JESUS IS GOD
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Coming soon: A verse-by-verse look at what the Bible says about the deity of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Trinity. This article reprinted from http://www.tektonics.org/jesusclaims/jesusclaimshub.html [Introduction] [Expectations if Claims Had Not Been Made] [Were the Claims Created?: The "Follower Trilemma"] [Conclusion] It's alarmingly simple, and a common suggestion to make: That Jesus either a) never made any claims to deity; b) that His claims were altered by His biased followers; or, c) His claims were misunderstood by His ignorant followers. Do these ideas hold any water? A related argument in this regard is that only John's Gospel portrays Jesus as claiming to be God; and since it is later than the Synoptics, the claims are the result of an evolution in Christian theology. Now there is no a priori reason to reject John's Gospel, or even to date it as the latest of the present quartet. Indeed, John A. T. Robinson in Redating the New Testament and in The Priority of John, presents a cogent argument for dating John in the same time period as the other Gospels, between 50-65 AD, with proto-gospel material and traditions dating into the two decades previous. Others have presented similar arguments for an earlier date for John than is often presumed (see particularly Chars.JDSS, 167-9). A full discussion of the date of the Johannine Gospel is beyond our scope in this essay, but we will, for the sake of argument, not consider most of the claims to divinity in John's Gospel. For now, at the end of this section, we shall only address one piece of John which is a key to understanding the claims that it includes. (Furthermore, we may not simply reject the record of John's Gospel because we find it incredible that Jesus should have made such direct claims to divinity - that, indeed, is the very point at issue!) |
