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Was Jesus
Really God? No
man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. I John 4:12 I love Jesus of Nazareth. He is my role model and hero, and always has been since I first read the New Testament when I was 13 years old. Jesus stood up for the little guy and was extremely courageous in his condemnation of the hypocritical Pharisee religious bigots – the fundamentalists of his day. He was seen as quite liberal and far too concerned with the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. He was extremely compassionate to the wayward sinner, and he was authentic to the extreme. There wasn’t a hypocritical bone in his body. He did not care what people thought of him and was regularly seen with the riffraff of the cities he visited. He was obviously known as fun person to be around because in Matthew 11: 18,19, it is said; “Because John didn't come eating or drinking, yet people say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (International Standard Version) Mark is the first account chronologically of any of the Gospels of the New Testament. Although Matthew appears first, Mark was written first. There is an interesting quote in that Gospel; “And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.” (Mark 12: 28 – 34, King James Version) Here is Jesus, my hero, saying that there is only one God; yet within a few years, the people who admired him had made him the second God among three that Christianity would officially accept for worship. How could this have possibly happened? There is an interesting phenomenon among people who actually take the time to read the Bible. (Most Christians seldom read the Bible, and are perfectly happy to let someone else do all their thinking for them.) When people read the New Testament, they read it like it is a novel. They see it as a single book because it does, after all, always come bound as a single book. But that is hardly the case. Not only is it not a single book, it is jumbled up so badly from the order it was written. If you arranged the books of the New Testament chronologically, it would probably look like this:
Have you ever read it in that order? I’m sure you haven’t. Also, you must remember that each book stands completely alone. When James wrote his letter, he had no way of knowing whether his readers would ever receive any other written instruction about the new faith. Therefore, he wrote a complete account of what he wanted his readers to know. He did not anticipate the many books to follow. If you look at the chronological order of these books, you will find something very interesting. James wrote first, and he was the brother of Jesus. In the first verse he refers to Jesus as the Messiah (Christ), the anointed messenger from God. In chapter 1, verse 13 he clearly states that God cannot be tempted by evil, yet we know that Jesus spent 40 days being tempted by Satan in the wilderness after his baptism. Having no knowledge of any book that would be written later, he says in 2:10, “You believe that there is one God; you do well…” The next books to be written are from the pen of Paul who had never seen or heard Jesus. In his letter to the Roman Church, he presents Jesus as the literal Son of God; “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God – the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed to be the Son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 1:1-6, NIV) Notice that Paul describes Jesus here as a descendant of David who was appointed to be the Son of God at his resurrection. At this point in time, Paul would have known nothing of the virgin birth. After James and Paul, Mark
was the next writer of his short Gospel, but we don’t get much reliable
information about the question in point from that Gospel. The words “Son of God”
appear in that book only three times: (1:1), (3:11), and (15:39). In the first instance, the words do
not appear in the oldest manuscripts; in the second instance evil spirits
claim they know who he is – the son of God; and the final instance is
when a soldier at the crucifixion says, “Surely
this man was the Son of God.”
But some early manuscripts have the soldier saying, “Surely this was a son of
God.” However, the
point can be argued that Mark believed that Jesus became the Son of God at
his baptism. In Mark 1:11 when
Jesus was baptized, a voice was heard from the heavens, “You are my Son, whom I love. I am pleased
with you!” (International Standard Version). Matthew and Luke, who used Mark’s
gospel as a reference and quoted it frequently, also include this story. This point is
advanced by the biblical scholar Lloyd Geering who offers
two intriguing bits of information concerning the time when Jesus became
God’s son in Mark’s Gospel.
However, by the time you get to the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke,
you have the time of Jesus becoming the Son of God moving to the time of his
birth, supernaturally born of a virgin, rather than his Baptism, or
resurrection. And by the time you
get to the first chapter of John, the last Gospel to appear in the New
Testament, Jesus has actually become the eternal Son of God, …begotten not made…, the second
person of a newly created bizarre doctrine of a triune God. In this Gospel, Jesus is presented as
the Eternal Creator – literally Almighty God himself. So the
deification of Jesus was a theological process. The first idea that Jesus was God came
from the pen of Paul who said that Jesus became God at his resurrection. Then Mark implies that he became God
at his baptism. Luke and Matthew
declare him to be God at his birth and thus arises a theological need for a
virgin birth; (not mentioned a single time in Paul’s writings, and
never mentioned by Jesus himself) and finally John declares that he had
always been God from eternity past and that he, in fact, was the eternal
Creator of all that is. Paul’s Christianity made Jesus a God just like Mithras in the popular religion of the day, and the Gospel of John (written many years after Paul’s writings) reinforced that view, even referring to Jesus by some of the very same names and titles used for Mithras, but Jesus was not God. In the early Gospel of Matthew, a very human Jesus was once approached and addressed as “Good Master” and his immediate reply was “Why do you call me good, there is no one who is good except God.” (Matthew 19:16, 17). He was not omniscient but learned new things and grew in wisdom just like any other child (Luke 2:52). When he was going to the Temple one day, he was hungry and saw a fig tree. He went over to see if there were any figs on the tree to appease his hunger. If he had been God, he would have certainly known whether or not there were figs on the tree. When he found none, he got angry, just like you and I might, and he cursed the fig tree, even though it was not the time of the year for figs to be in season (Matthew 21:18-20). When Jesus was talking about the Day of Judgment, he made it clear the he was not all knowing as God is when he said, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in Heaven, neither the son, but the Father." (Mark 13:32 and Matt. 24:36) God is omniscient (all knowing) but Jesus was not because he was not God. God is omnipotent (all powerful) but Jesus claimed that he could do nothing without the help of God when he said, "Truly, truly I say to you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do..." (John 5:19). Again he said, "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will but the will of the Father which has sent me." (John 5:30) He could not do many mighty works in his hometown because of the unbelief of the people. (Matthew 13:58) Jesus is referred to as “Christ” which is the Greek form for “Messiah” and meant “anointed.” The Jews were expecting a Messiah but no Jew ever thought the Messiah would be more than a great prophet. It would have been considered the ultimate blasphemy for the average Jew to believe a man could be God. Jesus himself stated there was only one God. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Mark 12:28) Jesus never taught that God was a strange three-in-one “trinity” and that word does not appear anywhere in the Bible. God is one.
Jesus was a man who called God his father but made it clear that he was your father and my father also when he said, "I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God." (John 20:17). He cried out on the cross, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). He called upon God. God is God and does not have a God to call upon. When in the garden of Gethsemane he prayed, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt." (Matt. 26:36). If Jesus were God why would he have said to the many people who were listening and looking at him, "No man has seen God at any time." (John 1:18). "Ye have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His shape." (John 5:37) He also said in John 4:24: "God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." God is all powerful yet when Jesus spoke of God in John 14:28 he said: "My Father is greater than I." Jesus was a human being like you and me, albeit a human being who had spiritually evolved to the point of allowing the Light of God to shine brightly through him. As a baby his mother Mary changed his soiled diapers and wiped his dirty nose. She wiped the tears from his eyes and cleaned his skinned knees. She sang lullabies to him and rocked him to sleep. He was just a little Jewish boy who learned obedience to the Light of God within him at a very early age, but he was not God. There is only one God. |