Who Is Jesus?

…according to a number of significant biblical scholars and reference works

Our purpose below is to alert the Christian public to a serious problem of definition. It concerns the very identity of Jesus himself. It is patently false (though often alleged) that only a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon is unwilling to say "Jesus is God." The facts are that biblical scholars, ancient and modern, and of all denominations, do not agree at all that the statement "Jesus is God" represents the Bible accurately.

One may continue to believe that only the ignorant "cultist" who has been brain-washed into believing "heresy" objects to the proposition "Jesus is God." The quotations gathered below demonstrate to the fair-minded that the "Deity of Jesus" needs much more careful examination than it is presently given. After all, Jesus was a Jew who affirmed the creed of Israel (Deut. 6:4; Mark 12:28ff.) It would be unwise for those who claim to follow Jesus to depart from his teaching in the fundamental issue of who God and Jesus are. Did Jesus, the Jew, and the instigator of New Testament faith, really claim to be God while at the same time assuring the Jews that he believed with them that God is a single Person?

Americans particularly should be challenged by the words of former President Jefferson. He was neither a Mormon nor a Jehovah’s Witness.

The quotations below contain statements by some who claimed to believe in the Trinity. Their admissions about the identity of Jesus are all the more telling.

We start with an individual whom many in the USA admire for his impressive contribution as the author of one of the greatest political documents, the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson was a recognized historian of the history of Christian ideas. Here is an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to James Smith on December 8, 1822:

"Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God is one LORD" (Deut. 6:4), the Shema, the creed of Israel.

"No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity…Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs…The Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say that he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck."

In the 1670s, Sir Isaac Newton devoted much attention to the question of the Trinity. He concluded that the doctrine was foisted on the church by Athanasius in order to swell numbers and fill coffers. He believed that the Bible had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism ("this strange religion of the West," the cult of three equal gods) as the abomination of desolation (The Rise of Science and Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes and Newton).

After Newton, others such as Matthew Tindal, John Toland, Gottfried Arnold, Goerg Walch, Giovanni But, Henry Noris and Hermann Reimarus argued that Jesus is presented as the Son of God, not God. They did much to free their readers from the vise-like grip of unexamined dogma.

Theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) saw the doctrine of the Trinity as flagrantly Hellenistic. He wrote that "it had corrupted the Christian message by introducing an alien layer of metaphysical concepts derived from the natural philosophy of the Greeks, and it had nothing to do with early Christianity."

"Jesus Christ never mentioned such a phenomenon, and nowhere in the New Testament does the word ‘Trinity’ appear. The idea was only adopted by the church three hundred years after the death of our Lord" (historian Arthur Weigall, The Paganism in Our Christianity).

"Anyone who can worship a Trinity and insist that his religion is monotheistic can believe anything" (Robert A. Heinlein).

"The New Testament writers…give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the Trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons…Nowhere do we find any Trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same Godhead" (Jesuit scholar, Fortman).

Protestant theologian Karl Barth said: "The Bible lacks the express declaration that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are of equal essence."

Yale University professor E. Washburn Hopkins: "To Jesus and Paul the doctrine of the Trinity was apparently unknown…they say nothing about it" (Origin and Evolution of Religion).

Christian scholar Tom Harpur in For Christ’s Sake: "As early as the 8th century, the theologian St. John of Damascus frankly admitted what every modern critical scholar of the New Testament now realizes; that neither the doctrine of the Trinity nor that of the two natures of Jesus Christ is explicitly set out in Scripture. In fact, if you take the record as it is and avoid reading back into it the dogmatic definitions of a latter age, you cannot find what is traditionally regarded as orthodox Christianity in the Bible at all."

"You simply cannot find the doctrine of the Trinity set out anywhere in the Bible. St. Paul has the highest view of Jesus’ role and person, but nowhere does he call him God. Nor does Jesus himself explicitly claim to be the second person of the Trinity, wholly equal to his heavenly Father" (For Christ’s Sake, Tom Harpur).

A German professor of biblical languages, J.D. Michaelis, stated: "It cannot be proved, out of the whole number of passages in the Old Testament in which the Holy Spirit is mentioned, that it is a distinct person in the Godhead."

Colin Brown, Systematic Theologian of the conservative Fuller Seminary in California, wrote: "To be called Son of God in the Bible means that you are not God" (Ex Auditu, 7, 1991).

"Jesus is not God but God’s representative, and, as such, so completely and totally acts on God’s behalf that he stands in God’s stead before the world…The gospel [of John] clearly states that God and Jesus are not to be understood as identical persons, as in 14:28, ‘the Father is greater than I’" (Professor Jacob Jervell, Jesus in the Gospel of John, 1984, p. 21).

"Apparently Paul did not call Jesus God" (Sydney Cave, D.D., Doctrine of the Person of Christ).

"Paul habitually differentiates Christ from God" (C.J. Cadoux, A Pilgrim’s Further Progress).

"Paul never equates Jesus with God" (W.R. Matthews, The Problem of Christ in the 20th Century, Maurice Lecture)

"Paul never gives to Christ the name or description of ‘God’" (Dictionary of the Apostolic Church).

"When the New Testament writers speak of Jesus Christ, they do not speak of Him nor do they think of Him as God" (J.M. Creed, The Divinity of Jesus Christ).

Karl Rahner (a leading Roman Catholic spokesman) points out with so much emphasis "that the Son in the New Testament is never described as ‘ho theos’ [God]" (A.T. Hanson, Grace and Truth, p. 66).

"The clear evidence of John is that Jesus refuses the claim to be God…Jesus vigorously denied the blasphemy of being God or His substitute" (J.A.T. Robinson, Twelve More New Testament Studies)

"In his post-resurrection heavenly life, Jesus is portrayed as retaining a personal individuality every bit as distinct and separate from the person of God as was his in his life on earth as the terrestrial Jesus. Alongside God and compared with God, he appears, indeed, as yet another heavenly being in God’s heavenly court, just as the angels were; though as God’s Son, he stands in a different category, and ranks far above them" (G.A. Boobyer, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library)

"What, however, is said of his life and functions as the celestial Christ neither means nor implies that in divine status he stands on a par with God Himself and is fully God. On the contrary, in the New Testament picture of his heavenly person and ministry we behold a figure both separate from and subordinate to God" (Ibid.).

"The fact has to be faced that New Testament research over, say, the last thirty or forty years has been leading an increasing number of reputable New Testament scholars to the conclusion that Jesus…certainly never believed himself to be God" (Ibid.).

"When [first-century Christians] assigned Jesus such honorific titles as Christ, Son of Man, Son of God and Lord, these were ways of saying not that he was God but that he did God’s work" (Ibid.).

"The ancients made a wrong use of [John 10:30 —‘I and the Father are one’] to prove that Christ is…of the same essence with the Father. For Christ does not argue about the unity of substance, but about the agreement that he has with the Father" (John Calvin, Commentary on John).

The above quotations should dispel forever the popular notion that the objection to Jesus being "God," without further explanation, derives from ignorance or failure to examine the Bible with care and skill. The fact of a divided Christendom points to a radical disunity of belief. A giant step could be taken in a return to the faith of Jesus when we accept him by accepting his definition of God. Jesus and Paul both believed that God was a single Person (John 17:3; 5:44; Mark 12:28ff.; I Cor 8:4-6).