The Academic Case for the Divinity of Christ

If the Gospels, rather than modern "scholars", are to be believed, the answer is YES! In St John 8:58, He says, "[B]efore Abraham was made, I am". And the Jews, believing He had blasphemed "took up stones therefore to cast at him".

From Crisis

By Hunter Leonard, MA(Theol)

Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God? Many modern scholars say no, but there is a strong academic case to be made that that answer is a resounding "yes."

While many persons of faith possess an unshakeable conviction in the divinity of Christ, the rise of modernism and secularism in the last few hundred years has brought about a growing doubt in this central article of the Christian Faith. Materialist presuppositions have poisoned biblical studies and seeped into Scripture 101, stripping the Gospels of all that is supernatural and leaving behind a Jesus who is a mere prophet and moral teacher.

This drastic shift in perception of Christ has naturally led to an even greater disinterest in Him. Modern man is so soaked in secularism that he simply shrugs off this distant figure with no apparent impact on his immediate concerns. To borrow, and slightly alter, a phrase from Flannery O’Connor: “If he’s just a man, to hell with him.”

Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God? Theologian and author Brant Pitre has written a recent monograph, Jesus and Divine Christology, exploring this very question. Pitre, most famous for his work on the Jewish roots of Catholicism, has now contributed in this book to the great “Quest for the Historical Jesus”—a multi-century academic effort to uncover the real Jesus of history. 

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily

The book begins by explaining a gaping hole in historical Jesus research: the question of the divinity of Jesus—more particularly, whether Jesus considered Himself to be divine. Pitre quotes Anglican scholar and bishop John A.T. Robinson, who says that in biblical scholarship, this is a “no-go area.” 

However, this is precisely where Pitre wants to go, claiming there are warrants to ask this question. While most contemporary scholars believe Jesus did not claim divinity, most scholars do agree there was a High Christology in the early Church. It is a paradox that so many scholars hold these two truths: Jesus did not claim He was God, but His earliest followers did. How can this be reconciled? Why would the earliest Christians believe Jesus was divine if He did not claim that for Himself?

Pitre proposes in his book’s thesis, “The best explanation for why the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine shortly after his death is because Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime.” Jesus and Divine Christology is Brant Pitre’s attempt to defend this hypothesis.

Now, a knowledgeable Christian may think the question of Christ’s identity is easily solved. He may likely point to the opening verses of John’s Gospel, where we read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Or he may recall that Jesus stuns the crowds by saying, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” and how the man from Nazareth goes even further by saying, “The Father and I are one” (John 8:58, 10:30). 

Content with the biblical prooftexts, he might next point to the famous “Trilemma” found in C.S. Lewis’ masterful apologetic Mere Christianity. This bulwark against a materialist view of Christ clarifies that we only have three possible responses to the divine claims of Jesus. Lewis writes:

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

There is nothing wrong with the appeal to the above Scripture citations; and certainly, Lewis’ famous “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” formula is a logically coherent argument. The problem is the presupposition of the historical reliability of the Gospels. This is precisely where the arguments potentially break down.

There is a legitimate fourth option that can be introduced into C.S. Lewis’ famous “Trilemma,” and it is perhaps the most commonly held and defended rejection of the divinity of Christ. Jesus need not be Lord, Liar, or Lunatic—He, at least His claim to divinity, might just be a Legend.

In Pitre’s earlier book The Case for Jesus, he shares how his graduate work in biblical studies brought him face-to-face with this legitimate option. Pitre writes: 

As I continued to study the quest for Jesus, it slowly dawned on me that for many people, there was a fourth option: namely, that the stories about Jesus in the Gospels in which he claims to be God are “legends.”

As Bart Ehrman, one of the leading scholars in modern historical Jesus research, puts it, “Jesus probably never called himself God…this means that he doesn’t have to be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. He could be a first-century Palestinian Jew who had a message to proclaim other than his own divinity.”

The scholar’s answer to Lewis’ “Trilemma” is I don’t reject Jesus’ claim to be God, I just don’t believe he made the claim.

As for the scriptural citations, these and many of the verses that Christians are familiar with from the Gospels that show Christ’s divinity come from the Gospel of John. Unsurprisingly, biblical scholars often consider John’s Gospel largely unreliable for detailing Jesus’ actual words and deeds.

The standard claim is that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) contain an early, low Christology, where Jesus is depicted merely as a man. Meanwhile, the later, less reliable Gospel of John has a higher Christology that projects later Christian theology back into stories from the life of Christ. Thus, a modern perspective is that Jesus did not claim to be God and any Scriptural citations that Christians quote in support of this claim are simply unhistorical.

Jesus and Divine Christology puts to rest this long-standing opinion of modern biblical scholars, showing that this is an unhistorical and indefensible vision of the Gospels. 

Pitre’s work begins by laying out his methodology in examining the historical reliability of the biblical words and deeds that he is evaluating. Following the example of New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders, Pitre lays out a “triple-context” approach which he uses to evaluate the historicity of a given biblical scene. In practice, this approach looks at the plausibility within a first-century Jewish context (Pitre’s specialty), coherence with other known facts about Jesus, and compatibility with effects seen in the early Church.

Purposefully focusing on biblical accounts from the Synoptics, Pitre masterfully demolishes the idea that Jesus only claims to be divine in the Gospel of John. He methodically examines multiple scenes in the Synoptics where Jesus speaks and acts as if He is equal to God. In addition to a rigorous methodology that is used consistently in evaluating the historicity of the biblical evidence found in the Synoptics, throughout the monograph, Pitre draws heavily on recent and contemporary biblical scholars of all religious and philosophical perspectives. By working off of common ground, Pitre demonstrates that Jesus’ divine claims and actions can be shown as a logical conclusion of commonly held beliefs among biblical scholars. 

For example, one case that Pitre makes is that scholars are almost unanimous in their belief in the historical plausibility of Jesus’ demand that His disciples love Him more than their parents. But many scholars also agree that in a first-century Jewish context, the love of parents is second only to the love of God. Pitre thus persuasively argues that we must logically conclude that Jesus of Nazareth makes a demand of His followers that only the God of Israel can make. He quotes Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who says, “For, I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking… In the end the master, Jesus, makes a demand that only God makes.”

This is just one of many examples. Over and over, with his usual attention to first-century Jewish detail, Pitre builds the case that through particular miracles, parables, and apocalyptic teachings, Jesus acts like the God of Israel, makes demands that only the Lord can make, and reveals Himself to be a divine Messiah with a unique relationship to the Father in Heaven.

Utilizing his “triple-context” approach, Pitre persuasively argues in favor of the historicity of these various words and deeds of Christ, showing that there is extremely good historical evidence that Jesus claimed to be God, not only in the Gospel of John but also in the Synoptic Gospels, in a way that was unmistakable to His Jewish audience. These claims are not modern projections back into the text; rather, they were recognized and understood by the Jewish disciples and enemies of Christ. That is precisely why the earliest followers of Jesus proclaimed Him to be God. It is also why the enemies of Christ sought out His death. The final key in Pitre’s quest to unlock the divine identity of Christ is the Lord’s crucifixion under the charge of blasphemy. 

Pitre goes to great lengths to show that the charge of blasphemy against Christ is what led to His crucifixion and is directly related to Jesus’ answer about His divine identity. On the night before Christ’s crucifixion, the high priest Caiaphas asks Jesus if He is the Messiah. When Jesus responds in the affirmative, Caiaphas tears his robes and charges Jesus with blasphemy. Scholars all agree it is not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah. So why does the high priest react this way? Pitre argues it is because Jesus claimed to be a heavenly Messiah, He claimed to be the Divine Son of God, and this can be seen when we read His response with first-century Jewish eyes. The earliest Christians worshipped Jesus for the same reason He was crucified: because He claimed to be the God of Israel.

The divinity of Christ is an essential element of the Christian Faith. In our modern secular age, Christians must be ready to make a thoroughly biblical, historical, and logical case for the divinity of Jesus. In Jesus and Divine Christology, Brant Pitre persuasively argues that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be a divine Messiah and the unique Son of God. In so doing, we are, you could say, safely back in the arms of Lewis’ “Trilemma.” We must reject Christ’s claim to divinity or accept it, we cannot ignore it.

Borrowing and altering another phrase, this time from Lewis: “Christ, if He is not God, is of no importance; and if He is God, of infinite importance. The only thing he cannot be is moderately important.”