King James has beautiful language, but its translations are often doubtful – I can’t read the originals, and don’t know whether this is one of the disputed ones.
But more to the point: we know that John said that Jesus said that. We don’t know whether Jesus said that; or said anything like it.
First of all the OP asked, DID JESUS HIMSELF believe he was God, so that eliminates the entire Old Testament as a source. In fact, the only books that contain direct quotes from Jesus himself are the Gospels because, once Jesus was gone, the rest was second hand information.
I am the good shepherd” (John 10:14). “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). “I am the resurrection, and the life” (John 11:25). “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Now, if that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t what else would.
But we could say that of anything attributed to Jesus, right? Doesn’t the question in the OP assume (just for purposes of discussion) that all the Jesus quotes are accurate and given that, could one argue that Jesus did not assert his own divinity?
There are a lot of inconsistencies between John and the other gospels, and i believe John was written later.
Yes, if you accept John as totally accurate, then i think you should conclude that Jesus thought he was God, not just a prophet.
But
And that’s largely because i believe Jesus was a Jew, and not assimilated into the Greco-Roman civilization around him. Judaism has a long history of prophets, who convey the word of God. It also has a really strong distinction between humans and God.(although all humans bear the image of God), and a clear understanding that the messiah will be a man.
Yeah, and i think that’s why it was easy for John and Paul to think Jesus was a god. And if a god, then the God. Although early Christians (and modern Mormons) struggle with that, and some, including Mormons, consider the Trinity to be separate persons.
Or a prophet, who has been ordered by God to deliver news from God. Most of the prophets were somewhat reluctant, starting with Moses. (Who is so important we don’t usually link him with the other prophets, but his relationship with God is similar.)
Sure, there’s always that. It’s kind of a blanket disclaimer in these kinds of discussions.
I guess it depends if you are coming from a religious or a historical perspective. From a religious perspective, yes, the gospels are definitely inspired and “gospel truth”, and Jesus knew he was God. (Except for some human doubts.)
From a historical perspective, which is more where i am coming from, i think Jesus was a real person who sparked a real movement, and i think it’s incredibly unlikely he believed he was divine. And i also think the Romans executed him because they believed he was an insurrectionist who physically threatened the peace of the Roman rule.
How exactly are we defining divinity here? A prophet is someone who teaches or relates information from a God to the people. Jesus did a bit more than that with healing the blind and raising the dead. Is there any case, based on the available evidence, that Jesus didn’t think he was divine?
Or splits open the Red Sea, or turns his staff into snakes and crocodiles and stuff, or calls out water from a rock, or causes his side to win a battle so long as he keeps his hands in the air (but the battle turns when he puts his hands down)…
That was all just one prophet. You want another one? OK, this prophet actually did very little teaching or relatong information, but he did grab a lion by its upper and lower jaw and split them apart (if you’ve seen the scene in Peter Jackson’s King Kong where the ape rips tyrannosaur heads apart, that’s inspired by a story about a Jewish prophet!). And he wiped out an entire enemy army using a donkey’s jawbone as a weapon.
Well, a tradition that arguest against Jesus’s divinity would obviously point out that no, Jesus did no such thing; God raised the sick and healed the dead through Jesus.
Which is all why, from a Jewish perspective, Jesus looks like a prophet. But from a Roman perspective, it’s easy to see how the people thought he must have been a god.
Does it assume that? I didn’t think that it did. If that’s a restriction for this thread, then a great deal that’s been said in it by others as well as by me shouldn’t be here; and the OP doesn’t seem to have been complaining.
And while some of them may be accurate (though we can’t tell which), it seems to me extraordinarily unlikely that all of them are word for word accurate; or even all of them accurate in overall meaning if not in exact word. Nobody was taking recordings. Probably nobody was even taking notes at the time, for any of them. The quotes are all people recollecting, years later, what they heard said; or what it was reported to them that somebody else said. Even assuming the absolute best of intentions on everybody’s part to report fairly, without consciously choosing wording or which quotes to include according to what points the particular Gospel author and/or the person(s) reporting to them wanted to make – memories are not that perfect. Even reports made immediately after something happened by various people of the same incident always vary.
Other prophets, and various priests of various faiths, work miracles according to the Bible. It’s already been pointed out in this thread that Moses worked miracles, and nobody says that Moses was a god, let alone that Moses was the God.
“A” god. Not “the” God, in the modern Jewish or Christian sense. They didn’t mean the same thing by the word.
I expect Jesus knew how the Romans used the word. But it seems to me (as I think it does to you) very unlikely that he thought he was a god in the Roman sense, because he was a Jew; and equally unlikely that he thought he was God in the Jewish sense, because that makes no sense whatsoever. Whether he thought he was God in some other sense – and Christians do seem to me to be using some other sense of the word – I don’t know.
That he thought he was channeling God’s will and that God could work miracles through him seems to me quite possible.
If there is one certain thing about the things Jesus was reported to have said, it’s that they were almost always ‘slantwise’ – inscrutable but meant to make you ponder, like koans. Sometimes they seemed to contradict each other. He seemed particularly cagey about his status, sometimes speaking about himself in the third person (the Son of Man, what exactly does that mean?), saying he is one with the Father (unlike anyone else, ever?). It’s because of this habit, which I would bet is accurately written down, for the very reason that they were puzzles to the disciples themselves, that we can go on arguing these points two thousand years later.
I think the claim that “I am the Son Of God” is a little different than claiming “I am God.” Because none of us choose to be born. Jesus may have believed that he was born to fulfill a certain role, but he didn’t particularly have a choice in it. I think he believed at least that much, that he was born to live out his life as he did.
There’s a pretty good source for that, buried in Max_S’s link;
This contains a footnote linking to Psalm 82.6;
" I say, ‘You are gods; you are all children of the Most High."
That seems a very reasonable stance to take, and some way from claiming to be the only Son of God.
Whether Jesus was a god or the God was in dispute in the early church
The ecumenical First Council of Nicaea of 325 decided the issue for mainstream Christianity, but it seems likely that various early Christians were all over the board on that: man, subordinate god, coequal god, or a manifestation of the only God.
Originally, not even a god but a demigod, like Hercules. That didn’t violate monotheism since God had sons in Genesis.
However it ruins the prophecy, since the Messiah was supposed to be descended from King David, and patrilineal descent was the only one that mattered, and if Jesus had god as his literal father he would not have qualified.
Yes, one needs to take in mind that the four gospels are not just slightly different takes on the same story. They appear to show an evolution in the Jesus legend accross their narratives. In Matthew, there is at least this evidence that Jesus did not consider himself to be God - in Matthew 19:16-17 (the beginning of the story about the rich young man):
16 And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17 And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.”
This passage would seem to imply that Matthew’s Jesus did not think he was actually God. If he is not the one who is good, who else could it be? OK, maybe John the Baptist, but more likely God. And if Jesus were God, then surely he would consder himself good.
Experts think that, although Matthew is placed in the Bible after Mark, that Mark is the first Gospel chronologically and Matthew the second. Still, it is the second earliest Gospel to be included in the Bible. It appears that the idea of Jesus as being God had not yet evolved, only being made clear enough in John.
Another book that’s relevant here is Zealot, by religious scholar Reza Aslan. Aslan’s take is that Jesus was a political revolutionary seeking to free Judea from the Romans, and the whole “divinity” aspect was added later along with the rest of the mythology.
Maybe a result of people refusing to give up belief after it was clear that this particular messiah wasn’t going to work as the political messiah?
That does raise the question: why that reaction for this would-be political messiah and not for any of the others? The answer wouldn’t necessarily be actual divinity, of course.
Most of the people running around Israel who claimed to be Messiahs were exactly that. It’s certainly plausible that Jesus was, too.
I don’t think Aslan tries to answer that particular question – he deals with the question of what the historical Jesus was, not why he became the center of Christianity, although Aslan does cite the Nicene Creed, adopted by the First Council of Nicaea in 325, as a pivotal factor in the establishment of Christianity. It’s been quite a few years since I read the book, though. I would venture to guess that perhaps Jesus became the center of Christian mythology because he was more effective than the other messiahs at attracting a following, and thus become more well known and consequently the subject of particularly ruthless persecution by the Romans.