Actually there is nowhere in Matthew, Mark or Luke where Jesus claims to be divine or calls himself the “son of God” (he always uses “son of man” instead). It’s only in John, which was written later, where he starts to claim his own divinity and call himself the Son of God. Later in the New Testament the authors of the other chapters do call him divine as well. But like with the OP’s original question, I find it intriguing how it’s so difficult to find any passage from the original three Gospels where Jesus claims to be divine or the son of God, when most people would assume that he does it constantly.
There’s admittedly a couple of points where Jesus is called the Son of God in those Gospels by other people: in Luke 1:35 the angel says to Mary that the “Son of God” will be born to her, and in both Matthew 17:5 and Luke 3:22 God says of Jesus during the transfiguration story, “this is my son, with whom I am well pleased”. But there’s not a lot of those references, and as far as I’m aware Jesus never calls himself divine in any of those three Gospels; in fact he specifically declines to do so when Pilate asks him if he is the, calling himself the “son of man” instead.
What Jesus claimed about himself, and what those claims meant, might be an interesting discussion, but it probably doesn’t belong here in this GQ thread; it’s certainly something that could be and has been debated. The phrase “Son of God” certainly appears in the first three gospels, but you’re right that Jesus doesn’t use it of himself (which makes me wonder why the gospel writers used the phrase about Jesus but didn’t report Jesus himself using it).
FWIW, the gospels were written later than the earliest of the epistles, so it’s potentially misleading to talk about what happens “later in the New Testament.”
It depends. I and other Christians consider ourselves disciples of Jesus, so I would say He was speaking to us. Admittedly, though, this was not addressed to those who are not disciples then or now.
No. He talks about how the world hates him and his Father, but he does not imply that he does not love the world in spite of their hate for him. Romans 5:8 - “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
By the way, jumpy, thank you for the history lesson on that hymn. I love hearing about where different hymns come from. But I think it’s clear that the idea that Jesus loves me (all of us) is derived from the entire canon of the Bible and not just based on a single verse, even if that verse comes closest to saying it explicitly, especially since “Jesus is God” is one of the oldest creeds of the church.
nm
i find it interesting, too. Jesus Loves me started out as a poem for a dying boy.
a lot of the verses pertain to that (illness/sickness) and have largely been omitted in modern iterations.
the thing i find most interesting is that rooting on the net yields a lot of different answers on the scriptural basis. the ones at the end of my last post–Galatians, Jeremiah and Ephesians seem to be the more spot-on.
but i have found Psalms 100 cited as the one-and-only scriptural basis, as well as Psalms 127:3.
with the exception of Ephesians, i think it’s a little peculiar the most dead-accurate quotes are from the old testament…
it’s all pre-jesus stuff.
i really struggle with what has been lost in translation and the backwards redaction of the initial compilers. agreed, it gets into debate pretty quickly, but none-the-less it’s fascinating to me.
btw, this isn’t the first time this questions has been posited on the net, and no one else really has a very clear answer, either.
And Jesus uses the Psalmist saying ," I said you are gods and sons of the most high" Jesus didn’t dispute this, but seemed to agree. Perhaps the word God, meant something different then than it does now, It could mean like in the Egyptian sense when the Pharoh’s used it to proclaim thenselves God to just mean a person of power?
Whether you believe it or not is beyond the point, but according to the Gospels, Jesus was blameless and gave his life up in a very painful way as a sacrifice that would appease God for the sin of ALL humanity. That’s a lot of sin to lay on one person. It’s clearly stating that Jesus, who was stated to be God himself, did it because he loved us, even if it doesn’t use the words “I love you”. It also makes the case that Jesus performed miracles not to show off his powers, but out of compassion. Jesus also saw past the frustrating limitations of his disciples understanding of what he was trying to teach them.
Does it? Where? It seems like we’ve established fairly thoroughly in this thread that in the Gospels alone it’s impossible to find a quote that “clearly states” that Jesus loved us, and it’s not even as simple as you’d imagine to find quotes calling Jesus the son of God in the Gospels.
Really little point in providing more cites to somebody that pretends there haven’t been many already.
they haven’t.
i think the only thing established is it’s not 100% explicitly stated in any one place but is alluded to in various manners throughout.
…sorta.
Yes that is the Bible’s claim, but if God is an all knowing being he knew ahead of time that Adam and Eve (and even Satan ) would sin and he created them anyway, so God then punished his children, and had his own son suffer when he could have prevented it, so If the Bible is correct, God is not a loving being (or father), but a cruel being who takes pleasure in making his children suffer for what he could have prevented in the first place.
Revelation 1:5
With all due respect, this isn’t hardly true.
Indeed, Trinitarianism----and the notion of a triune, or 3 headed, God can be traced to several pagan religions, it is not part of the early church, and it is unheard of in the OT.
This is no small matter because the earliest Christian Church were not “Christians”, but Jews; Jews who had found the long anticipated Jewish Messiah.
This is best handled in it’s own GD thread (which I have no time for, btw) but the Jews----and the subsequent early Christians----were not trinitarians. The trinity was codified in the Nicene creed, and owes more to pagan influence than anything the writers of the bible ever said.
With all due respect to you, raindog, what you say here is largel not the case. And in any case, as you note, is more properly the subject of a separate GD thread.
I’d submit for purposes of this thread that for the early followers of Jesus, the idea that Elohim Adonai, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit comprised one God in some way was “a fact of their existence” (in the sense of being an underlying, unexamined belief, a Mystery in the original Greek meaning of the term). The Dogma of the Trinity, explicated at and after Nicaea, was an attempt to couch in human philosophical terms how that could be so. That certain relatively small denominations reject Trinitarianism and continue to consider themselves Christian is a product of modern times, not a holdover from First Century beliefs – as reference to the Ante-Nicene Fathers’ writings will show you.
John 14 arguably fits: “he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.” If you – or whoever is singing – loveth Jesus, then he’ll love you; per the OP, the Bible tells you so, when Jesus says so.
Surprisingly, this hasn’t been quoted in full in response to the OP:
John 15:9-17
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing;
but I have called you friends,
because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
And I appointed you to go and bear fruit,
fruit that will last,
so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
As another person who had a secular upbringing, I don’t know, and I don’t care.
I hear that the hokey-pokey is what it’s all about, anyway. That ethos seems just as valid as religion to me.
Thanks for your valuable input to the discussion then, Molesworth.
You’re welcome, Skammer.
I feel that I’ve brought as much to the table as several thousand years worth of people believing that there are fairies living at the bottom of their garden. And with a lot less bloodshed.
It’s nice to know that my efforts were appreciated.