Is Jesus God or … something else?

The task of defending what Christians believe about Jesus is complicated by the fact that this belief is opposed from a variety of directions, both religious and nonreligious.

We begin with skepticism, an outlook on knowledge that brings with it a worldview that rejects all religion. The term skepticism refers to a stance of sustained doubt about or disbelief in anything other than the material realm. In the view of skeptics, the world is all that exists — or at least it might as well be. Consequently, skeptics maintain either that God does not exist (atheism) or that God’s existence is both unknowable and irrelevant to us (commonly called agnosticism).

It follows, of course, that Jesus was not in any sense divine. From this point of view, Jesus did not do miracles or rise from the dead. While most skeptical scholars agree that Jesus existed, they view the New Testament as unreliable in what it says about Jesus.

Bart Ehrman, who identifies as an agnostic, is a well-known representative of this skeptical perspective. According to Ehrman, Jesus viewed himself as a teacher or prophet but certainly not as divine. After Jesus’ crucifixion, some of the earliest disciples thought Jesus had appeared to them, and they immediately came to believe that God had exalted Jesus in heaven. From there, Christians began pushing back the time when Jesus attained divine status, from his resurrection back to his baptism, to his conception, and eventually concluded that Jesus has always been divine, even God incarnate.^[1]

Those who are unfamiliar with the evidence for God’s existence, which is a staple of Christian apologetics, may want to become equipped to share such evidence with skeptics.^[2]

Three types of evidence support the belief that Jesus was the divine Son come in the flesh.

First, we have good evidence that Jesus viewed himself as divine. By this, I do not mean that Jesus explicitly claimed to be God. Jesus never called himself “God” because that would have been understood as a claim to be God the Father, the one who had sent him into the world. Rather, Jesus spoke and acted in ways that intimated his divine identity. All four Gospels report that people often wondered who he thought he was (e.g., Matt. 7:28–29; 21:20, 23; Mark 4:41; Luke 9:9; John 8:25) and that the Jewish authorities accused Jesus of “blasphemy” (Matt. 9:3; 26:65–66; Mark 2:7; 14:63–64; Luke 5:21; John 10:33; 19:7).

The evidence that Jesus spoke as if he were divine is found throughout the Gospels (not just in John, as commonly alleged). In all four Gospels, Jesus prefaced his statements numerous times with the words “Amen I say to you,” an unprecedented speech form that expressed supreme confidence in what he said. Jesus claimed that at the end of the age He would rule from the throne of God, judging all human beings (Matt. 7:13–27; 25:31–46; Mark 14:62; Luke 22:69; John 5:22–30). It is simply not feasible to discount the historicity of all of these sayings, which are representative of the way Jesus talks throughout all four Gospels.

Second, Jesus’ implicitly divine claims were backed up by his miracles and confirmed by his own resurrection. The classic example is Jesus forgiving a paralyzed man’s sins (a prerogative of God) and then demonstrating his authority to do so by immediately healing the man (Matt. 9:2–8; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:17–26). Here Christ joined His words (which the scribes thought were blasphemous) with an action that backed up His implicitly divine claim. Moreover, the way in which Jesus healed the paralyzed man confirmed the divine implication of His words of forgiveness. Just as He told the man, “Your sins are forgiven,” with no ritual and no prayer, he simply told the man, “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” Such unmediated acts were the rule in Jesus’ miracles. And Jesus certainly performed miracles — or at least amazing cures and exorcisms that everyone at the time believed were miracles.

The central miracle of the Bible is the resurrection of Jesus Himself. The evidence for Christ’s resurrection is another standard topic in Christian apologetics. This evidence includes Jesus’ death on the cross, His burial in a rock tomb, the discovery of the empty tomb, the experiences of those who reported seeing Jesus alive afterward, and the testimony of Paul, whose experience of seeing the risen Christ transformed him from a Pharisaic enemy of the Christian faith to a zealous apostle for Christ to the Gentiles. Once skepticism about all miracles is dispelled, the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead is surprisingly compelling.^[3] The point here is that Jesus’ resurrection confirms the validity of His implicit divine claims.

Third, the earliest Christians viewed Jesus as truly divine. Even Ehrman, who argues for a rapid development of divine Christology in the first century, admits that from the very beginning of the Christian movement, “the man Jesus is showered with divine favors beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, honored by God to an unbelievable extent, elevated to a divine status with God himself, sitting at his right hand.”^[4] Rather than a linear development over time from a lesser Christology to a higher one, Ehrman ends up arguing that various views of Christ arose more or less simultaneously — even before the earliest of the New Testament writings. “Different Christians in different churches in different regions had different views of Jesus, almost from the get-go.”^[5] He finds three such Christologies reflected in the New Testament in which Jesus is viewed 1. as a man whom God exalted (the “exaltation” Christology of the Synoptics and Acts), 2. as an angel who became a man (the “angel” Christology of Paul), and 3. as the divine Son who became a man (the “incarnation” Christology of Hebrews and John).

We may briefly dispense with the supposed angel Christology. Ehrman’s argument for finding one in Paul depends entirely on a questionable interpretation of one verse that is not even about Christ (“you … received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus,” Gal. 4:14). On the other hand, Paul frequently identifies Jesus as “Lord” in contexts that refer (sometimes via explicit quotations) to Old Testament passages about Yahweh, translated kyrios, “Lord,” in the Greek New Testament (e.g., Joel 2:32 in Rom. 10:9–13; 1 Cor. 1:2; Deut. 6:4 in 1 Cor. 8:6; Isa. 45:23 in Phil. 2:9–11).

The so-called exaltation Christology is fully compatible with incarnation Christology, since the latter affirms that the divine Son humbled himself to become human and die on the cross, after which he was raised from the dead and exalted. Thus, in reality the New Testament teaches one Christology in three parts or chapters: 1. the divine Son in Heaven 2. comes down from Heaven to become a man and die for our sins, and then 3. returns to the Father’s side in Heaven. This three-part story of Christ is presented in various ways by different New Testament authors, including Paul (Phil. 2:5–11; Col. 1:12–20; cf. Gal. 4:4–6), Hebrews (1:1–4, expanded in 1:5–2:18), and John (1:1–18; also 13:3; 16:28).

The Christian belief that Jesus Christ is God the Son incarnate rests on solid historical evidence. Far from being a later, distorted view of Jesus, the belief derives from Jesus’ own words and deeds, was confirmed by his miracles and especially his resurrection, and was part of the earliest Christian teaching.

Notes

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014).

[2] E.g., William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008); Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (New York: HarperOne, 2021).

[3] See (for example) Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010); and now Gary R. Habermas, On the Resurrection, 4 vols. (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, 2024–25).

[4] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 231, 232.

[5] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 237.

Originally published at The Worldview Bulletin Newsletter.