Objections to God by Alex O'Connor

III - Jesus never claimed to be God

1 Atheist vs 25 Christians, image credit: YouTube

This next objection Alex makes, that Jesus himself never actually claimed to be God, is common in attacks upon historical Christianity, perhaps popularised by the critical and formidable NT scholar Bart Ehrman based on the fact that if you line the gospels up according to the generally accepted chronology then the quotes in which Jesus seems to make more elaborate theological claims come later, or more specifically they come in the gospel of John which is generally thought to have been written at the end of the first century and are not present in the synoptic gospels.

One contention to this is that the earliest writings in the New Testament attest to the belief in the idea of Jesus as God, including a hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians that may be one of the earliest pieces of traceable NT material in which Jesus is “very nature God” as it is often translated or literally in the form of God (ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ). This is a belief that seems to be present about Jesus from the early New Testament period, so it isn’t just incorporated later as the belief develops.

Alex’s argument is that in spite of that, Jesus himself didn’t actually believe it. He claims that even the later John lacks the direct claim of kinship with God or outright statements of divine status, and that verses such as “before Abraham was I am,” are wrongly over-interpreted.*