Who Jesus Claimed to Be

The thing about Jesus that the polite versions of the story usually skip.

There is a soft version of Jesus that has soaked into the air of our culture — a wise teacher, a moral exemplar, a kind man who told stories about lilies and lost coins. That version is not wrong about the stories or the lilies. It is wrong, severely, about the man.

The Jesus the gospels describe did not, anywhere in the four documents we have, present himself as a wise teacher among many. He acted, and spoke, like a person who believed he was God in a human body — and his contemporaries, including his enemies, understood that this is what he was saying.

This part of the story is the part that gets skipped, often, when Jesus is being recommended to a polite audience. I want to put it back in.

What he did

Forgave sins — not sins against himself, sins against other people, sins against God.¹ The religious authorities of his day picked up on this immediately: who can forgive sins but God alone? They were right about the implication.

Accepted worship. When his student Thomas, a Jewish man raised in strict monotheism, fell at his feet a week after the resurrection and called him “my Lord and my God,” Jesus did not correct him. He blessed him.² In the Hebrew scriptures the only response to being worshipped as God, if you are not God, is to recoil in horror. Jesus did not recoil.

Authorized his own words above the law of Moses — you have heard it said, but I say to you — in a culture where the law of Moses was God’s own words.³ No prophet had ever spoken this way. The prophets said thus says the Lord. He said I say.

Claimed to be the one who would judge every human being at the end of history.⁴ Claimed to have existed before Abraham, using a phrase — I am — that in his language was the personal name of God.⁵ His listeners picked up stones to kill him for it. They were not confused.

The trilemma

C. S. Lewis put this in a sentence that has stuck for sixty years and deserves to stick longer.⁶

A man who said these things, he wrote, can only be one of three things: a lunatic on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg, a deliberate fraud trying to deceive the most religious nation on earth into committing blasphemy against their God, or actually who he said he was.

The fourth option that modern audiences want — a great moral teacher, but not divine — is the one option Lewis refuses you. Because a great moral teacher does not casually claim to be God, accept worship from practicing Jews, and forgive sins committed against other people. A great moral teacher who did these things would not be a great moral teacher; he would be something far worse than the worst things his enemies said about him. Either he was a madman, or he was a fraud, or he was who he said he was. He has not left any other option open.

Why this matters for the gospel

It matters because the message of the gospel — that the death of one man, on one Friday afternoon, in one city, can rearrange the standing of every human being who has ever lived with the God who made them — is either the most arrogant statement ever made or the most important one. And which it is depends entirely on who the man on the cross was.

If he was a kind Jewish rabbi who got crosswise with Rome, his death is a tragedy and nothing more, and the church that grew up around it is one of the strangest sociological accidents in history.

If he was who he said he was, the cross is the moment the maker of the universe took the consequences of human evil into his own body, on behalf of everyone who has ever done evil — and that includes you and me. It is the moment the books were balanced.

You cannot get to the second reading without going through this question first. Who did he say he was, and was he right?

The history section makes the case for was he right — specifically by way of the resurrection, which is the one event that, if it actually happened, makes the answer obvious. Start with the minimal facts if that’s the direction you want to go.