did jesus claim to be god ? this is a really important question
and historians have been investigating the life of jesus the historical jesus for generations
now , and they've come broadly to consensus on this question . it really matters to us today
because if he did claim to be god then it matters . it matters that we worship
him as our creator as our lord however if he didn't claim to be god and he wasn't god
then worshiping him is an act of egregious idolatry and indeed orthodox jews will not enter
into a church today because of what they perceive to be the idolatry that takes place in the typical
christian church and muslims many muslims will not enter into a church for the same reason
so i want to share with you some of the mainstream research findings of biblical
scholarship by sharing with you again from the work of bart ehrman who is distinguished professor
of religious studies at the university of north carolina chapel hill in america he's one of
the world's leading new testament scholars and a specialist on the historical jesus . i'm going to be
quoting from this book again how jesus became god the exaltation of a jewish preacher from galilee .
there's a chapter in his book called did jesus think he was god and towards the end of this
chapter there's a subheading : did jesus claim to be god ? which i want to share with you i
don't necessarily agree with everything he says in here but i think he's certainly more or less on
the right path when it comes to jesus . so he writes this then in a nutshell is what i think we can say
about the historical jesus and his understanding of himself he thought he was a prophet
predicting the end of the current evil age and the future king of israel in the age to come but did
he call himself god it is true that jesus claims to be divine in the last of our canonical gospels
to be written the gospel of john in that gospel jesus does make remarkable claims about himself
in speaking of the father of the jews abraham who lived 1800 years earlier jesus tells his opponents
truly i tell you before abraham was i am that's john 8 58. this particular phrase " i am " brings
a familiar call to anyone acquainted with the hebrew bible in the book of exodus in the story
of the burning bush , moses asked god what his name is and god tells him that his name is i am
jesus appears to be claiming not only to have existed before abraham but to have been given
the name of god himself his jewish opponents know exactly what he is saying they immediately take up
stones to stone him later in the gospel jesus is even more explicit again as he proclaims i and the
father are one john 10 30. once again the jewish listeners break out the stones still later when
jesus is talking to his disciples at his last meal with them his follower philip asked him
to show them who god the father is jesus replies the one who has seen me has seen the father 14 9
and again later during the same meal jesus prays to god and asks about how god had
sent him and speaks about how god had sent him into the world and refers to my glory that you
gave me before the foundation of the world 24. jesus is not claiming to be god the father here
obviously since when he's praying he is not talking to himself
so he is not saying that he is identical with god but he is saying that he is equal with god
and has been that way from before the world was created these are amazingly exalted claims
but looked at from a historical perspective they simply cannot be ascribed to the historical jesus
they don't pass any of our criteria they are not multiply attested in our sources they appear
only in john our latest and most theologically orientated gospel they certainly do not pass the
criterion of dissimilarity since they express the very view of jesus that the author of the
gospel of john happens to hold and they are not at all contextually credible we have no record of
any palestinian jew ever saying any such things about himself these divine self claims in john
are part of john's distinctive theology they are not part of the historical record of what jesus
actually said and just to leave this for a second having read about this subject for some time
i would say virtually all over 99 percent of the world scholars do not think that the amazing
claims on the lips of jesus in the gospel of john are historical very very very few people just a
handful of people so just to continue , look at the matter in a different light as i pointed out we
have numerous earlier sources for the historical jesus a few comments in paul including several
quotations from jesus's teaching we have mark q this is quell the source shared by matthew and
luke we have M and L that's M is material unique to Matthew and L is material unique to Luke Luke's
gospel not to mention the finished gospels of matthew and luke . in none
of them do we find exalted claims of this sort if jesus went around galilee proclaiming himself to
be a divine being sent from god one who existed before the creation of the world he was in fact
equal with god could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important
and yet none of these earlier sources says any such thing about him did they all of them just
decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about jesus this is a really
good point by the way almost certainly the divine self claims in john are not historical
but is it possible that jesus considered himself divine in some other sense i have already argued
that he did not consider himself to be the son of man and so he did not consider himself to be the
heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of all the earth but did he think of himself as the
future king of the kingdom the messiah and we saw in the previous chapter that in some passages of
scripture the king is talked about as a divine being and not merely a mortal and this is psalm
45 for example isn't it possible that jesus understood himself as divine in that sense
it is of course possible but i think it is highly unlikely for the following reason
in the hebrew bible and indeed in the entire jewish tradition we do have instances in which
mortals for example a king or moses or enoch were considered to be divine beings in some sense
philo of alexandra by the way who was slightly earlier than jesus used this kind of language of
moses he called him a god by the way but that was always what someone else said about them
it was never what they were recorded as saying about themselves so in philo for example moses
is never recorded as saying i am god other people may have used that language of them
no one records moses or enoch or a king saying i am god not in the jewish tradition this is
quite different from the situation that we find in say egypt where the pharaohs claimed
direct divine lineage or with alexander the great who accepted cultic veneration always some of the
roman emperors who actively propagated the idea that they were gods . this never happens in judaism
that we know of . the idea that a king could be divine may have occurred to his followers later
as they began to think more about his eminence and significance but we have no known instance
of a living jewish king proclaiming himself to be divine could jesus be the exception yes of course
there are always exceptions to everything but to think that jesus is the exception in this case
one would need a good deal of persuasive evidence and it just doesn't exist the evidence for jesus's
claims to be divine come only from the last of the new testament gospels not from any earlier sources
some may argue that there are other reasons apart from explicit divine self claims to suspect
that jesus saw himself as divine for example he does amazing miracles that surely only a
divine figure could do and he forgives people's sins which surely is a prerogative of god alone
and he receives worship as people bow down before him which surely indicates that he welcomes divine
honors there are two points to stress about such things the first is that all of them are
compatible with human not just divine authority in the hebrew bible the prophets elijah and elisha
did fantastic miracles including healing the sick and raising the dead through the power of god and
in the new testament so did the apostles peter and paul but that did not make any of them divine
when jesus forgives sins he never says i forgive you as god might say but your sins are forgiven
which means that god has forgiven the sins this prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven
was otherwise reserved for jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at
the jerusalem temple jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative but not a divine one and
kings were worshiped even in the bible matthew 18 26 by veneration and obesience just as god was
jesus may be accepting the worship due to him as the future king
none of these things is in and of itself a clear indication that jesus is divine
but even more important these activities may not even go back to the historical jesus instead they
may be traditions assigned to jesus by later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence
and significance recall one of the main points of this chapter many traditions in the gospels do
not derive from the life of the historical jesus but represent embellishments made by storytellers
who were trying to convert people by convincing them of jesus's superiority and to instruct
those who were converted these traditions of jesus's eminence cannot pass the criterion of
dissimilarity and are very likely pious expansions of the stories told about him told by people who
after his resurrection did come to understand that he was in some sense divine what we can
know with relative certainty about jesus is that his public ministry
and proclamation were not focused on his divinity in fact they are not about his divinity at all
they were about god and about the kingdom that god was going to bring . and i'll just end it there .
this is totally mainstream scholarship by the way the vast majority of biblical scholars throughout
the world would accept this conclusion . some may believe jesus is god as a matter of faith but
they would accept nevertheless the the logic of the arguments that bart ehrman presents there
i hope this goes some way to informing your decision about whether or not we
should worship jesus as god or whether we should accept him for what by ermine concludes he was
a prophet and a messiah sent by god . until next time