Is Jesus God?

Nothing comes from nothing. Things do not “just happen”. For every effect, there must be a cause adequate to explain the effect. So where did faith in Jesus as God come from? How did Christians come to affirm that the man Jesus is also God? The conventional explanation many would give is that the historical Jesus morphed into a mythical God, through a process of embellishment and misunderstanding; and that any use of the language of God in relation to Jesus must be understood not literally but as supercharged metaphor for an inspiring religious and moral teacher.

However plausible this hypothesis may seem it is hard to square with historic facts. It would take more than one or two generations for memories of the historical Jesus to morph into a mythical God, and so we would expect references to Jesus as God to appear very late – and that claim is sometimes made in relation to the 4th century Nicene Creed. But in fact, belief in Jesus as God long predates the Nicene Creed, and can be traced to the lifetime of his first followers. Just a few years after the crucifixion, Stephen provoked outrage in Jerusalem when he testified to seeing “the heavens opened”, and the “Son of Man [Jesus] standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56, 59) – that is, in the position of equality with the Creator, and of one who mediates the authority of God’s kingdom to the world. When the lynch-mob stoned him, St. Luke tells us that Stephen “called upon God” but what he said was, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”. There is no question that he identified Jesus with the Creator.

Acts perhaps dates to the 60’s A.D., but the letters of Paul can be securely dated to the 50’s A.D., and their historic value as evidence of early Christian belief about Jesus is great. As in Acts, the claim for Christ’s deity is often made implicitly, by identifying the Messiah Jesus with the authority and action that are prerogatives of the Creator God of Israel: “Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:3). Paul can also be explicit: “the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Whether the language is implicit or explicit, what’s striking about this language (and it is pervasive) is that there is no hint of controversy around it. Paul’s letters address any number of controversies among early Christians, but there is no evidence of controversy about the deity of Jesus, no evidence of Christians who had other points of view. One must conclude, therefore, that the historic belief in Jesus’ deity did not evolve gradually over time, but emerged rapidly and simultaneously among all the first generation of his followers.

What makes this sudden and unanimous emergence of belief in the deity of Jesus all the more striking, is that it emerged within a Jewish culture where such ideas were unthinkable. In the pagan Greco-Roman world, you could talk about gods who appeared in the likeness of human beings, and human beings who became gods. But it is precisely such beliefs as this that were rejected by Jews, who held tenaciously to the distinction of the one Creator from the many creatures – and there is no evidence that this distinction is not abandoned or blurred by the early Christians either Jewish or Gentile. The early Christians were no syncretists, blending elements of pagan and Jewish religion, but to the contrary identified idols with demons. As Paul, says, the pagans “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever” (Rom. 1:25). Far from easily accepted, the idea that someone born of a woman could also be god, is precisely the idea that Jewish followers of Jesus would be least likely to adopt – and yet they did.

The question one must ask is, how did this happen? What made devout Jews who had walked and talked with the man Jesus speak of him as God? For every effect, there must be a cause adequate to explain the effect. One is led back ineluctably from the claim of his deity to the other claim made by the New Testament about Jesus, a claim equally outrageous to conventional wisdom, the resurrection. The only plausible explanation for the undeniable historic fact that the followers of Jesus believed in him as God, is his own resurrection from the dead. As Paul says, God’s “Son Jesus Christ our Lord, … was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:3, 4). All human beings die; only God can rise from the dead: in rising from the dead, Christ manifests deity. That’s why when Thomas sees the risen humanity of Jesus, he confessed him “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). St. John puts this another way: “No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven” (John 3:13). The man who was exalted to the right hand of God, is the God who first humbled himself to become man. If Thomas confesses Jesus as God, it is because Jesus is the Word who was “in the beginning”, who was “with God, and who was God” (1:1), and who is now “made flesh”, to show forth the glory of the “only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14).

If Jesus is just a man who was close to God, then we may learn from him: only if he is God, can we trust him to be our Savior and Lord.