Half God or fully God

Was reading up on a talk (comments basically) on Wikipedia on the topic of “demigod”, and came across some people claiming Jesus was a demigod


What does anyone here think of this? Would Jesus being a demigod matter to Christianity? Why do you think he isn’t a demigod, and is instead, fully God and man?

Reminds me of TV show “Lucifer” which treats the various characters of Christianity like members of a family or pantheon. It is a perfectly human tendency to fit things into the patterns we are familiar with. In this case, it is fitting Jesus into the pattern of a common mythology.

Jesus as a demigod is not Christianity. Christianity is founded on the belief that Jesus is fully man and fully God. It one of the principle difference between the Christian religion and other religions like Islam.

He’s either God incarnate, or the solely human pivot, nothing in between.

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Whether or not Jesus was a “demigod” requires an exact definition for a vague term. Jesus was fully human with regard to sustenance, hydration, fatigue, on and on. Jesus was in communion with the Father; yet there were times when Jesus’ ability to e.g. turn water into wine left Him. When He fed thousands and so forth He credited the Father doing it through him. John’s gospel suggests that Jesus did without the ability to outstrip the mechanical limitations of humanity, but kept the spiritual aspects such as forgiving Sin.
Not to abuse the equine remains - choose a clear definition, then try it out.

I think it’s best to just define it as they did.

Jesus was the son of God.

Which god was Jesus the son of? Well he’s the son of the god we see throughout the entire Tanakh presumably.

So Jesus is the son of his father and his father was the god Yahweh.

So we read of the son known as Jesus in the Tanakh walking around? No. Sole try to make that link but it appears Jesus, the son of the god known as Yahweh, was born sometime around the early first century.

How was the son of God able to preform miracles? Was it because of his own divine power? Nope. You don’t read that. You read this .

John 3:35
The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.

Ephesians 1:20

which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,

Matthew 28:18

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.

We also see that at some point Jesus will hand it all back over to his god and his father which is Yahweh. Jesus knew of one god. Yahweh. If you asked Jesus is god he would say my father is the god Yahweh.

1 cor 15:24

then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power.

We also know that Jesus made this response once.

Mark 10:18

But Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.

If Jesus was not God, then his receiving worship would have been sinful.

I’ve preferred the view that Jesus was truly God and and truly man. This means he could do things only God can do and he could do things only man could do.

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The divinity of Christ is central to orthodox Christianity. Whether you want to accept the Trinity or not Christ still has to be directly the son of God otherwise He has not sacrificed His own son and it becomes an empty transposition. If Jesus was just a man then we are saved by a man, not God.

Richard

Wikipedia ‘talk’ pages are full of people giving personal opinions. Don’t base your education on WP’s ‘talk’ pages! The articles themselves tend to be better, especially articles that are well visited and active, which can be useful for familiarising oneself with a topic.

Jesus a demigod? I see that the “Jesus” article never mentions demigod. Not even its (current) ‘talk’ page (far less reliable) mentions that term.

Not a single major Christian denomination regards Jesus as a demigod. Mainstream church theology (Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist…) regards Jesus as “fully God and fully human”. The technical term is “Hypostatic Union”.

Of course, folk outside this mainstream may devise other ideas, such as “demigod”. OK.; let them. But “demigod” never was or is part of mainstream Christian theology.

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It’s not orthodox Christianity, which since Athanasius won the debate, has accepted the idea of the hypostatic union. This doctrine says Jesus was fully God and fully man and any attempts to tweak his divinity or humanity down to something less than 100% is either Arianism or Docetism, both of which are heresies.

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