Do the canonical Gospels portray Jesus as divine? After a quick perusal of our sources, this may seem like a question with a very obvious answer.
Consider the following data, scattered across the Synoptics and John:
Jesus makes a number of statements claiming an abbreviation of the divine name, ‘I am’ (egō eimi), God’s mode of self-disclosure in the Jewish Scriptures.
Jesus performs several deeds which God alone had the authority to perform, such as calming storms, walking on water and forgiving sins.
Jesus receives acts of prostration which are elsewhere rejected by humans.
Jesus is the implied subject of passages from the Jewish Scriptures which refer to YHWH, the God of Israel himself.
Jesus is already identified in the earliest New Testament literature, the epistles of Paul, as a divine being, supporting the existence of this idea in early Christianity.
Jesus is identified by John as the incarnation of the pre-existent Word, while in Matthew and Luke, Jesus has a virginal conception, signalling divine sonship.
Jesus receives titles in the Gospels which may – in certain contexts – appear to signal his divinity, including ‘Son of Man’, ‘Son of God’ and ‘Lord.’
With few exceptions, almost all exegetes across the theological spectrum accept some of these data as convincing evidence that the evangelists portray Jesus as divine.
Yet this calls out desperately for another question: why then do many scholars therefore say the things about Christology that they do? Why do they say that Jesus is not actually God in the Gospels? Or that John has a ‘higher Christology’ than the Synoptics? Or that the Nicene Creed is a later development still – even on John?…
Why indeed! These are great questions, and ones which many students, including myself, naturally ask when they embark on their academic journey with the Gospels. In what follows, I will do my best to unpack this difficult area of debate. To begin this unpacking, we need to ask the question: what did it mean to be divine in antiquity?
Divinity in the Ancient World
One of the key reasons why scholars disagree about Jesus’ divinity is that they don’t agree on what it meant to be divine in the ancient world. Thus, while many scholars agree that Jesus is depicted as divine, they do not agree upon what his divinity means.1
What is the nature of this disagreement? On one side of the fence, there are scholars who think that monotheism in the ancient world was a hard-and-fast line. Either you are divine – which makes you God – or you are not God, and not divine.
Sometimes scholars refer to this position as ‘exclusive monotheism.’ It is called exclusive because there is a clear distinction between God and everything else. Framing monotheism in this way tends to force us into one of two options: either Jesus is a human being – even if he is a very special one – or he is the God of Israel.
Yet there is a group of scholars on the other side of the fence. These scholars do not think that divinity in the ancient world was a strict binary between God and everything else. Instead of seeing divinity as an either-or, they see it as a gradient.
To support this perspective, this group – whom we might call ‘inclusive monotheists’ – point to a variety of ‘intermediary’ beings. These are figures who may not be identical to God, but who nevertheless fulfil divine roles and are even sometimes described using divine terms (such as ‘God’).
Sometimes these figures are personified attributes of God, such as his Wisdom or Word (Logos). In other texts, intermediary figures might be divinised humans, angels, or even a human being who has become angelified. Whatever the exact nature of these figures, their primary purpose is to mediate the being of the ineffable God.
In the wider Graeco-Roman world, pagan thinkers shared similar ideas of divinity. For example, a human figure such as the Emperor could be ‘divine’. Domitian, like Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, was to be called Dominus et Deus – ‘Lord and God’. But this does not mean they are divine in the same robust sense as, for example, the Olympians.
What This Means for the Gospels
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