"Jesus did not declare himself to be God"

By Brant Pitre

When we compare the results of the modern quest for the historical Jesus with recent research on the earliest Christology—that is, the earliest beliefs about Jesus’s identity and mission as the Jewish “messiah” (Greek: christos)—we discover something of a paradox.

The Historical Jesus Did Not Claim to Be Divine

On the one hand, when it comes to contemporary Jesus research, the vast majority of modern scholars agree that Jesus of Nazareth himself did not think, speak, or act as if he was in any way “divine”—that is, more than human. Consider, for example, the following statements of prominent contributors to the quest for the historical Jesus:

Jesus did not declare himself to be God.¹²

There is no indication that Jesus thought or spoke of himself as having pre-existed with God…. We cannot claim that Jesus believed himself to be the incarnate Son of God.¹³

The religion proclaimed by Jesus was a wholly theocentric one in which he played the role of the man of God … without being himself in any sense the object of worship as he later became.¹⁴

There is no evidence whatever that [Jesus] spoke or acted as if he believed himself to be “a god” or “divine.”¹⁵

Notice here that the view that Jesus did not claim to be divine can be found in the works of Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious scholars alike.¹⁶ It has even found its way into the writings of prominent contemporary systematic theologians.¹⁷

Significantly, this view goes back to the earliest days of the modern quest for Jesus. For example, three of its most influential figures—Herman Samuel Reimarus (1778), David Friedrich Strauss (1836), and Ernst Renan (1863)—are at one in the assertion that Jesus never claimed to be divine:

It was not his [Jesus’s] intention to present a triune God or to make himself God’s equal, no matter how much he makes of himself.¹⁸

Jesus had indeed an intimate communion of thought and will with God, but … the boundary line between divine and human was strictly preserved.¹⁹

That Jesus never dreamt of making himself pass for an incarnation of God is a matter about which there can be no doubt. Such an idea was totally foreign to the Jewish mind; and there is no trace of it in the Synoptical Gospels: we only find it indicated in portions of the Gospel of John, which cannot be accepted as expressing the thoughts of Jesus.²⁰

Notice that the confidence with which these figures assert that Jesus never made divine claims rests on two key pillars: (1) The notion that Jesus thought himself divine is deemed impossible because it would “deviate from Judaism” and be “totally foreign to the Jewish mind.”²¹ In other words, any kind of divine claim on Jesus’s part would be incompatible with early Jewish monotheism. (2) Although Jesus does claim to be divine in the Gospel of John (e.g., John 8:58–59; 10:30–33), there is “no trace” of a divine self-claim in the Synoptic Gospels.²²

To this day, the assertion that Jesus never speaks or acts as if he is divine in the Synoptic Gospels continues to play a decisive role in the view that the historical Jesus did not claim to be more than human. Consider, for example, the argument of Bart Ehrman:

If Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming himself to be a divine being sent from God—one who existed before the creation of the world, who was in fact equal with God—could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important? And yet none of these earlier sources [i.e., the Synoptic material] says any such thing about him. Did they (all of them!) just decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about Jesus? Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.²³

According to this view, when it comes to the four first-century biographies of Jesus that we possess, the “score” is three against one: three earlier gospels in which Jesus does not claim to be divine (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and only one later gospel in which Jesus makes divine self-claims (John). In light of such data, the weight of evidence clearly falls in favor of a historical Jesus who never claimed to be more than human.

In sum, it is no overstatement to conclude that “the overwhelming majority” of contemporary scholars agree “that Jesus did not think of, or present, himself in divine terms.”²⁴ To be sure, there are some exceptions, from both Jewish and Christian scholars alike.²⁵ However, a brief glance at Jesus research in the last century or so shows that the vast majority render a negative verdict. Indeed, one searches most major monographs on the historical Jesus in vain for any mention of the possibility that Jesus may have made divine claims during his lifetime. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the massive four-volume, 3,600-page Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (2011), which contains no discussion of whether the historical Jesus ever made divine claims.²⁶ The implication of such a gaping lacuna is clear: it is so self-evident that Jesus did not claim to be divine that the topic is not even worthy of discussion. For contemporary Jesus research taken as a whole, the answer to the question, Did Jesus claim to be divine? is a resounding no.

The Earliest Christology Was High Christology

On the other hand, when we turn from contemporary Jesus research to recent studies in early Christology—or early Christologies²⁷—we discover that a remarkable number of scholars agree that the earliest Jewish believers in Jesus held what might be described as a “high” Christology, in which Jesus is regarded as divine in some sense.

In recent decades, it has become popular to use the expression high Christology to describe beliefs about Jesus in which he originates as a heavenly being who becomes human. Conversely, the expression low Christology is often used to describe beliefs about Jesus in which he originates as an earthly human being who is later exalted (at some point) to the status of divine.²⁸ To be sure, there are problems with this terminology—not the least of which is a tendency to oversimplify matters. Nevertheless, with these common definitions in mind, consider the following statements of major contributors to the study of early Christology:

I have been a member of the Early High Christology Club (EHCC) for quite a few years now.²⁹

The idea that Jesus is God … was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesus’ death.³⁰

A Christology that portrays Christ as divine emerges very early, in distinctively Jewish terminology and within a Jewish context.³¹

No follower of Jesus, to our knowledge, ever called Paul divine or reckoned him a god. Christians did, however, say astounding things about Jesus, and that from the very beginning.³²

The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology.³³

Devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly, not gradually and late, among first-century circles of followers.³⁴

It is worth noting that the existence of early high Christology is agreed upon by Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious scholars alike. It should also be stressed that the scholars quoted above have different opinions regarding in what sense the earliest Jewish believers viewed Jesus as divine: for example, as an exalted human being, an angelic figure, equal with the Creator, and/or God incarnate.³⁵ They also have different explanations for exactly how the belief in Jesus’s divinity arose so quickly: for example, as a by-product of Jesus’s execution as “king of the Jews,” a result of the resurrection appearances, or the effect of revelatory experiences of the exalted Jesus in heaven. Despite these differences, however, they all agree on one thing: after the death of Jesus, his earliest Jewish followers did not begin with a low Christology in which Jesus was regarded as merely human and then slowly develop a high Christology in which Jesus was regarded as in some sense divine. Rather, Jesus was regarded as “Divine from the Beginning.”³⁶

The Problem of Jesus and Early High Christology

To sum up what we’ve seen so far: although the vast majority of contributions to the modern quest agree that the historical Jesus never claimed to be divine, recent studies of the early church also agree that Jesus was regarded as divine in some sense from the very beginning. This somewhat paradoxical pair of hypotheses raises an important historical question: If Jesus himself never claimed to be divine in any sense, then how do we explain the origins of early high Christology? Again, Bart Ehrman puts the point well when he asks:

How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?³⁷

The question of the genesis of early high Christology is particularly pressing when we recall that the earliest believers in Jesus—including the apostle Paul—were Jewish believers, who believed in and exclusively worshiped the “one” God of Israel (cf. Deut 6:4–6).³⁸ How did early believers in Jesus, who were also Jewish monotheists, come to regard Jesus as in some sense equal with the one God?³⁹ In other words, how do we solve “the riddle of the origin of the christology of the early church”?⁴⁰

Notes

¹² Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 128.

¹³ James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 254. For a similar point, see James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 761–62.

¹⁴ Geza Vermes, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 60.

¹⁵ A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 168.

¹⁶ See also Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 399, 506; Marcus Borg, “Jesus and God,” in Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1999), 145.

¹⁷ See Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 66–67: “The earthly Jesus … did not present himself as the pre-existent Creator of the world…. Such claims surface in John’s Gospel (e.g., John 5:17; 8:58), but these are later theological reflections rather than historical traditions that reach back to Jesus himself.”

¹⁸ Herman Samuel Reimarus, Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert, trans. Ralph Fraser (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970 [orig. 1774–1778]), 96.

¹⁹ David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972 [orig. 1835–1836]), 289; cf. Strauss, Life of Jesus, 29–91.

²⁰ Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London: Watts & Co., 1935 [orig. 1863]), 132 (emphasis added).

²¹ Reimarus, Fragments, 96; Renan, Life of Jesus, 132.

²² Renan, Life of Jesus, 132.

²³ Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 125.

²⁴ Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond, vol. 1 of Jesus Monotheism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 27.

²⁵ See Boyarin, Jewish Gospels, 56–70; Sigurd Grindheim, God’s Equal: What Can We Know about Jesus’ Self-Understanding in the Synoptic Gospels?, Library of New Testament Studies 446 (London: T&T Clark, 2011); Peter Stuhlmacher, “The Messianic Son of Man: Jesus’ Claim to Deity,” in Dunn and McKnight, Historical Jesus in Recent Research, 325–44.

²⁶ Edwin K. Broadhead, “Implicit Christology and the Historical Jesus,” and Matthias Kreplin, “The Self-Understanding of Jesus,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols., ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 2:1169–82, 3:2473–2517, deal exclusively with Jesus’s messianic claims.

²⁷ Michael F. Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 1, 5, rightly cautions against speaking of “a single monolithic Christology of the early church.”

²⁸ See Francesca Aran Murphy, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 300, 306, 350–51, 564, for examples of the similar expressions of “Christology from above” and “Christology from below.”

²⁹ Paula Fredriksen, “How High Can Early High Christology Be?,” in Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Matthew V. Novenson, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 293.

³⁰ Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 3.

³¹ Andrew Chester, “High Christology—Whence, When, and Why?,” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 38.

³² Allison, Constructing Jesus, 304.

³³ Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), x.

³⁴ Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 650. Cf. Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26: “I agree with Hurtado that Jesus came to be regarded quickly as a divine human son of God.”

³⁵ Cf. Michael F. Bird, Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022), 11–12.

³⁶ Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 207 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 17. See also Andrew Ter Ern Loke, The Origin of Divine Christology, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 169 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24–48; Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 3–30; Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 31, 39.

³⁷ Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 45.

³⁸ See Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

³⁹ See, e.g., Matthew Novenson, “Did Paul Abandon Either Judaism or Monotheism?,” in The New Cambridge Companion to St. Paul, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 239–59.

⁴⁰ Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 1.

— Brant Pitre is Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. He has authored numerous books, including Jesus and the Last Supper and (with Michael P. Barber and John A. Kincaid) Paul, a New Covenant Jew: Rethinking Pauline Theology.

image: Stained Glass Jesus

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Excerpted from Jesus and Divine Christology by Brant Pitre (Eerdmans, 2024). Used by permission.

Jesus and Divine Christology sheds light on long-neglected yet key evidence that the historical Jesus saw himself as divine. Scholars and students of the New Testament—and anyone curious about the Jewish context of early Christianity—will find Pitre’s argument a necessary and provocative corrective to a critically underexamined topic.

“Finally! By showing from history that Jesus made divine claims about himself, Brant Pitre has compelled the prodigal quest for the historical Jesus to return home. This book should be received with open arms, because it is both necessary and convincing.”
—Matthew W. Bates, author of The Birth of the Trinity; professor of New Testament, Northern Seminary

[Jesus and Divine Christology] engages perhaps the biggest question of all: did Jesus think of himself not only as human but also as divine? Immensely readable and erudite, this persuasive and brilliant book will be a touchstone for all future studies of this controversial topic.”
—Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary

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