Did Jesus Claim To Be God?
One of the fundamental question for Christians is whether Jesus claimed to be God. Did he really present himself as divine? Did the NT authors think Jesus was divine?
This issue has become especially important in recent years as some scholars continue to dispute whether Jesus ever claimed such a thing. Bart Ehrman’s, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014), is a key example.
For a response to Ehrman, see my review of his book here, and the full length work edited by Michael Bird, How God Became Jesus (Zondervan, 2014) which includes contributions from a number of scholars.
I provide a brief answer to these questions in the video … Continue reading...
Was the Divinity of Jesus a Late Invention of the Council of Nicea? Probing Into What the Earliest Christians Really Believed
One of the most common objections to Christianity is that the divinity of Jesus was “created” by later Christians long after the first century. No one in primitive Christianity believed Jesus was divine, we are told. He was just a man and it was later believers, at the council of Nicea, that declared him to be a God.
A classic example of this in popular literature can be found in the book The Da Vinci Code:
…“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history [council of Nicea], Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
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Did the Earliest Christians Really Think Jesus Was God? One Important Example
One of the most common critiques of Christianity is that some of its major tenets are late inventions. Core Christian doctrines, we are told, were never believed in the earliest phases of the church but were developed only at a later time period. Orthodoxy, therefore, was not early but late.
The most obvious example of a doctrine that was purportedly added later (we will cover another such doctrine in a future post) is the divinity of Jesus. The popular internet-level narrative goes like this: Jesus was not God, nor did he claim to be God. He was just an ordinary man. At a later point, his followers began to … Continue reading...
Does Mark Really Present Jesus as God? A Response to James McGrath
In my most recent post, I argued that Mark 1:2-3 presents Jesus as the fulfillment of OT passages that discuss the coming of God himself. These verses, therefore, have tremendous implications for Mark’s Christology, namely that he views Jesus as “the Lord” of the OT.
James McGrath has responded over on his website here. Let’s have a look at McGrath’s two main complaints. Here is his first one:
…When I was a conservative Evangelical, I confess that I too made similar arguments, and never noticed how odd they are. Mark apparently believes that Jesus was God come in the flesh, and yet he expresses this not by saying it
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Does the Gospel of Mark Present Jesus as God?
Over the years it has been claimed (again and again) that John presents Jesus as divine, and the Synoptic gospels, particularly Mark, present Jesus as human. Therefore, it is argued, we have different versions of Christology within early Christianity.
While we certainly can agree that different gospels have different emphases, and that they articulate Christological truths in their own ways, is it really the case that gospels like Mark view Jesus as merely human? Not at all. In fact, it is worth noting that Mark presents Jesus as God from the very opening few verses in his gospel, in a manner that is often missed on a quick reading of … Continue reading...