In the Bible, did Jesus claim to be God?

[GentleDove]

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote this about Jesus (emphasis mine):

• "I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am ready to accept Jesus as the great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a boiled egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Some debaters on the site have written that Jesus did not claim to be God and/or Biblical authors did not claim that Jesus was God.

Yet, it is an orthodox Christian doctrine, claimed to be Biblically-based, that Jesus was man and God in one person.

Questions for debate:

In the Bible, did Jesus claim to be God?
Did the Biblical authors claim that Jesus was God?

[Jonah]

No Jew has ever entertained the idea of a human being as God. This is a central aspect of Judaism that separated it from other religions. ESPECIALLY in the time where Jews were occupied by Rome headed by the man-god Caesar. In Judaism, God is wholly other than humanity.

The nascent deification of Jesus in the NT draws directly on Hellenistic culture, mythology, and religion....all replete with men-gods. A Jew never did and never will believe that a human being can be God. The exception to this would possibly be the rather recent phenomena where Jews have become also followers of some eastern religions and there is an eastern definition of "God" in which humanity is a part...such thinking has converged with western existentialism and panentheism, but typically Jewish folk still have their own spin on things of that nature such that you still would never get a Jewish affirmation of a certain individual human being actually being God.

[InTheFlesh]

No Jew has ever entertained the idea of a human being as God.

How do you go about supporting such a claim?
How can you speak for every Jew?

Didn't God create man in his image?
Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
We look like him.
Many Christians interpret as meaning "qualities"
but this is far from true.
Image means image.

The Old Testament clearly describes God as having all the body parts of a man.
Does it not?

[Jonah]

I guess my best advice would be to pick any rabbi out of the phone book and call him or her up and ask if Judaism allows a belief that a human being can be God. It's one of the few black and white things in Judaism. Now, you tripping through the Hebrew Scriptures imagining that you find support for your idea is your own affair. But, the fact remains that there is no synagogue, and never was, that allowed this central teaching of Judaism to be reversed. There is no man-God in Judaism, period.

[beloved57]

jon said:

No Jew has ever entertained the idea of a human being as God

Jesus was no ordinary human being, so how you know what every individual thought in jesus day ? You read hearts ? You sound like you trying to be God making such a statement..

[Goat]

jon said:

No Jew has ever entertained the idea of a human being as God

Jesus was no ordinary human being, so how you know what every individual thought in jesus day ? You read hearts ? You sound like you trying to be God making such a statement..

It was foreign to the religion. The idea that God is not a man , nor god is the son of man is a repeating theme in the Jewish scriptures, putting them apart from the Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians.

To the Jews, Jesus would have been an ordinary person.

[Jonah]

Logically, an extraordinary human being does not translate to deity. Although, this was often the case in pagan religion. In as much as the Christ story parallels other similar god-men stories in pagan religions...there you go.

What I really think you are suggesting is that some Jewish individuals in Jesus day would have violated their Jewish religion in order to believe Jesus was divine. Well, that would be a big deal. The NT would have given considerable ink to such events.

Take the stoning of Stephen. By the claims of Luke in Acts, Stephen was not killed because he claimed Jesus was God, but Acts claims it was the Jewish Christian anger over Stephen chucking the Torah. In his defense, Stephen preaches a long sermon which accuses the Jews of killing Jesus "The Righteous One" the same way they killed the other prophets before him. The term tzadik is a common Jewish religious term for a holy man. It never meant God.

But, when the Hellenistic Christian Church pushed the idea of a Jewish messianic claimant being turned into a new thing: a gentile messiah....the problem there is that the concept doesn't make much sense in the gentile world...so you have the seeds there, logically, to bump Jesus up to a God...and that's handy because the pagan gentiles are already used to god-men religions.

[InTheFlesh]

God is a Spirit.
And according to the Old Testament,
God has eyes to see
ears to hear
a mouth to speak
hands to work
and so forth.
And according to the Old Testament,
man has seen God face to face.
We were created in his image.

[Jonah]

What?

How is humanity in a position to say what God is? And really doesn't the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob put the concern on the reverse? "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" Psalm 8

Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it as well:

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equally, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!

D. Bonhoeffer

[InTheFlesh]

What?

How is humanity in a position to say what God is? And really doesn't the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob put the concern on the reverse? "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" Psalm 8

It is not man saying it.
It is the Word of God.

Exod.31
[18] And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.

You see, God has fingers to write with.

[Ben Masada]

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote this about Jesus (emphasis mine):

• "I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am ready to accept Jesus as the great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a boiled egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Some debaters on the site have written that Jesus did not claim to be God and/or Biblical authors did not claim that Jesus was God.

Yet, it is an orthodox Christian doctrine, claimed to be Biblically-based, that Jesus was man and God in one person.

Questions for debate:

In the Bible, did Jesus claim to be God?
Did the Biblical authors claim that Jesus was God?

Here is the good news: You don't have to accept that Jesus claimed to be God because he never put up that claim. Jesus was a Jewish man, and it is not Jewish for a man to claim to be God. The claim was fabricated by Paul about 30 years after Jesus had been gone, and it was perpetuated by the Heelenistic Gentiles who wrote the gospels.