The Deity of Jesus

A majority of Americans no longer believe Jesus is God. That’s according to a recent LifeWay survey, and it marks a significant shift in American popular opinion — which, for years, generally affirmed the Deity of Jesus, even if they didn’t fully understand it or live up to it.

There have always been people who doubt, deny, or challenge the Deity of Jesus, but starting with Constantine and continuing through the Middle Ages, the majority of westerners generally held to the orthodox Christian view that the biblical Jesus was the same as the historical Jesus.

That began to change with the Enlightenment and the rise of modernism. Starting in the twentieth century, many mainline Protestant denominations began to embrace a more skeptical view of the Bible. And the challenges only increased with postmodernism.

An example of this critique of biblical Christianity is the book Who is Jesus? In their book, John Dominic Crossan and Richard Watts argue that the miracles associated with Jesus (including His virgin birth and resurrection) were “symbolic” and not literal and that Jesus’ intention was not to atone for the sins of the world, but rather to offer a “divine ideal” to a world strained by injustice, social inequality, and poverty. To Crossan and Watts, Jesus was a human being, not a god.

Similar conclusions have been offered by the likes of Bart Ehrman, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and many more. All of these attacks are rooted in either modernism or postmodernism.

In the United States, in the early part of this century, the assault on Christ’s Deity picked up popular steam with Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code (2006). Brown’s plot was built on the premise that Jesus Christ was a mere mortal and was understood as such by those closest to him during his active ministry.

According to The Da Vinci Code, the whole idea of Jesus’ Deity was the result of an early medieval conspiracy, orchestrated as a power grab by religious elites, under the authority and supervision of the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea.

All of this of course goes directly against how Bible-believing followers of Christ see things.

The central claim of biblical Christianity is that the first-century historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was God in the flesh, who died for the sins of the human race, was raised from the dead on the third day, and soon thereafter ascended back into heaven.

And this understanding didn’t begin with Constantine! That the early church worshipped Jesus prior to the Council at Nicea (A.D. 325) is easy to prove.

As early as A.D. 112, a Roman provincial governor, Pliny the Younger, was seeking advice from Rome on how to deal with Christians. In his letter to Emperor Trajan, Pliny explained that some “Christians” he investigated had departed the faith but they had provided an explanation of their practices while within the church. According to Pliny, “the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god…” (see Pliny’s letter to Trajan at Fordham University’s website: “Internet Ancient History Sourcebook.”)

Clearly, Christians were worshiping Jesus as early as the second century A.D. The evidence, however, doesn’t stop there. Numerous letters from early church leaders (known as the “Church Fathers”) prove that worship of Jesus as God dates at least to the end of the first century.

And then you have the New Testament itself.

In his letter to the Colossian Christians, Paul described Jesus as the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” and said that “by [Jesus] all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth…that He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:15-16)
In the same letter, Paul wrote: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:9)
In his letter to Timothy, Paul stated that Jesus will “judge the living and the dead,” which is clearly a perogative of God Himself. (II Timothy 4:1)
Paul’s letter to the church in Rome clearly and repeatedly declares Jesus to be “Lord” and the primary figure in the redemption of mankind from their sins (see Romans 3, 5, and 10).
The Gospel of John kicks off with an unmistakable claim of Jesus’ Deity, calling him “the Word” and making clear that the “Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

I’m just scratching the surface. I could list many, many more verses.

Indeed, the entire New Testament is written with the theme that Jesus is the Son of God and the fulfillment of the Old Testament messianic prophecies.

And we have the testimony of Jesus Himself. Jesus often called Himself the “Son of Man,” associating himself with divine imagery (Daniel 7:13-14). He also took it upon himself to forgive sins (something only God can do). What’s more, Jesus provocatively used the words “I AM,” a term that every learned person in Judeo-Palestine knew to be a reference to Yahweh (John 8:58).

Whether one believes the Bible’s claims about Jesus is a personal choice. But as the saying goes: “People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” And the facts, in this case, are that the early church worshipped Jesus as God long before Constantine and that the Bible itself explicitly affirms the Deity of Jesus.

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