Did Jesus Claim to be God? (2021-01-26) #

0:00:01 did jesus claim to be god ? this is a really important question 0:00:06 and historians have been investigating the life of jesus the historical jesus for generations 0:00:11 now , and they've come broadly to consensus on this question . it really matters to us today 0:00:18 because if he did claim to be god then it matters . it matters that we worship 0:00:23 him as our creator as our lord however if he didn't claim to be god and he wasn't god 0:00:30 then worshiping him is an act of egregious idolatry and indeed orthodox jews will not enter 0:00:36 into a church today because of what they perceive to be the idolatry that takes place in the typical 0:00:43 christian church and muslims many muslims will not enter into a church for the same reason 0:00:49 so i want to share with you some of the mainstream research findings of biblical 0:00:54 scholarship by sharing with you again from the work of bart ehrman who is distinguished professor 0:01:01 of religious studies at the university of north carolina chapel hill in america he's one of 0:01:06 the world's leading new testament scholars and a specialist on the historical jesus . i'm going to be 0:01:12 quoting from this book again how jesus became god the exaltation of a jewish preacher from galilee  .
0:01:19 there's a chapter in his book called did jesus think he was god and towards the end of this 0:01:26 chapter there's a subheading : did jesus claim to be god ? which i want to share with you i 0:01:32 don't necessarily agree with everything he says in here but i think he's certainly more or less on 0:01:36 the right path when it comes to jesus . so he writes this then in a nutshell is what i think we can say 0:01:44 about the historical jesus and his understanding of himself he thought he was a prophet 0:01:50 predicting the end of the current evil age and the future king of israel in the age to come but did 0:01:57 he call himself god it is true that jesus claims to be divine in the last of our canonical gospels 0:02:05 to be written the gospel of john in that gospel jesus does make remarkable claims about himself 0:02:13 in speaking of the father of the jews abraham who lived 1800 years earlier jesus tells his opponents 0:02:20 truly i tell you before abraham was i am that's john 8 58. this particular phrase " i am " brings 0:02:29 a familiar call to anyone acquainted with the hebrew bible in the book of exodus in the story 0:02:34 of the burning bush , moses asked god what his name is and god tells him that his name is i am 0:02:43 jesus appears to be claiming not only to have existed before abraham but to have been given 0:02:48 the name of god himself his jewish opponents know exactly what he is saying they immediately take up 0:02:55 stones to stone him later in the gospel jesus is even more explicit again as he proclaims i and the 0:03:03 father are one john 10 30. once again the jewish listeners break out the stones still later when 0:03:11 jesus is talking to his disciples at his last meal with them his follower philip asked him 0:03:17 to show them who god the father is jesus replies the one who has seen me has seen the father 14 9 0:03:27 and again later during the same meal jesus prays to god and asks about how god had 0:03:34 sent him and speaks about how god had sent him into the world and refers to my glory that you 0:03:41 gave me before the foundation of the world 24. jesus is not claiming to be god the father here 0:03:50 obviously since when he's praying he is not talking to himself 0:03:55 so he is not saying that he is identical with god but he is saying that he is equal with god 0:04:01 and has been that way from before the world was created these are amazingly exalted claims 0:04:09 but looked at from a historical perspective they simply cannot be ascribed to the historical jesus 0:04:17 they don't pass any of our criteria they are not multiply attested in our sources they appear 0:04:24 only in john our latest and most theologically orientated gospel they certainly do not pass the 0:04:32 criterion of dissimilarity since they express the very view of jesus that the author of the 0:04:37 gospel of john happens to hold and they are not at all contextually credible we have no record of 0:04:45 any palestinian jew ever saying any such things about himself these divine self claims in john 0:04:54 are part of john's distinctive theology they are not part of the historical record of what jesus 0:05:01 actually said and just to leave this for a second having read about this subject for some time 0:05:09 i would say virtually all over 99 percent of the world scholars do not think that the amazing 0:05:17 claims on the lips of jesus in the gospel of john are historical very very very few people just a 0:05:25 handful of people so just to continue , look at the matter in a different light as i pointed out we 0:05:32 have numerous earlier sources for the historical jesus a few comments in paul including several 0:05:38 quotations from jesus's teaching we have mark q this is quell the source shared by matthew and 0:05:45 luke we have M and L that's M is material unique to Matthew and L is material unique to Luke Luke's 0:05:53 gospel not to mention the finished gospels of matthew and luke . in none 0:05:59 of them do we find exalted claims of this sort if jesus went around galilee proclaiming himself to 0:06:07 be a divine being sent from god one who existed before the creation of the world he was in fact 0:06:14 equal with god could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important 0:06:22 and yet none of these earlier sources says any such thing about him did they all of them just 0:06:31 decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about jesus this is a really 0:06:36 good point by the way almost certainly the divine self claims in john are not historical 0:06:44 but is it possible that jesus considered himself divine in some other sense i have already argued 0:06:51 that he did not consider himself to be the son of man and so he did not consider himself to be the 0:06:57 heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of all the earth but did he think of himself as the 0:07:03 future king of the kingdom the messiah and we saw in the previous chapter that in some passages of 0:07:10 scripture the king is talked about as a divine being and not merely a mortal and this is psalm 0:07:17 45 for example isn't it possible that jesus understood himself as divine in that sense 0:07:24 it is of course possible but i think it is highly unlikely for the following reason 0:07:30 in the hebrew bible and indeed in the entire jewish tradition we do have instances in which 0:07:37 mortals for example a king or moses or enoch were considered to be divine beings in some sense 0:07:45 philo of alexandra by the way who was slightly earlier than jesus used this kind of language of 0:07:51 moses he called him a god by the way but that was always what someone else said about them 0:07:58 it was never what they were recorded as saying about themselves so in philo for example moses 0:08:04 is never recorded as saying i am god other people may have used that language of them 0:08:08 no one records moses or enoch or a king saying i am god not in the jewish tradition this is 0:08:15 quite different from the situation that we find in say egypt where the pharaohs claimed 0:08:22 direct divine lineage or with alexander the great who accepted cultic veneration always some of the 0:08:30 roman emperors who actively propagated the idea that they were gods . this never happens in judaism 0:08:37 that we know of . the idea that a king could be divine may have occurred to his followers later 0:08:45 as they began to think more about his eminence and significance but we have no known instance 0:08:50 of a living jewish king proclaiming himself to be divine could jesus be the exception yes of course 0:09:00 there are always exceptions to everything but to think that jesus is the exception in this case 0:09:07 one would need a good deal of persuasive evidence and it just doesn't exist the evidence for jesus's 0:09:15 claims to be divine come only from the last of the new testament gospels not from any earlier sources
0:09:26 some may argue that there are other reasons apart from explicit divine self claims to suspect 0:09:32 that jesus saw himself as divine for example he does amazing miracles that surely only a 0:09:38 divine figure could do and he forgives people's sins which surely is a prerogative of god alone 0:09:44 and he receives worship as people bow down before him which surely indicates that he welcomes divine 0:09:51 honors there are two points to stress about such things the first is that all of them are 0:10:00 compatible with human not just divine authority in the hebrew bible the prophets elijah and elisha 0:10:08 did fantastic miracles including healing the sick and raising the dead through the power of god and 0:10:15 in the new testament so did the apostles peter and paul but that did not make any of them divine 0:10:22 when jesus forgives sins he never says i forgive you as god might say but your sins are forgiven 0:10:31 which means that god has forgiven the sins this prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven 0:10:37 was otherwise reserved for jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at 0:10:43 the jerusalem temple jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative but not a divine one and 0:10:51 kings were worshiped even in the bible matthew 18 26 by veneration and obesience just as god was 0:11:01 jesus may be accepting the worship due to him as the future king 0:11:06 none of these things is in and of itself a clear indication that jesus is divine 0:11:15 but even more important these activities may not even go back to the historical jesus instead they 0:11:21 may be traditions assigned to jesus by later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence 0:11:27 and significance recall one of the main points of this chapter many traditions in the gospels do 0:11:33 not derive from the life of the historical jesus but represent embellishments made by storytellers 0:11:41 who were trying to convert people by convincing them of jesus's superiority and to instruct 0:11:47 those who were converted these traditions of jesus's eminence cannot pass the criterion of 0:11:53 dissimilarity and are very likely pious expansions of the stories told about him told by people who 0:12:02 after his resurrection did come to understand that he was in some sense divine what we can 0:12:10 know with relative certainty about jesus is that his public ministry 0:12:15 and proclamation were not focused on his divinity in fact they are not about his divinity at all 0:12:22 they were about god and about the kingdom that god was going to bring . and i'll just end it there  .
0:12:31 this is totally mainstream scholarship by the way the vast majority of biblical scholars throughout 0:12:37 the world would accept this conclusion . some may believe jesus is god as a matter of faith but 0:12:43 they would accept nevertheless the the logic of the arguments that bart ehrman presents there 0:12:49 i hope this goes some way to informing your decision about whether or not we 0:12:52 should worship jesus as god or whether we should accept him for what by ermine concludes he was 0:12:58 a prophet and a messiah sent by god . until next time