Jesus is God

You may doubt this claim for different reasons. If you are one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, you accept the Bible as God’s word and have learned from it that Jesus is God’s Son but not Almighty God; the Watch Tower Society cites John 14:28 for this. If you are a Muslim, the Qur’an honors Jesus as the Messiah and a messenger and denies that he is God. If you hold no faith, the idea may sound like a later exaggeration of a Jewish teacher.

Each of you can follow this page. If you do not accept the New Testament as Scripture, read it here as the record of what Jesus’ earliest followers claimed about him. That question can be answered from the documents whether or not you believe them.

Christians do not believe in two or three gods, and they do not believe Jesus is the Father. The Trinity, the Christian teaching that the one God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is an attempt to say both things the New Testament says: there is one God, and Jesus belongs within that one God while remaining distinct from the Father. The New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham calls this a “Christology of divine identity”: instead of arguing about abstract divine nature, the first Christians took the things that mark out the one God of Israel and said them of Jesus.

The first Christians were Jews, and Jewish belief drew one hard line: on one side the Creator, on the other everything he made. Angels, kings, and prophets were all on the made side. The New Testament writers repeatedly put Jesus on the other.

• John’s Gospel opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The New World Translation reads “a god” in the last clause. Whichever reading you prefer, verse 3 follows: “Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.” The Word is not among the things made.
• Israel’s central confession is that “the LORD is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4); “the LORD” stands for God’s personal name, rendered “Jehovah” in the New World Translation. Paul, in a letter usually dated around AD 53 to 55, rewords that confession: “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). Instead of adding a second god, he places Jesus inside the confession of the one God.
• Colossians 1:16 says that in the Son “all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.”
• Hebrews 1:10 takes words from Psalm 102 addressed to the LORD, “In the beginning, O Lord, You laid the foundations of the earth,” and says God speaks them to the Son.

The one through whom everything was made cannot himself be one of the made things.

In Isaiah 44:6 the LORD calls himself the first and the last, and says there is no God apart from him. In Revelation 1:17-18 the risen Jesus says, “I am the First and the Last, the Living One. I was dead, and behold, now I am alive forever and ever!” The speaker is the one who died, so it is Jesus, and he claims a title Isaiah gives to the LORD alone.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians says God gave Jesus “the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:9-11). Paul is echoing Isaiah 45:23, where the LORD swears that every knee will bow to him.

The Gospels show the same pattern in what Jesus does. In Mark 2, Jesus tells a paralyzed man, “your sins are forgiven.” The scribes object, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Instead of telling them they have misunderstood, Jesus heals the man to show that he has authority to forgive. In John 8:58 he says, “before Abraham was born, I am!” and his hearers pick up stones.

Titus 2:13 speaks of “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” The Greek grammar here is debated, and no single verse, this one included, carries the weight.

Jews in Jesus’ day would bow to no one but God in worship. The New Testament records that rule being kept. When Cornelius falls at Peter’s feet, Peter lifts him up and says he is only a man (Acts 10:25-26). When John falls before an angel, the angel says, “Do not do that!.. Worship God!” (Revelation 22:8-9).

Jesus does not respond that way. After the resurrection, Thomas says to him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Jesus does not correct him; he commends the faith that led to the words. Hebrews 1:6 quotes God: “Let all God’s angels worship Him.” The New World Translation reads “do obeisance”; why the verse still sets the Son apart from every angel is explained at Jesus is Michael the archangel. In Revelation 5:13, every creature in heaven and on earth gives honor and glory to the one on the throne and to the Lamb together.

Larry Hurtado, a historian of early Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, spent much of his career on this. His conclusion was that devotion to Jesus, prayer to him, hymns about him, calling on his name, appears very early, among Jewish believers, and not as a slow later development. Whatever you conclude about Jesus, his first followers worshiped him, and they did so while insisting there is one God.

A common view holds that Jesus’ deity was decided in AD 325, at the Council of Nicaea. Two witnesses from about two centuries earlier tell against that.

Pliny the Younger was a Roman governor in what is now northern Turkey, with no sympathy for Christians. Around AD 112 he wrote to the emperor Trajan describing what Christians did when they met: among other things, they sang a hymn to Christ as to a god. His report shows what the worship looked like to someone outside it.

Ignatius, a church leader in Antioch, wrote letters on his way to execution in Rome around AD 110. In his letter to the Ephesians he speaks of Jesus Christ as God, while also distinguishing him from the Father.

You do not need to trust any council to weigh this. These are historical reports, and they show that later creeds put words to a belief that was already present rather than inventing it.

The strongest reason to doubt that Jesus is God comes from the same books. Jesus prays to the Father. He says, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). He says that no one knows the day or hour of the end, “not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). These are real verses.

Two things in the New Testament account for them. First, the Son is not the Father. A Son who is sent, who prays, and who obeys is what you would expect if Father and Son are distinct. Second, the Son became a man. Philippians 2:6-7 says that he existed “in the form of God” and “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness.” A real human life includes prayer, growth, and limits. The same Gospel that records “the Father is greater than I” also opens with “the Word was God” and closes with “My Lord and my God!” John did not see a contradiction there.

For a reader who does not accept the New Testament, this page shows what Jesus’ first followers believed, and how early. It does not show that they were right. That turns on whether Jesus rose from the dead, which is a separate historical question.