Does the Bible really say Jesus was God?

[Jonathan_Burke (Jon)]

@Bill_Smith

You may have read this or known it already,

Yes I have read it. Earlier, George even linked you to it.

@ManiacalVesalius

Few scholars at all, even those with zero belief in the divine Jesus (i.e. Bart Ehrman as a good example) would deny that Jesus is God in John’s Gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Could that be any more clear?

The problem is that you’re reading it as saying “In the beginning was Jesus, and Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God”. Leaving alone for now the logical contradictions involved here (specifically that Jesus could be both himself and with himself), this is very obviously not saying Jesus. It could have been made abundantly clear by actually saying “Jesus”. It doesn’t.

@ManiacalVesalius

In recent decades, an emerging consensus has emerged in scholarship that states that the earliest Christology was the belief that Jesus was God, that this belief had spurred almost immediately after the crucifixion.

No I am not. I know the difference between Jesus calling himself God and other people calling him God in the New Testament.

@ManiacalVesalius

You are confusing scholarship on whether Jesus believed He was God (which may be affected by personal beliefs) with scholarship on the divinity of Christ in the New Testament writings (which is assuredly not, at least much less so).

I have read NT Wright, Hurtado (I follow his blog), Bauckham, Hays, and Ehrman. This view is fine for people who are comfortable with binitarianism or bitheism (it works perfectly for Arians such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it also works for the Mormons), not so much for “orthodox” Trinitarians (other than those who are comfortable with a couple of centuries of doctrinal development to correct the apostles’ original teaching). Hurtado, for example, argues for what Fletcher-Louis refers to as “a binitarian mutation in monotheism”.

@ManiacalVesalius

I’ll end this comment by quoting Fletcher-Louis:

Allow me to quote him also.

And because the leading voices of the emerging consensus, to one degree or another, admit a personal, confessional interest in the enterprise, there is an excursus after these two chapters on some theological questions and issues raising from Hurtado’s work.

And another quotation.

At the outset, it is worth saying that, underlying all the specific issues that will be covered in Part 2, I discern a weakness in the underlying conceptual structures within which many in the emerging consensus work. Its leading voices seem to have theological assumptions that reflect the tendencies of a distinctively Western and especially a Protestant (and, in particular, a Reformed), theological vision that construes the relationships between God, the world, and humanity in terms that militate against the international shape of NT Christological material.