The Scriptures on Jesus' Humanity and Divinity
The Scriptures on Jesus' Humanity and Divinity
The Bible resoundingly affirms the humanity of Jesus. Second- and third-century Gnostic heresies—reflected in later noncanonical gospels such as Thomas and Judas—rejected the goodness of the physical creation, downplayed earthly history in favor of eternal truths and spiritual enlightenment; they denigrated the material body while exalting an immaterial soul. The Gnostic pseudogospels portray an otherworldly “Christ.” By contrast the earlier, canonical Gospels present Jesus as fully human. Jesus is the Word become flesh (John 1:14). He is the “man” by whom came the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:21). He is also the “second Adam” (1 Cor 15:45). This “man” is the “mediator between God and man” (1 Tim 2:5 HCSB) who is “revealed in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16) and who suffered and died on the cross (1 John 5:8).
What of Jesus' divinity? University of Edinburgh's Larry Hurtado argues that, contrary to all expectation, belief in Jesus' deity emerged as “a veritable ‘big bang,’ an explosively rapid and impressively substantial development in the earliest stage of the Christian movement.”5 What is the biblical evidence for His divinity?
Philippians 2:6–11, an early Christian hymn, provides strong evidence not only for the preexistence of the Son of God6 but also for Jesus' equality with God the Father.
[He], although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:6–11)
Further support for Jesus' divinity comes from key Old Testament references to Yahweh (“the LORD”) that are used to refer to Jesus “the Lord” in the New Testament:
In addition, Jesus takes on divine prerogatives; that is, He assumes the role and authority typically taken by Yahweh. He forgives sin, not only displacing the temple but assuming God's authoritative domain (Mark 2:5,7). He's the judge of the world (Matt 25:31–46; cf. 2 Cor 5:10). He is prayed to (Acts 7:59–60; 1 Cor 16:22; 2 Cor 12:9) and He receives worship (John 20:28, where He is called “My Lord and my God!”). He calls Himself the “Son of Man”—the exalted figure of Daniel 7 who shares authority with the Ancient of Days (Mark 14:62). He is explicitly called “God” (John 1:1,18; 20:28; Acts 20:28; Rom 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb 1:8; 2 Pet 1:1; 1 John 5:20). A helpful acrostic that summarizes the various aspects of Jesus' deity is H-A-N-D-S: Jesus shares in the Honors due to God, the Attributes of God, the Names of God, the Deeds of God, and the Seat of God's throne.7
We're familiar with the trilemma popularized by C. S. Lewis. Jesus is not merely a “good moral teacher” (as merely good moral teachers don't make such “outrageous” identity claims as having all authority or being the final judge of all humanity): Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord of all. There is another alternative, however—legend. But Lewis was well aware of this possibility, and it was one he readily dismissed. He knew about miracle-denying New Testament critics, even theologians, who considered the incarnation to be a myth or legend, a human fabrication. Lewis was capable of distinguishing between legend and history, and he wrote of these scholars: “I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the quality of the texts they are reading.” Though studying the New Testament from their youth up, they lack the needed literary experience and so miss “the obvious things” about these texts: “If [the critic] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel.”8 As Lewis affirms, Jesus' miracles and authoritative identity-claims in the Gospels are reliably recorded history; they are not the stuff of legends. Indeed, the notion that Jesus' death and resurrection are copycat beliefs from existing pagan dying-and-rising god myths from the Mediterranean world is simply implausible. As N. T. Wright asserts, efforts to find parallels between Christianity and these mystery religions “have failed, as virtually all Pauline scholars now recognize,” and to do so “is an attempt to turn the clock back in a way now forbidden by the most massive and learned studies on the subject.”9
Interestingly, while disputes had broken out in the earliest Christian communities over circumcision, spiritual gifts, or the place of the Mosaic Law, no disagreement exists in the New Testament writings regarding Jesus' lofty status as Lord of all. The fiercely monotheistic Jew, Paul, writing an early Christian creed (early AD 50s), Christianizes the Shema (“Hear, O Israel”) of Deut 6:4–6, declaring Jesus is the one “Lord” of Israel and the Creator of all—“by whom are all things, and we exist through Him” (1 Cor 8:6). Jesus shares in the divine identity. The Hebrew Bible anticipates that Yahweh will come to Zion, defeat evil, and restore His people, gathering the scattered exiles into a new, redeemed community; and the early Christians affirm that this happened in the Christ event; Yahweh's kingdom breaks in by the person of Jesus of Nazareth.