#778 Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity

Dr. craig’s response

Your question, John, intersects nicely with my study of the doctrine of the Trinity in connection with my projected systematic philosophical theology. There’s a ton to be said here, but let me just make a few points in response to Ehrman’s claims as you describe them.

1. Ehrman has a defective understanding of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. According to the classic doctrine of the incarnation articulated at Chalcedon in 451, Christ did not simply have a divine mind but also had a human mind, which was accordingly limited in knowledge and typical for a first century Galilean Jew. But for Ehrman the incarnate Christ was supposed to be basically like Superman disguised as Clark Kent. So he expects Jesus to go about saying things like, “Hello, I am God” and so is surprised when he doesn’t.  An orthodox doctrine of the incarnation rejects the notion that the man Jesus had that sort of divine consciousness. As you correctly discern, Jesus’ divinity does not depend on his having that sort of self-consciousness and making such assertions.

2. For Jesus to claim to be God would have been tantamount to claiming to be the Father, which would have been false and misleading. The Greek word for God (theos) in the New Testament typically refers to God the Father, as you can easily verify yourself with your English Bible (e.g., Romans 1.7: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”). God the Father had sent Jesus; the Father did not Himself come to die on the cross. So it would have been outrageously false for Jesus to claim to be God.

3. The historical Jesus made implicit Christological claims that imply the deity of Christ. As I explain in my book Reasonable Faith, chapter 7, “The Self-Understanding of Jesus,” we can show that the historical Jesus made claims and engaged in practices that implied his divinity. You mention his claim to forgive sins. His miracles and exorcisms are significant, not for the power they require, but because they served as signs of the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom into human history in his person. And so on. Jesus was therefore condemned as a blasphemer by the Jewish Sanhedrin for these claims and delivered over to the Roman authorities for execution for treason. But God’s raising Jesus from the dead vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims, revealing him to be exactly who he claimed to be and thereby enabling his followers to see him as truly divine.

4. Rather than call Jesus “God,” the earliest Christians appropriated the title “Lord” for Jesus. Indeed, the confession “Jesus Christ is Lord” was a necessary condition of salvation (Romans 10.9). Now here’s the interesting part: “Lord” (Kyrios in the Greek) is the word used to translate the name of God (Yahweh in the Hebrew) when the Greek Old Testament was read aloud by Greek-speaking Jews. In fact, New Testament authors like Paul quote Old Testament passages about Yahweh and apply them to Jesus (e.g., Romans 10.13)! This extraordinary practice leads to some interesting circumlocutions, e.g., “For us there is one God (theos), the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord (kyrios), Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (I Corinthians 8.6). Here God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are described in almost identical terms as the Creator of all things, a role reserved for deity alone, and yet they are personally distinct.

5. The earliest Christians, right back to the first years following Jesus’ crucifixion, worshiped Jesus along with the Father. This phenomenon is unparalleled in Judaism. Nowhere else do we find Jews worshiping along with Yahweh some other divine figure. Scholars therefore speak of the “binitarian” beliefs and worship practices of the earliest Christians: as strict monotheists they believed in and worshiped only one God, but there were two persons equally worthy of that worship, namely, the Father and the Son. Because they were equally God, they were equally worthy of worship.

6. On rare occasions the New Testament authors do go so far as to refer to Jesus as theos (John 1.3; 1.18; 20.28; Rom 9.5; Titus 2.13; Hebrews 1.8-9; II Peter 1.1). It is as if the authors in their exuberance simply cannot contain themselves and so come right out and say, “Jesus is God.” Not that Jesus is the Father; rather there are two persons who are equally God.