teach that Jesus wasn’t God "no one is good but God alone."When correctly interpreted, it says the exact opposite.

3 Likes
61

Well,Gary…people (Christian or not) argue about tons of stuff and you raised a ton of issues here…all of them interesting.

“300 years for the proto-Trinitarians to fnally decide on this issue” …well…actually the Judaism of the first centuries BCE/AD/CE was already conflicted by what the book of Daniel (not to mention a couple intertestamental texts) had to say about imagery (or prophetic visions) that seemed (in their observation) to posit a One God who somehow might be complex in nature—two in one, perhaps. They dropped this discussion once they saw what followers of Jesus did with it…and the observations about a “three in One” aspect of the One God are found in non-biblical writings (by followers of Jesus) in the first century CE/AD. The word trinitasemphasized text** was first used early second century AD. For sure…there were later councils and people with their noses bent out of shape on certain things…but that is true today as well.

As for what followers of Jesus claimed for Him…the writings of Paul are much closer in time than most or all of the Gospels (unless you accept the assertions of Crossley who, a few years ago suggested that some of the Gospel passages refllect traditions from the late 30s AD/CE)—Jesus Himself claimed for Himself…it seemed pretty obvious to the religious establishment of His time, at least as the Gospels put it. There is also the “Son of God” scroll of the Dead Sea Community --which Jesus actually cited in a conversation with some of the followers of the Baptist.

In Mark 2:10, it quotes Jesus as saying:" But that you may know that the Son of Man on earth has authority to forgive sins"–Daniel Boyarin, a now-retired university professor of Talmudic studies (and more)-- wrote of that verse “This claim is derived from Daniel 7:14 …the term that we conventionally translate as ‘authority’ …is exactly the same term that translates the Aramaic..namely ‘sovereignty’ or ‘dominion.’ That is, what Jesus is claiming for the Son of Man is exactly what has been granted to the one like a son of man in Daniel; Jesus rests his claim on the ancient text quite directly…The sovereign, moreover, is the one who has power to declare exception to the Law.”

The above would indicate a certain sense of possession of authority on the part of Jesus.

And later in Mark 2:27, Boyarin notes “What is distinctive to the Jesus of the Gospels is…the statement that the Son of Man, the divine Messiah, is now lord of the Sabbath.”

Boyarin is the one referring to the Son of Man as “divine Messiah” here.

Flusser noted, in one of his works, that in Matthew 27:64 “By relating Daniel 7:13 and Ps 110:1 to himself, …Jesus asserted heavenly divinity”. Harvey and others have promoted the belief that Jesus’ remarks here in the trial scenes of Matthew 26–have emphasized His overall claims of divinity. There are other examples.
And remember what Isaiah said to begin with "For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given. And His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.': .

1 Like
62

I have him on block and can no longer see what he writes. It would be nice if this topic doesn’t turn into one of the numerous other ones where Gary likes taking dumps on Christianity.

Vinnie

2 Likes
63

Jesus is the Everlasting Father?? When has the Church ever worshipped Jesus as the Everlasting Father? Isaiah was speaking about Yahweh.

Question: If it is so clear that Jesus fulfilled prophecy in his (alleged) claim to be God, why did 99% of all first century Jews reject him? What do you as a Gentile see in the Jewish Scriptures so clearly what millions of Jews then, and ever since have missed?