The Table Briefing: Did the Historical Jesus Claim to Be Divine?

By Darrell L. Bock and Mikel Del Rosario

[Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor in New Testament Studies and Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Mikel Del Rosario is cultural engagement assistant.]

How would you respond to someone who said Jesus never claimed to be God? While most believers can cite Scriptures that affirm Jesus’s deity, more and more people are hesitant to accept the Bible as an authority. Through popular culture, many have passively absorbed claims by skeptical scholars that the historical Jesus never claimed to be divine.

On an episode of the Table Podcast, we sat down with Dr. Justin Bass to discuss whether the historical Jesus claimed to be divine. Bass explained how he argued for the affirmative at a debate held at the Collin College Preston Ridge Conference Center in Frisco, Texas. Dr. Bart Ehrman, one of the most visible agnostic New Testament scholars today, argued for the negative position.

This Table Briefing highlights a portion of the conversation with Bass on the historical evidence for Jesus’s claim to be divine. First, we discuss a strategic way to talk about Scripture in a skeptical context. Then, we examine what early sources for Jesus’s claims say. Finally, we consider two key texts that demonstrate how Jesus used a combination of his words and deeds to point to his divine identity.

Examining Scripture In A Skeptical Context

Before we talk about the claims of Jesus, it is important to consider how we can discuss the New Testament with skeptical friends who do not recognize the Bible as an authority. Understanding how historians and New Testament scholars employ biblical texts in historical Jesus conversations can inform a strategic approach.

Bock: Most historical Jesus study is rooted in a principle that we actually use in our journalism today, which is corroboration: “Is there some way we can corroborate, or get additional sources, or multiple witnesses attesting that this took place?” It used to be [that] newspapers didn’t print a story unless they had two fairly independent witnesses testifying that something happened. Then they felt more confident about it. One of the criteria is what’s called multiple attestation: The more source levels you have testifying to something—a theme, a saying, or something like that—the more likely it goes back to Jesus on the premise that the more widely spread this is across the tradition, the more likely it is to have roots.

You have to be aware of these kinds of discussions with certain people because if you say, “Well, [the New Testament is divine] revelation. It’s so,” they’ll say, “So? I don’t believe in [divine] revelation and I don’t believe it’s so. What reasons do you have for believing that?” You’ve got to think through the other ways to say this.

Del Rosario: So there are ways to talk about this with your skeptical neighbors, coworkers, and relatives who don’t hold that the Bible is the word of God. You can say, “Look, here are different ways that we can figure out what happened in the past,” and they can come to the conclusion that Jesus did claim to be God, not just by “taking it on faith,” but by looking at the historical evidence and being confronted with the claims that Jesus made.

Bock: And it would be a kind of rationale you’d use with anybody in any kind of setting whatsoever. It’s designed to give them pause, [to] have them think, “Oh, that’s another way to think about this,” and boom, you’re into a conversation. In some cases, people will be drawn to this kind of argumentation.

Now there’s a lot of discussion about why people doubt. Are they really [doubting] strictly for intellectual reasons or is there other stuff going on? A lot of the time, there can be other stuff going on that’s impacting the way they argue rationally. But what you’re doing is you’re taking away that support, that buttress that says, “Well, I object and I object strictly on rational grounds. You don’t have to talk about where I am personally because I’ve got these rational objections that you have to deal with first.” And that oftentimes is a good way into these conversations because unless someone’s really into this topic, in most cases, they aren’t aware of what these conversations are.

Bass: And this was my approach with Bart Ehrman. I basically said, “Okay, let’s assume your criteria. Let’s assume what you accept.” I chose sayings of Jesus [that] he accepted. . . . I said, “Hey, let’s look at the New Testament documents. Let’s not assume they’re inspired. Let’s not assume they’re inerrant, and let’s just look at them as historical documents [and try] to find out ‘What did Jesus say?’ ” And I think even if we do it that way, we still see Jesus claiming to be God. That’s one of the reasons I love studying historical Jesus in this method.

More than ever, believers must be prepared to engage in public square discussions about Jesus in a culture that has shifted away from the traditional Christian view of Scripture. Christians tend to assert, “It’s true because it’s in the Bible,” but skeptical friends may be more open to conversations considering the idea that “it’s in the Bible because it’s true.” In light of our current context, this strategic approach seems to provide a more appealing way forward in cultural engagement.

Examining The Sources About Jesus

Skeptics often resist taking the Scriptures seriously as historical sources for Jesus’s claims, arguing that the earliest biblical documents were written at least a decade or more after Jesus’s death. However, the apostle Paul’s early letters are often overlooked as key sources for investigating the claims of the historical Jesus. These epistles contain traces of oral traditions that predate the composition of every New Testament document and shed light on the earliest Christian views of Jesus. Bass explains how close early Pauline material gets us to Jesus:

Bass: A lot of people think that the Gospels are our earliest sources for Jesus, but it’s fascinating that Paul, in his early letters—1 Corinthians, Romans, Galatians were written within about 20 to 25 years of Jesus’s death—actually quotes creeds, poems, hymns, and other sayings of Jesus that go back to within even the first decade after Jesus’s death.

Paul’s epistles provide a glimpse into very early oral traditions about Jesus. For example, Paul quoted an ancient creed in 1 Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we live, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we live” (NET). This seems to modify the Shema, a historic declaration of Jewish monotheism proclaimed daily by pious Jews: “Listen, Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength” (Deut. 6:4-5, NET). Bass and Bock discuss this creedal material:

Bass: [This quotation] is basically making the Lord of Deuteronomy 6 Jesus . . . [who is] somehow included in the one God of Israel. It’s an incredible creedal tradition that goes back probably within the first five to ten years after Jesus’s death.

Bock: The written traditions may go back to five or ten years, but the actual [conversion] experience of Paul lands on top of the [Passion] events in Jerusalem, if you think through what it took for Paul to be converted when Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus Road within eighteen months . . . of the events tied to Jesus in Jerusalem.

He had to have known the Christian message. He had to have been able to respond to it. When Jesus appears to him, he has to understand what that means. He immediately gets it. That actually dates [the] theology that allows for his conversion to before his experience with Jesus, because he’s hearing what the church is preaching as a preparation for that experience.

So this gap that people like to talk about between the event and what’s written in the Bible keeps shrinking to the point where it’s on top of itself. So the issue becomes “Where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” We’ve got these teachings among the very earliest Christians—where did they get them from? It’s unlikely they made them up on their own because they got them into trouble. Why would you make up something that would get you into trouble? That doesn’t make sense. . . . If Jesus really taught that he was a great religious leader or even that he was just the Messiah, there [would have been] no reason to make him divine.

Given the early date of 1 Corinthians and Paul’s own radical conversion, it seems the earliest Christians did believe that Jesus was somehow divine. But what caused this belief? A very plausible explanation is that Jesus really did claim to be divine. Still, some skeptics object that creedal material does not reflect what Jesus himself said. Are Jesus’s words and deeds really congruent with the beliefs of the early church?

Examining Jesus’s Words And Deeds

Nowhere in Scripture do we have a report of Jesus saying, “I am God.” This is one challenge often brought up by those who doubt that the more explicit divine claims portrayed in the Gospel of John—claims like “I and the Father are one” (10:30)—truly go back to the historical Jesus. But was an explicit declaration the only way for Jesus to communicate his divine identity? Not at all. According to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus revealed his divinity by doing the things that only God was believed to do. For example, Jesus implicitly claimed to be divine by assuming authority over the sacred calendar. He claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath—the Master of one of Judaism’s key distinctives commanded in the Torah. Further, he changed the historic Passover liturgy into a ritual that referred to his own life and death. He even demonstrated his supernatural authority over nature. This leads to a discussion of how to understand Jesus’s implicit claims in a monotheistic Jewish context:

Bock: If you think the only way for Jesus to say, “I’m divine,” is to say, “I am the Son of God,” you won’t have much to work with. But if you step back and you look at what these implicit claims [are] actually saying, they’re building a cumulative argument of, “It’s in this area, this area, this area, this area.” Who can do all of that? That’s part of the way the argument works.

Bass: Even in the Gospel of John, [Jesus] never says, “I am God.” I think the reason for that is he came to reveal the Father and he did not want to confuse people by saying he was the Father. So he did claim to be God, but the way he did that was by claiming to be, using the Jewish text of the Old Testament, “the Lord at God’s right hand” and the Son of Man from Daniel 7.

Del Rosario: The implied claim then seems to be, “I have authority over sickness, over demons, over the sacred calendar, over all these things.” In a monotheistic culture, he’s not saying, “Hey, I’m another god alongside Adonai who created heaven and earth,” right?

Bock: Right. It can’t be that.

Del Rosario: He’s making this claim and they’re having to put things together.

Bock: Exactly. . . . He’s introducing the idea that there is personage in God. He doesn’t use that terminology, but he says, “My status and my function equate to the types of things that God does, but there is only one God.” And you’ve got the idea of incarnation working here, that God is expressing himself through a human person. He’s gone about this very, very carefully.

Bass: Right. There’s no doubt Jesus was a strict monotheist, yet he accepts worship. It’s those kinds of things—those implicit things—that show that he did claim to be divine and see himself as divine.

Bock: So they really do add up. . . . It’s kind of an alpha to omega or an A to Z set of things that he’s doing, many of which God alone does. So as a result, you begin to say, “Okay, who is this guy?” For example, when Jesus calms the creation, the disciples’ reaction at the end is, “Who’s able to command the winds and the waves, and they obey him?” That’s the pronouncement that comes at the end of that miracle. That’s exactly the right question to be asking.

A good Jew would say, “Well, there’s only one person who’s able to control the creation; that’s the Creator.” So you get the introduction of this Creator-creature divide in which Jesus keeps functioning on the Creator side of that divide and that begins to raise the question: “All right, who is he claiming to be?”

Del Rosario: So there is a unity with God and there is a distinction as well.

Bock: Exactly right, and he’s trying to preserve both of those simultaneously so he’s not [mis]understood as a second god but he’s also appreciated as divine.

Indeed, if Jesus had chosen to announce, “I am God,” many Jews would have misunderstood his claim. In order to more accurately communicate his divine identity, then, he often chose more implicit means. In fact, it was often Jesus’s combined words and deeds that gave people pause and piqued the curiosity of some. Others who heard and saw the kinds of things Jesus said and did rightly came away with serious questions about the level of authority he seemed to assume. Jesus’s words and deeds contributed to his implicit claims to deity in, for example, the healing of the paralytic and Jesus’s Jewish examination.

Two Key Texts

In Mark 2:1-12, the scribes present likely heard Jesus’s apparently unoccasioned claim to forgive a paralytic’s sins—apart from any reference to the temple or the sacrificial system—as an implicit claim to possess divine authority. Indeed, his combined words and deeds pointed to a kind of authority beyond that of priests, prophets, and even angels. Further, Jesus seemed to present the healing miracle itself as validation of his authority to forgive sins—something those present believed only God had the authority to do.

Most scholars agree Jesus was known as a miracle worker and a healer. Further, all four Gospels report his miraculous healing of lame people and his clash with the Pharisees and their scribes. Moreover, Jesus’s pronouncement of forgiveness appears across the Synoptic tradition as well as in Luke’s special material. We discuss Jesus’s implicit claims in this scene:

Bock: The Mark 2 passage is important because Jesus is showing something that you can’t see by something that you can see. So he’s got a paralytic in front of him who’s asked to be healed. When the paralytic drops into his presence, he doesn’t say, “Be healed.” He says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Then he says, “In order that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—that’s something you can’t see—“I say to you, ‘Get up and walk.’ ” He links it to something you can see and that requires the power of God in order to happen. That’s how implicit claims work.

Jesus is doing something miraculous. If he’s a sinner or a deceiver, then how are these things happening? But if they require the power of God, and he’s doing them, and he’s making claims of authority while he’s doing them, that underlies the implicit claim.

One of the great ironies of this text is we tend to give the Pharisees and the leaders in the Gospels a hard time, but every now and then in the movement of the narrative, they actually are giving us major clues for what’s going on. They’re saying to themselves in the Mark 2 text, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Jesus asks, “What’s easier to say? ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Rise up and walk?’ ” And then, “In order that you might know that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins, I say to you get up and walk.” And when he gets up and walks, his walk talks. And what his walk is saying is “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” And the Pharisees have already put the theological stamp on that: “[Forgiving sins] is something only God does.”

Bass: Also they say “blasphemy” there, which is an important connection between Mark 2 and Mark 14. After the climactic statement of Jesus claiming to be the Son of Man before the high priest, they also declared blasphemy. So you have that connection with Mark 2, almost a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in Mark 14.

This brings us to the second key text: Mark 14:53-65. Here, Jesus’s own words before the high priest provided the impetus for the leadership to present Rome with a case against him. Jesus links himself with powerful figures in Psalm 110 and Daniel 7:13-14, resulting in a blasphemy charge. This scene is corroborated across the Synoptic tradition. Further, ancient extrabiblical sources also support the idea that a segment of the Jewish leadership rejected Jesus and presented charges against him before the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate (Antiquities 18.64; Gospel of Thomas 66; Gospel of Peter 1:1; Gospel of Nicodemus 1:1). The event also helps explain why the Jewish leadership rejected Jesus and how this resulted in his crucifixion under Rome.

Bock: Jesus responds by saying, when he’s asked if [he is] the Christ, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man riding on the clouds and seated at the right hand of power,” as Mark puts it.

It’s a roundabout way to refer to God out of respect because there’s something respectful going on. Jesus has been put under an oath when the question is asked and so he responds in kind. [The high priest asks,] “Are you the son of the blessed one?” showing respect for God by not saying “son of God,” and Jesus responds by saying, “I’ll be seated at the right hand of the power”—doing the same thing back. So they keep the solemn note of the exchange, but [Jesus’s] claim is “You can do whatever you want to me, but one day, I will be your judge and I will be seated at the right hand of the Father,” and they didn’t like that answer.

Bass: Things will be switched.

Bock: Things will be switched, and the assumption is that he’s actually predicting his vindication by God because God’s going to take him to the right hand. That’s an allusion to the resurrection. So when the tomb goes empty, Jesus is saying, “God will have vindicated me and he will have cast his vote in this dispute.”

Bass: And that’s important. He could have just said, “I am.” He didn’t have to say, “and you will see the Son of Man.” He added that, and that just happens to be what people have called the Christological climax of the Synoptics. It’s on par with “Before Abraham was, I am.”

Del Rosario: So here, Jesus is using [the title] Son of Man and he’s saying basically, “People will worship me, my kingdom will be unstoppable, and I will be your judge,” to the representatives of God on earth.

Bock: Yes. “I’m seated on the throne. I’m riding on the clouds. I’m doing God stuff. God is vindicating me and giving me this position with him. This is not something I’m claiming for myself. This is something God is going to do in order to show who I am.” And they get it, because when he gives the answer, they tear their clothes. That’s a Jewish symbol of having heard a blasphemy, and [they say,] “What more need do we have of evidence?” The next thing they do is they go to Pilate.

The healing of the paralytic in Mark 2 shares themes with the Jewish examination in Mark 14. In both cases, cultural conceptions of blasphemy and exaltation clashed. In the former, Jewish scribes understood Jesus’s claim to possess divine authority to forgive sins. In the latter, the Jewish leadership understood his claim to divine vindication and being seated in God’s presence as a claim to be both God’s Anointed One and their eschatological judge as well.

To them, Jesus’s claims constituted blasphemy—a perceived offense to God’s unique honor. Interestingly, the dissimilarity of this expression to Christian titles for Jesus along with Mark’s use of “Son of God” in his Gospel (1:1; 3:11; 5:7; 15:39) suggests that this material came to him from an existing tradition. What must have struck the Jewish leadership is how closely Jesus seemed to link his exaltation with God, suggesting that he would share in both judging and ruling—that he was in fact sent by God from heaven.

Conclusion

Introducing the concept of personage in the God of Israel required a monotheistic audience to grapple with implicit claims. Although Jesus did not say, “I am God,” he claimed to be divine by doing things his Jewish audience understood as divine prerogatives.

As a result of the cultural shift away from Christian assumptions in the public square, we need to be prepared to do more than merely declare the teaching of Scripture. Rather than saying, “It’s true because it’s in the Bible,” we must be willing to help our skeptical friends understand that “it’s in the Bible because it’s true.” Understanding how Jesus used a combination of his words and deeds to point to his divine identity can help us better engage popular skepticism about Jesus’s claims to deity.