The historical Jesus, who speaks to us through the Gospels, makes claims about himself that are inconsistent with those of a man who was merely a Jewish prophet and nothing more.
As C.S. Lewis famously argued in book 2, chapter 3 of "Mere Christianity," a man who said the kinds of things that Jesus said could not have been a prophet, plain and simple. Either he was, as he claimed to be, the eternal Son of God, or a madman on the order of someone who thinks he is a poached egg, or the devil of hell.
American apologist Josh McDowell, in good preacher form, boiled down the options to three words all beginning with the letter "L": liar, lunatic, or Lord. Either Jesus was the worst blasphemer who ever lived (as Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin ruled) or a crazy person who needed to be locked up (as his own family thought; see Mark 3:21) or the promised Messiah and Son of the living God (as his disciples came to recognize and believe).
No one at the time said he was only a prophet: neither his friends nor his enemies made that unsustainable claim. More to the point, no one disputed Jesus had made the claims he made. They either believed what he said, or they used his words as proof of his blasphemy or his lunacy. Those who heard his message either attacked him or ridiculed him or worshiped him. What they didn’t do was domesticate him as a mere prophet.
We who live on the other side of Easter may not find such things particularly surprising, but those who lived at the time of Jesus would certainly have recognized the radical nature of Jesus’ claim to suspend the rules on account of his presence in the world.
Lewis’s argument is a powerful one, but it rests squarely on the contention that Jesus actually claimed to be the Son of God.
Fewer and fewer critics of the Gospels can get away with claiming that Jesus did not say the things attributed to him — the Gospels are too early and reliable in their eyewitness testimony to be dismissed as legends — but many still try to bend Jesus’ words so as to avoid their implications.
And yet, as Lewis, McDowell, and others have shown, Jesus’ claims cannot be so easily brushed away. John’s Gospel is filled with “I am” claims by which Jesus links himself to the God of the Old Testament, whose name is Yahweh (“I am”): “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35; ESV throughout), “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), “I am the door [to salvation]” (John 10:9), “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11), “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and “I am the true vine” (John 15:1).
The “I am” claims reach their climax when Jesus assures a group of skeptical religious leaders, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). That the religious leaders recognized the blasphemy in Jesus’ words is made clear by their response: “They picked up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59).
Again and again, Jesus presents himself as the revelation of God: To know him is to know God; not to recognize him is not to recognize God. Thus, in his last public discourse, Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me” (John 12:44-45). Earlier, he faults the Pharisees for failing to recognize who he is: “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also” (John 8:19).
That Jesus claimed to be equal with God is made clear in the fourth Gospel, but it is equally clear in the first and seemingly less “theological” Gospel of Mark. Almost as soon as he appears on the scene, Jesus claims the right to forgive sins (Mark 2:5), a right which belongs only to God, who is the wronged party when we sin. That this is so is evidenced by the fact that the teachers of the law recognize his claim as blasphemous (Mark 2:6-7).
Jesus’ teachings frequently put the focus on him rather than on God, contrary to what one would expect from a mere prophet: “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). Indeed, he makes it clear that to accept him is equivalent to accepting God: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me” (Mark 9:37).
Jesus promises that those who give up home and family for his sake will receive their reward (Mark 10:29-30); or, more strongly: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).
When Caiaphas asks Jesus if he is “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed,” he replies: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” In response, Caiaphas rips his cloak and declares Jesus guilty of blasphemy, a sentence to which all agree (Mark 14:61-63).
I could list many more examples from Matthew and Luke where Jesus makes claims that would brand him as a blasphemer or megalomaniac were he not, in fact, the Son of God. Instead, I would like to close by considering three subtler claims to deity that Lewis mentions in passing in a lesser-known essay anthologized in "God in the Dock": “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?”
After explaining how Christ’s claim to have the authority to forgive sins identifies him with God, Lewis draws his readers’ attention to an easy-to-overlook verse that carries remarkable implications:
In the Old Testament, it is Yahweh, and Yahweh alone, who sends prophets and wise men to teach and admonish his people. For Jesus to assert that he is the person who has been doing the sending is tantamount to identifying himself with Yahweh. It is not a human prophet who sends the prophets but the God who created them. Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel: None of these divinely chosen leaders would have made such a claim. Great as they are, they are the ones who are sent, not the one who sends.
These great men of the faith would also not have made the shocking claim that Lewis highlights next:
Here we have a man who is not only obeyed by the wind and the sea but who claims the right to redefine the very nature of the Jewish religion, of which he is a faithful follower. We who live on the other side of Easter may not find such things particularly surprising, but those who lived at the time of Jesus would certainly have recognized the radical nature of Jesus’ claim to suspend the rules on account of his presence in the world.
By highlighting these two seemingly minor verses, Lewis demonstrates that Jesus’ claims to divinity are pervasive, underlying nearly everything he said and did. But he does not stop there. Lewis next finds evidence for Jesus’ divinity in something that he did not say in any of his sermons or discourses:
Neither Moses (Deuteronomy 32:50-52) nor David (Psalm 51:1-5) nor Isaiah (Isaiah 6:5) nor Daniel (Daniel 9:7-11) ever claimed to be free from sin. The same goes for the New Testament epistles, where Paul (1 Timothy 1:15), James (James 3:1-2), Peter (1 Peter 2:24), and John (1 John 1:8-10) all count themselves among the sinners whom Christ came to save. Christ alone of God’s chosen vessels presents himself as sinless.
If a preacher continually accused his congregation of sin but never even intimated that he was a fellow sinner, we would conclude that he was filled with pride and deluded as to his own nature. Yet, Jesus comes across in the Gospels as humble and sane: neither self-righteous like the Pharisees he exposed nor out of his wits like the demoniacs he set free.
Surely, this man was the Son of God!
Editor's note: This essay was originally published in the Worldview Bulletin Substack and was republished with permission.
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