Jesus never claimed to be God

You do not have to accept the New Testament as Scripture to ask a historical question of it: what did Jesus’ first followers say he claimed, and how soon did they say it? Its documents are the only first-century records of his words. The Qur’an came about six hundred years later.

The verses in which Jesus prays, or says the Father is greater, come from the same Gospels as the verses in which he forgives sins and is condemned for blasphemy. If those sources can be trusted for the first kind of verse, they deserve a hearing on the second. If they cannot be trusted at all, then they cannot show that Jesus called himself only a prophet either.

Christians do not say that Jesus was the Father, or that a man was promoted to be God. They say that the one God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son became a man. So the question is not whether Jesus said “I am the Father.” It is whether he spoke and acted as one who shares in God’s own authority.

Most historians date Mark as the earliest Gospel, written around AD 65 to 70. It is often said to have the “lowest” view of Jesus, which makes it a fair place to look.

In Mark 2, a paralyzed man is brought to Jesus. Jesus says to him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The religious scholars present object: “He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). They are right that a prophet can announce God’s forgiveness, but cannot forgive offenses against God in his own name. Jesus does not correct them. He says he will show “that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” and heals the man.

In Mark 4, Jesus calms a storm, and his followers ask, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?” Any Jew of the time would have heard the Psalms behind that question: it is the LORD who “calmed the storm to a whisper” (Psalm 107:29).

Mark does not put a slogan in Jesus’ mouth. He shows Jesus doing things that the Hebrew Scriptures reserve for God, and he shows the people around him noticing.

Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial before the high priest is the clearest single moment. The high priest asks, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus answers: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61-62). The high priest tears his clothes and calls it blasphemy, and the council condemns him to death.

“Son of God” in Jewish usage could describe Israel’s king, so that title alone would not have been blasphemy. What provoked the charge was the rest of the answer. Jesus applies to himself the vision in Daniel 7:13-14, in which “One like the Son of Man” comes with the clouds and receives a kingdom in which “the people of every nation and language should serve Him.” He claims he will sit at God’s right hand.

Whatever you conclude about who Jesus was, the earliest Gospel says he was condemned for what he claimed about himself. That is hard to square with a prophet who only ever pointed away from himself.

Paul’s letters, from the AD 50s, are older than any Gospel. Paul had been a Pharisee, strict about the one God, and he never thought he had left that belief behind. Yet he writes: “there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came… and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came” (1 Corinthians 8:6). This is a rewording of Israel’s central confession, “The LORD our God, the LORD is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4), with Jesus placed inside it. The New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham calls this a “Christology of divine identity” (Jesus and the God of Israel).

Paul also quotes what many scholars think is an earlier hymn: that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:6-11). The words come from Isaiah 45, where God says, “I am God, and there is no other… Every knee will bow before Me.”

The historian Larry Hurtado, in Lord Jesus Christ, showed that this devotion to Jesus, with prayer and hymns addressed to him, appears among Jewish believers within the first two decades, too early to have developed slowly under Greek influence.

The idea that Nicaea made Jesus God is common, and it is easy to check. Around AD 110, Ignatius, the leader of the church in Antioch, wrote letters on his way to execution in Rome in which he repeatedly calls Jesus Christ our God (Letter to the Ephesians). Around AD 112, a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan about the Christians in his province. He reported that they met before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as to a god (Letters 10.96). Pliny had no interest in Christian teaching; he was describing what he found when he questioned them.

Nicaea, in 325, did not start the worship of Jesus. It met to settle a dispute about how to describe the Jesus whom churches had been worshiping for nearly three centuries.

None of this proves that Jesus is God. Historians who are not Christians can accept everything on this page and still conclude that Jesus and his followers were mistaken. What the evidence shows is that the belief was not added at Nicaea or by later Greek converts. It goes back to the earliest followers, who were Jews, and to the records of Jesus’ own words and acts.

That leaves a question that matters especially if you honor Jesus as a true prophet, as the Qur’an does. A true prophet speaks truly about himself. If the earliest records are right that Jesus forgave sins in his own name and claimed God’s throne, then he cannot be only a prophet. If they are wrong, the earliest evidence about him is wrong, and the account that corrects it comes six centuries later. The Christian case that Jesus’ claims were true is set out in Jesus is God.