(Download the PDF)
I agree that Jesus IS god! But perhaps not in the way you believe.
So this has been hot topic; did Jesus claim to be god? Most honest biblical scholars say no, it’s something of a consensus, and it has been taken as a very serious proposition for 200 years.
You might think that I will say that Jesus wasn’t ‘god’ ?
No, it’s just the opposite.
Jesus NEVER claimed to be god, not really, but I say he WAS..
Yup.
Honestly.
And so are you and so are you and so are you (pointing at all 8 billion of us).
It’s like in Daoism.
A new person to Daoism becomes ‘enlightened’ and goes around frantically shouting “I am god!” “I am god!”.
Then about every tenth person says, “Yah, we know. We always knew. You always knew.” Now shut yer yap and get back to your
farm chores.
Jesus and all the rest of us need to get back to our farm chores.
Note: the term ‘god’ is very loosely defined in Platonic Surrealism as a bridge concept to what is actually real, and not actually used, as it is a culturally corrupt concept that is only valuable to promote suffering and to start wars. We need to stop using that term, if there is ever to be love and peace and togetherness on Earth.
Here are just a few of many references a to the scholarship:
Jesus never explicitly claimed to be God is indeed a major point of scholarly consensus among non-theistic and many critical New Testament scholars. They generally hold that the belief in Jesus’s divinity was a development within the early church, rather than a claim made by Jesus of Nazareth himself.
This conclusion is primarily drawn from an analysis of the earliest Gospels, where Jesus’s self-designations and teachings align with Jewish concepts of a prophet or messiah, but not with God incarnate.
Here are prominent scholars, including Bart Ehrman, who support this view:
📚 Prominent Critical Scholars
1. Bart D. Ehrman
- Affiliation: Agnostic/Atheist New Testament Scholar, Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill.
- Key Work/Stance: In his book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (2014) and others like Jesus, Interrupted (2009), Ehrman argues that the historical Jesus saw himself as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet announcing the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. He contends that Jesus did not claim to be divine; the explicit, unambiguous claims of divinity are found only in the later-written Gospel of John (e.g., the “I am” statements), which Ehrman views as reflecting a later theological development.
2. E. P. Sanders
- Affiliation: Major figure in the “Third Quest” for the Historical Jesus; renowned for his work on Jesus and Judaism.
- Key Work/Stance: In The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993) and other scholarship, Sanders portrays Jesus primarily as a Jewish restorer and reformer who understood his mission as being God’s agent for the restoration of Israel. Sanders’ work emphasizes that Jesus’s actions and self-designations (like “Son of Man”) must be understood within a first-century Jewish monotheistic context, where claiming to be God would have been unthinkable and entirely foreign to his environment. He sees a clear distinction between the historical Jesus’s self-understanding and later Christian claims of divinity.
3. Geza Vermes
- Affiliation: Jewish Scholar; a leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical context of Jesus.
- Key Work/Stance: In Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (1973), Vermes firmly situates Jesus within the world of first-century Galilean charismatic Judaism. He interprets Jesus’s role as that of a charismatic Holy Man and Prophet. Crucially, he rejects the idea that Jesus claimed or possessed an explicit divine nature, viewing such claims as later interpretations by the Christian community following the resurrection experience.
4. John Dominic Crossan
- Affiliation: Former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, leading proponent of a skeptical, “historical-anthropological” approach.
- Key Work/Stance: Crossan’s The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and subsequent works depict Jesus as a Cynic-like peasant philosopher and social revolutionary whose message centered on an inclusive, egalitarian “Kingdom of God.” He argues that the historical Jesus never claimed to be divine, and the miracle and divinity claims found in the Gospels are literary or theological constructions intended to convey the meaning of his life and death.
🔑 Core Scholarly Distinction
These scholars all rely on the distinction between low Christology and high Christology:
| Concept | Description & Gospel Support |
| Low Christology (Historical Jesus View) | Jesus as a human figure—a prophet, Messiah, or sage—who was uniquely anointed or empowered by God. This is typically argued to be the perspective of the earliest sources, especially the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke). |
| High Christology (Later Church View) | Jesus as a divine figure—God incarnate, pre-existent, and co-equal with the Father. This perspective is considered by these scholars to be a later theological development, most clearly expressed in the Gospel of John. |
The consensus among many critical scholars is that the historical Jesus belongs to the first category and therefore did not claim to be God.” — compiled by Gemini.AI
Kevin Cann
Public Domain
11/10/2025