WAS JESUS GOD?

Traditional Christianity has likewise asserted his divinity. Had this doctrine been lost, ‘Christianity would have vanished like a dream’, says Carlyle.

C S Lewis tried to shrug off Jesus Christ for years. But when he studied the evidence, noting particularly the attitudes of contemporaries to Jesus – hatred, terror, or adoration – he couldn’t be neutral either.

The problem is simply stated: If Jesus was right about himself, the grim sequel is that he was also right about me, and my need to repent. And about the Scriptures, heaven, hell, judgment.

To ignore him is to commit more than intellectual suicide. He was not merely another moralistic pedagogue, like Buddha, Confucius, or Zoroaster. He was God – or a fraud, or a megalomaniac.

The New Testament writers, who spent their lives propounding (and practising) Jesus’ high ideals of goodness and truth, were prepared to die to defend the veracity of their assertions about their Lord. They often coupled his name with that of God the Father, and they were Jewish monotheists! Occasionally Jesus is described in the Old Testament phraseology reserved for Yahweh himself.

John, who knew him best, was utterly convinced that he was God’s pre-existent Logos, the Word of God who became a human being and lived among us. Paul asserts that Christ is the visible expression of the invisible God. He existed before creation began; it was through him that everything was made. ‘There was not when he was not,’ as the ancient theologians put it.

Besides claiming directly to be God enfleshed – ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ – Jesus exercised God-like functions such as forgiving sins and bestowing eternal life. Being God’s executive agent among his creatures, Jesus said he would be their resurrector and judge on the Last Day. As a teacher, he never deferred to previous rabbinical authorities: ‘Truly, truly, I say unto you’ was his customary formula.

Thomas, the only person on record to have directly addressed him as God, is complemented for his belief, an ascription from which Jesus should have recoiled in horror, if he were better than subsequent Christian saints.

The trilemma is, therefore: Jesus either deceived his contemporaries by a deliberate and malicious hoax, or he was deluded, or he was what he claimed to be. His affirmations of Deity were not merely intermittent or accidental: they were frequently used, particularly in John’s account, as the major premise from which he made assertions on other subjects. Aut Deus aut homo non bonus: He is God, or else he is not a good man.

If he were an imposter, what was he trying to achieve? What did he gain by it all? What were the motives behind his extolling ultimate goodness on the one hand, and this perpetration of a lie on the other? The inveterate liars of my acquaintance do not bother themselves preaching righteousness, much less do they practise the selfless altruism that Jesus of Nazareth is renowned for. Even his hawk-eyed religious enemies confessed him to be above moral reproach.

I am forced to agree with John Stuart Mill when he described Jesus as a ‘unique figure, not more unlike all his predecessors than all his followers.’ Misunderstood and misrepresented, and finally crucified in cold blood, Jesus’ character more than matches his ethical teachings.

If he were a megalomaniac, psychiatrists will have to work hard to convince us that a self-styled Messiah, such as those in our mental institutions, may occasionally exhibit the poise, purity and penetrative insights of a Jesus Christ. If there is a case-study of such a person, the world has yet to hear of it. I for one wouldn’t be prepared to do what those disciples did – forsake my job and risk my neck to follow a lunatic. Among the thousands of people convinced enough o Jesus’ deity to be branded as ‘Christians’ in the hostile first century were educated priests, intellectuals like Paul, and members of the Jewish and Roman governing families. Were all of these given to flights of fantasy? When has there been a wide cross-section of individuals prepared to vouch, with their own blood if necessary, for an asseveration of this magnitude?

Probably, as C S Lewis has remarked in a BBC talk on the subject, the question which haunts us as we read the New Testament narratives, is whether we are sane, not he. Neither Jesus nor his followers could have invented it all; the truth of these claims is needed to account for both Jesus and his followers.

There’s also this business of a resurrection, the crucial faith-event in the lives of the early Christians. J B Phillips, in his book Ring of Truth which argues for the historicity of the events narrated in the Gospels, quotes from a letter written to the British Church Times:

‘Can someone please explain convincingly why Caiaphas and the priestly conclave did not simply march down to the grave, break the seals, and have a three-day exhibition of the mortal remains (proceeds from viewing to be in aid of the Temple funds naturally!). Can he explain why the trained hardened soldiers suddenly deserted their posts and dashed back to face what might have been court-martial and execution? Or why they were bribed to spread an obviously false story when the simple remedy would have been to march them back under escort, prove them wrong and have them beheaded on the spot as a warning to any who might have fancy super-natural ideas? Through history the fact remained that no body was ever produced – which would have been the simplest thing in the world to do if there were a body available…

‘Perhaps the simple answer is too simple…. Perhaps there was no body to produce and the Ascension is merely the logical follow-on of that incredible and to some people highly uncomfortable, fact of the resurrection of the Man-God, Jesus Christ’.

Jesus was not an ordinary mortal who somehow achieved divinity, or, as Schleirmacher put it, was ‘entirely pervaded by the God-consciousness.’ Nor was he, as Renan pictured him, a gentle humanitarian who delivered beautiful, rationalistic lectures on love. All of the Christian creeds reject such unbiblical and unhistorical half-truths. The Council of Chalcedon’s statement may be taken as representative: We confess our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead… and in manhood, truly God and truly man. Karl Barth writes: ‘Here we have not to do with a reality different from God, but with God Himself’.

No wonder Christians use the capital ‘H’ in pronouns referring to Him. The empty sepulchre then, the Holy Spirit operating through the Scriptures now, combine to dispel my doubts about the Way, the Truth and the Life. God was in Christ, reconciling me to Himself. And I am invited, not to demythologize Jesus, but to trust Him.

If He was God, and He died for me, no sacrifice that I can make can be too great for Him.

ROWLAND CROUCHER