IS JESUS GOD?

Is Jesus really God? Or was he just a man? That’s the 64 zillion dollar question, isn’t it? There are many people who believe that Jesus was (and still is) God with absolute certainty, and no matter what you say, no matter how rational or compelling your arguments may be, they will never waver in that belief. But there are many people who believe that Jesus was just a man with absolute certainty, and no matter what you say, no matter how rational or compelling your arguments may be, they will never waver in that belief. How can people be so certain of opposite answers? Who is right? Can they all be right?

So, is Jesus God? My answer is, to be brief, “Yes and no.” Yes, they are all right. And no, they are all wrong. I believe that Jesus was God… in a sense. I suppose I should explain what I mean.

First, let me make it clear that I do believe in the doctrines of 1) the Christ, Jesus was the Jewish messiah, 2) the Gospel, Jesus died to atone for my sins, and 3) the “dinity,” the Father and the Holy Spirit are one God in two persons. The only thing I’m questioning on this page is whether Jesus, too, is God.

There is no doubt in my mind that the disciples/apostles believed that Jesus is God.

Also, we know that Jesus said and did things that caused other people to believe he was God, and he never disagreed with them when they did.

But Jesus never actually said, in clear and unequivocal terms, “I am God.” I challenge anyone to find a place in the Bible that reports Jesus plainly stating that he was God.

Many people claimed that Jesus was “the son of God.”

So, the disciples, the apostles, the Gospel writers, the author of Hebrews, Martha, demons, a Roman centurion (a gentile), an angel, and even a voice from above claimed that Jesus was the son of God. And people reported that Jesus had called himself the son of God:

However, the Bible doesn’t report any time when Jesus actually told these people that he was the son of God. Oh, he certainly implied it:

But Jesus never actually used the phrase “son of God” to refer to himself. However, he did call God his father.

So Jesus said that he is in his disciples, and they are in him. Does this mean that Jesus and the disciples are equivalent? I don’t think so. So then what does he mean by “in”? He answered that question. See below.

Jesus uses the word “one” in an unusual way.

Some would say that, when Jesus said that he and his Father are one, he was saying that he and the Father are equivalent. And, since the Father is God, therefore Jesus is also God. However, there are other times he says that different people are “one”:

So Jesus said that his believers can be “one”. Does this mean that they would all be equivalent? I don’t think so. So what did he mean when he said that different people are “one”? Well, he answered that question for us:

The underlined sentence in the King James Version, which is known as the Johannine Comma, is completely missing from the New International Version translation. Why is that?

The book, Misquoting Jesus, says, “… the Johannine Comma, … [cannot] be found in the oldest and superior manuscripts of the Greek New Testament.” But much later, in the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus published a version of the Greek New Testament that included the Johannine Comma, and it “…became the standard form of the Greek text to be published by Western European printers for more than three hundred years.” The Johannine Comma is very important, “… since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the trinity… Without this verse, the doctrine of the trinity must be inferred from the combination of a variety of passages… This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly.”

So it seems to me that the apostle John never wrote the Johannine comma. Rather, Jerome, the author of the official Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), added that verse about 300 years after John died. Over the next eleven centuries, the Christian church adopted the doctrine of the trinity based on that single verse.

By the time Erasmus published the Greek standard, the trinity had become such a fundamental part of Christianity that the Johannine Comma had to be included, even though it couldn’t be found in any of the oldest Greek versions of the New Testament. Erasmus’s Bible was then translated to make the King James Version of the Bible. About 300 years later, when it was generally accepted that the Johannine Comma couldn’t be found in any copies of the Greek New Testament that were written before Erasmus made his version, the authors of the New International Version of the Bible decided not to include it, except in a footnote.

The conclusion then is that the Johannine Comma was not written by God, and without it, the doctrine of the trinity becomes very difficult to defend based on the Bible. This suggests that, if it weren’t for Jerome’s creativity, the trinity might never have become a doctrine of Christianity.

Some would say that the fact that Jesus had no father proves that Jesus was God. But I don’t see that. A virgin birth is certainly a miracle, but it doesn’t follow that the child is God in the flesh. Maybe you could convince me that he is a son of God. But I already explained that a son of God is not necessarily the same as God.

The Bible records several miracles that Jesus performed.

However, just because Jesus performed miracles, that doesn’t prove that he is God. After all, the Bible also records several miracles that were performed by mere humans.

It is clear to me that all of these miracles were performed by God through men. The men were not actually capable of performing miracles on their own.

Jesus said, “I am.”

Christian theology claims that this means Jesus is God, because God also called himself “I am”.

But just because a person says the two words, “I am”, that doesn’t mean that he is God. For example, in the chapter immediately following the chapter where Jesus said “I am”, another person said the same thing.

“But wait,” you say. “This man said, ’I am the man,’ not ’I am,’ like Jesus did.” Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but “the man” is not found in the original Greek. The NIV translators added it. The begging man’s quote in John 9:9 is identical to Jesus’ quote in John 8:58.

An angel said to Joseph:

So Jesus is called “God with us,” but that doesn’t mean he is God. Consider that Daniel means “God is my judge” and Samuel means “name of God”, but that doesn’t mean that Daniel and Samuel are God. Just because a person’s name ends in “el” (which means God), that doesn’t mean that the person is God.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all reported the occasion when Jesus forgave the sins of a paralyzed man. Here is Matthew’s account:

So you might argue that, if only God can forgive sins, and Jesus has the authority to forgive sins, therefore and thus, Jesus is God. However, the flaw in your proof is in step one. Just because the teachers of the law thought only God can forgive sins, that doesn’t make it true. I don’t think there’s any place in the Bible that says that. However, Jesus himself implied that Peter had the authority to forgive sins:

So, unless Peter is also God, humans can have the authority to forgive sins.

The Bible says that Jesus never sinned

But the Bible also says that all humans sin.

If Jesus never sinned and all humans sin, doesn’t that prove that Jesus must be God? Well, actually, I believe that Jesus did sin, and I give some examples here.

There are several distinct differences between Jesus and the Father (God).

So Jesus and the Father have different knowledge, authority, and greatness.

Also, unlike God, Jesus can be tempted.

Another difference between Jesus and God is that God is immortal, but Jesus died.

And Jesus and God can disagree. In Gethsemane, Jesus admitted that they could want contradictory things.

“One” more difference between Jesus and God: God is one.

As I understand it, this means God is indivisible. He cannot be separated in parts. But when Jesus hung on the cross, didn’t he bleed? And if a single drop of blood separated from the rest of his body, he was not indivisible.

Here are some verses that refer to God and Jesus as if they were different people:

According to the Gospels, Jesus referred to God in the third person many, many times. If he really was God, why wouldn’t he use first-person pronouns.

Jesus couldn’t have meant, “Why do you call me good? No one is good — except me alone…”

Did he really mean, “I have come here from [me]… [I] sent me…”?

And there are other examples of Jesus referring to God in the third person:

But here is the most incredible time Jesus referred to God in the third person:

How can anyone believe that what Jesus really meant was, “Myself, myself, why have I forsaken me?” Did Jesus really forsake himself? So, unless you claim that Jesus was delirious and that he accidentally read his line wrong, or he was lying, then based on this quote, you must conclude that Jesus was not God. In order for God to forsake Jesus, they must be different people.

Now, before I give you my answer to the question, “Is Jesus God?”, I must make sure you understand some things about the Holy Spirit and the Shechinah.

The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the trilogy. This means that the Holy Spirit is God and God is the Holy Spirit. It is completely correct to refer to the Holy Spirit as “God”. And I know from the Bible and personal experience that the Holy Spirit dwells in me.

The Shechinah was God, in some sense. In I Chronicles 6, when the Shechinah entered the temple, the people realized that it was God entering the temple. And from that time until the temple was destroyed, people said that God was in the temple. But how can that be true? Isn’t God omnipresent, which means he is everywhere at all times. Yes, that’s what the Bible says:

So God was not confined by the walls of the temple. But then what does it mean to say God was in the temple? Does it even make sense to say such a thing? You might also say that God is in the synagogue, or the church, or the mosque, all of which are true, but not in the same way that God was in the temple.

Consider my theory: The Shechinah and the Holy Spirit are one and the same thing. Whatever it was that dwelt in the Temple long ago now dwells in me. I draw this conclusion, because both the Shechinah and the Holy Spirit are God, in some sense. And God was in the temple, and God is in me, but in a different way from the way He is in other places.

So God was present in the space my body occupied before I received the Holy Spirit, but now He is in me more. His presence is somehow more intense. His spirit is stronger. If it makes any sense, He is more present. And I think it was exactly the same when God was in the temple. He was more present in that place than in other places.

So now, I’ll finally explain why I said, “So, is Jesus God? My answer is, to be brief, ‘Yes and no.’” I think I have made it clear why I think the answer is “no,” but why did I also say the answer is “yes?” Well, let’s look at a few other verses.

I’ve already said that I believe that the Holy Spirit is God. But why did Jesus receive the Holy Spirit at his baptism when he was an adult? If he was God, and the Holy Spirit is God, then God was indwelt with God, which seems unnecessary and pointless.

So I believe that Jesus was just a man (or a boy) until his baptism. At that point, he received the Holy Spirit. And then, when he was hanging on the cross, the Holy Spirit left him. That explains why he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God really did forsake him by removing His Holy Spirit from him.

So now I will present my answer to the question, “Is Jesus God?”, in a single sentence: Jesus was indwelt with the Holy Spirit. However, even though I believe that I too am indwelt with the Holy Spirit, there is a significant difference in the degree of closeness. Often, I ignore the Holy Spirit, and, when I do that, He usually leaves me alone to my own devices. The closeness of my relationship with the Holy Spirit varies over time from that kind of effective separation at one extreme to one time when the Holy Spirit actually took control of my body and moved it. And the closeness of Jesus’ relationship with the Holy Spirit also varied over time. But Jesus remained very tightly connected with the Holy Spirit most of the time. Sometimes Jesus and the Holy Spirit were so closely intertwined so that they were practically united as one thing. So, since he was so well aligned with God, you might say he was the same as God. This means you could point to him and say, “You are God,” and, in a sense, you might be essentially right.

Jesus said that he existed before he was born.

If Jesus is not God, how does his sacrifice atone for all the sins of mankind? The answer is, “I don’t know.” However, Jewish tradition says that, on the day of atonement, the sacrifice of a single goat atones for all the sins of all the people of Israel for an entire year. It’s based on these verses:

So, maybe the death of one exceptional human being can atone for the sins of all people across all time.

But again, my answer is, “I don’t know.”

MJ Ehrman, Bart D. 2005. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Harper San Francisco. 78-83.

NIV New International Version. 1984. International Bible Society. https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/