In What Sense Was Jesus God?
Many believe that John’s is the highest Christology of the New Testament. But even though John has Jesus saying “I and the Father are one”[1], for which his hearers understood him to be claiming to be God, he still often seems to portray Jesus as a different entity than the Father. As I’ve already noted, Jesus’ response to them is not about his uniqueness, though he could have responded that way; on the contrary, he seems to be saying something about the divine uniqueness of humans themselves. In fact, I believe John 17 says something which is key to his message: Jesus came so that people might be one with the Father just as he is. This is no smoking gun of the argument that Jesus and God must necessarily be the same entity.
In fact, when we go to the prologue of John, which has some very powerful messages about the divinity of Jesus, here too we find some peculiar comments. Firstly, as I’ve already observed, John uses hypostasis to refer to Jesus as the Logos of God. Is Jesus therefore God himself, or God in the sense that he is the Logos of God? To dogmatically conclude that the former is necessarily tantamount to the latter is to forget that we are speaking of a mystery. There are surely theologians much wiser than I who feel confident that Jesus is in fact the same person/entity as God, and I cannot say that they are wrong: perhaps they fully understand the mystery; but I know that I am more ignorant, as I know that I cannot be sure that that is what John is saying. This mystery appears again in 1:18, where Jesus is the only one to have seen God, and is the monogenes of God, himself God! See translations such as the ESV and the NRSVUE; many translations merely say “the only begotten Son,” but the Greek literally contains the words “the monogenes God.”
But John also says many things that seem to suggest that he is speaking of two entities, even if the son is equal with the father in glory. The son acts like the father,[2] and the father loves the son. But sometimes the son does things that the father does not, like judging, and the father was the one who sent the son. The father granted to the son to have life in him and authority. The son does not his own will, but the will of the father. The father’s testimony is in addition to the son’s. They had never heard nor seen the father, but they had the son. Jesus came in the father’s name. His will is not the same as the father’s will.[3] It was not Jesus who glorified himself, but the father.[4] Jesus obeyed the command of the father.[5] God gave all things into his hands.[6] The father is greater than the son.[7] The father prunes the son.[8] Even when they ask to see the Father,[9] and Jesus equates seeing the father with seeing himself, he speaks of them being “in” each other: by the same rationale, it might be that John would agree that any disciple who believes in him thereby dwells in him, and thereby also shows the father to the world. As long as love abides in them, the father, Jesus, and his disciples all enjoy one big reciprocal “abiding-in”/being one with each other.[10]
I am not saying that John did not necessarily somehow believe that the Jesus and the Father were the same entity. But if he did, based on such passages, then it was certainly a mystery.
Jesus as Angel?
Of course, the concept of the Trinity was one explanation for how Jesus was “one” enough with the father in order for Christianity to remain monotheistic. But modern scholarship sees it as anachronistic to assume that the earliest Christians explained Jesus’ divinity in this way.
One of the most popular explanations in modern scholarship[11] of how Jesus’ earliest followers “must” have viewed him as divine is that he was the Angel of the Lord[12] found in the Hebrew scriptures, who was an angel, but with the authority of Yahweh, and who was also spoken of as Yahweh himself. When we come to the development of the Trinity, we’ll also see how equating Jesus with the Angel of the Lord was actually a fairly early view among some of the so-called church fathers. But for now I only want to consider any possibly evidence for it in the New Testament.
One of the most glaring deficiencies of the now popular notion that Jesus was believed to be the Angel of YHVH by the earliest followers is that he is never once explicitly called that, as Ehrman candidly acknowledges.[13] In fact, it could be argued that the first chapter of Hebrews would provide a direct refutation of this theory, as it starkly contrasts Jesus with angels. However, to give it fair hearing, the strengths of this theory are that it fits within Jewish understandings of the nature of those who are taken up into Heaven becoming angel-like beings, and the Bible’s own testimony that not everything was made clear until after the crucifixion. How indeed were they to explain a Davidic messiah who had gotten himself killed and left them? The gospels portray even his closest disciples as very much clueless regarding his nature during his life, and even oblivious to the divine plan at the third day after his crucifixion. Luke and John have him send the Spirit after his ascension to guide them into the Truth that they constantly stumbled away from. Paul apparently got bonus visions.
Perhaps the best argument for the Jesus-as-angel theory is found in Paul. It has been argued, based on the Greek grammar, that Galatians 4:14 is not saying that they welcomed Paul like an angel of God or like Jesus, but they welcomed him as an angel of God, such as Jesus.[14] A similar “as…as” construction is found in 1 Corinthians 3:1, where they are said to be like two things, both fleshly and as infants. However, I would argue that this is not the proof Ehrman makes it out to be, as fleshly is not the same as infants. Both are used to describe the Corinthians, just as the Galatians’ welcome of Paul was as if he were an angel of god, and as if he were Jesus. If Jesus is the angel of God in Paul’s Christology, then why does he not ever make it clearer than that? Wouldn’t preaching Christ involve preaching his nature?
An objection to my line of reasoning here might be, why, indeed? But did he not make his views clear? As I have at least partially outlined, Paul had a great deal to say about the nature of Christ and what he accomplished on earth. In other words, Paul did make his views clear. I would argue that if we cannot reason them out logically, then it is because it is like the rest of the gospel message: it is a mystery. Taking the stance that Paul would have necessarily explained things the way the modern, rationalistic mind would want is itself committing the error of anachronism.
Ehrman and others have argued that the Jesus-as-angel paradigm was the development that not only allowed the transition from exaltation to incarnation Christology to occur; but that the shift to incarnation Christology occurred “as soon as” Jesus was seen as an angel. [15] This raises two questions, at least for me. 1) Why was the angel theory necessary to explain this theoretical transition from exaltation to an eternally existing incarnated Christ? And how could it, if the Jewish view of exaltation of mere humans was that they became like angels? That sounds exactly like mere exaltation, not necessary for a transition to incarnation theory per se. And 2) what about incarnation theory in Paul?
I am not trying to disprove the idea that certain concepts in Christianity didn’t evolve over time. On the contrary, as I’ll examine below, the concepts around this very topic did in fact evolve substantially over the next three centuries, affecting foundational beliefs of virtually all Christians in our day. Although Ehrman does concede that Jesus was thought of as God within that first generation after Christ’s death, I think he reaches too much to try to show this progression for which we have very little evidence, especially considering how narrow the timeframe is, and the internal biblical evidence to the contrary that I’ve been presenting. Nor do I disagree that at least some people earlier on simply could not accept the doctrine that Jesus was the same person as God, such as Marcion and his substantial following, although there were certainly much less extreme examples than him. (I cover this elsewhere in my book.) From a logical perspective, it is also quite possible some of John’s view of Christ could have been completely unknown until the book was written, which would in fact be a progression in the beliefs regarding Christ, though not as extreme as some have imagined; I only disagree that it was necessarily a shift toward believing that Jesus was somehow more divine, at least in a very significant sense. The synoptics’ claims of Christ’s divinity, even when heavily veiled, are nothing to sneeze at. They would have been radical enough for the first century Jews who first heard them, many of whose reaction was to want to stone their fellows who followed Christ. And as I have been hinting at, their view of Christ may be all a Christian today needs. In the following section, I hope to illustrate that the development of the Trinity may have been totally unnecessary. I find it ironic that the increasing number of theologians today who reject the Trinity are often branded as heretics by those who have never considered whether the New Testament writers would have ever agreed with that concept. I have witnessed this with my own eyes on social media.
[1] 10:30-38
[2] John 5:18-43
[3] 6:38
[4] 8:54
[5] 10:17-18; 12:47-50
[6] 13:3
[7] 14:28
[8] 15:1
[9] 14:8-12, 20
[10] 15:1-10
[11] One explanation for why this view has not been more accepted among scholars is that the view of Jesus as angel is not exalted enough. See Angelomorphic Christology, by Charles Gieschen, and No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus, by Susan Garrett. For older arguments against the idea that Jesus was considered an angel by the earliest Christians, see Christology in the Making, by James Dunn.
[12] See Exodus 3:1-22, and Genesis 16, 18.
[13] How Jesus Became God, ch. 8
[14] Ibid.
[15] How Jesus Became God, ch. 7