The Trilemma Argument - Part 4: Did Jesus Claim to be God?

THE ARGUMENT FOR THE KEY PREMISE (1)

The core of the Trilemma Argument is clear (see Part 2 of this series):

1. Either (a) Jesus is God, or (b) Jesus lied about being God, or (c) Jesus was seriously mentally ill.

2. It is not the case that: Jesus lied about being God.

3. It is not the case that: Jesus was seriously mentally ill.

THEREFORE:

4. Jesus is God.

 

Most of the Trilemma Argument is concerned with supporting premise (1), the claim that we are limited to just three options concerning Jesus.

Here is a diagram of the Trilemma Argument that shows the logical structure of the sub-argument supporting premise (1):

Based on my analysis of the sub-argument supporting premise (1), that sub-argument is based on a key historical claim: 

5. Jesus claimed to be God.

This historical claim is false, so the entire Trilemma Argument is based on a false historical claim. 

According to the McDowells, Jesus claimed to be God:

Among the great religious leaders, Jesus uniquely claimed to be God in human flesh. (EFJ, page 39)

The Gospels record many examples of Jesus claiming to be God. (EFJ, page 47)

ONCE I (JOSH) CONCLUDED THAT JESUS CLAIMED TO BE GOD, I realized I had only so many options left. (EFJ, page 64)

Jesus’s claim to be God must be either true or false. (EFJ, page 65)

Despite the confident assertions by the McDowells, Jesus never claimed to be God. The McDowells come close to admitting this historical fact:

CRITICS OF CHRISTIANITY ARGUE THAT JESUS NEVER uttered the words “I am God.” Technically, they’re right! But while Jesus is not recorded in the Bible as having said those three words, that doesn’t mean Jesus did not claim deity. (EFJ, page 41)

The problem, however, is not that Jesus never said the three words “I am God”. The problem is that there are at least fifty different ways that Jesus could have claimed to be God, but Jesus never made any of these fifty different statements. 

THE EVIDENCE AGAINST PREMISE (5)

In the New Testament, Jesus never says:

1. “I am God.”

2. “I am the eternal God.”

3. “I am the everlasting God.”

4. “I am the immortal God.”

5. “I am the living God.”

6. “I am the mighty God.”

7. “I am the Almighty God.”

8. “I am the all-wise God.”

9. “I am the holy God.”

10. “I am the true God.”

11. “I am the great God.”

12. “I am the supreme God.”

13. “I am the Most High God.”

14. “I am the God of heaven.”

15. “I am the God of heaven and earth.”

16. “I am the God of glory.”

17. “I am the God of peace.”

18. “I am the God of love and peace.”

19. “I am the God of hope.”

20. “I am the God of all grace.”

21. “I am the God of faithfulness.”

22. “I am the God of our ancestors.”

23. “I am the God of Abraham.”

24. “I am the God of Isaac.”

25. “I am the God of Jacob.”

26. “I am the God of Israel.”

27. “I am the God of the Hebrews.”

28. “I am the God of gods.”

29. “I am the God of the spirits of the prophets.”

30. “I am the God of the spirits of all flesh.”

31. “I am maker of heaven and earth.”

32. “I am the creator.”

33. “I am the creator of the world.”

34. “I am the creator of all things.”

35. “I am the creator of the ends of the earth.”

36. “I am the creator of Israel.”

37. “I am Yahweh.”

38. “I am the Almighty.”

39. “I am the Mighty One.”

40. “I am the Mighty One of Israel.”

41. “I am The Lord of the earth.”

42. “I am the Lord of all the earth.”

43. “I am the Lord of the whole earth.”

44. “I am the Lord of heaven.”

45. “I am the Lord of heaven and earth.”

46. “I am the Lord of hosts.”

47. “I am the Lord God.”

48. “I am the Lord God Almighty.”

49. “I am the Lord God the Almighty.”

50. “I am the Lord God of Israel.”

From these facts, it is clear that Jesus never claimed to be God.

Furthermore, the earliest Christian writings we have are the letters of Paul (particularly the seven letters that NT scholars view as authentic letters that were actually written by Paul), but Paul never writes that “Jesus is God”, and Paul never uses any of the above fifty different ways of stating this claim. So, Paul also never claimed that Jesus is God. If Jesus frequently claimed to be God, why didn’t Paul ever make this claim about Jesus?

Finally, nobody in the New Testament ever uses any of the above fifty different ways of claiming that Jesus is God. This is powerful evidence that Jesus never claimed to be God. Otherwise, some of the followers of Jesus would have made some of those fifty claims about Jesus.

Jesus also does not claim to have the divine attributes of God:

• I am eternally a bodiless person (or a spirit).
• I am eternally an omniscient person (or all-knowing).
• I am eternally an omnipotent person (or all-powerful).
• I am eternally a perfectly morally good person (or morally flawless).
• I am eternally an omnipresent person (present in every location).
• I am the creator of the universe.

Thus, Jesus neither claimed to be God nor claimed to possess the key attributes of God.

OVERVIEW OF THE MCDOWELL'S EVIDENCE FOR PREMISE (5)

What evidence do the McDowells provide to support their key assertion that Jesus claimed to be God?  In Chapter Five of EFJ (called “Did Jesus Claim to Be God?”), they focus on eight passages from the Gospels. Five of those eight passages, however, are from the Gospel of John.  But the Gospel of John provides a historically unreliable account of the life and words of Jesus, so most of their evidence can be tossed aside, because it is very dubious.[1]

In fact, one of the main reasons that N.T. and Jesus scholars view the Gospel of John as being historically unreliable, is that Jesus frequently makes exalted claims about himself in that Gospel, but not in the previous three Gospels.  It is precisely the sort of passages that the McDowell’s quote from the Gospel of John that leads most scholars to view that Gospel as being unreliable.[2]

Furthermore, Jesus does not clearly claim to be God in any of the five passages quoted from the Gospel of John. All five passages can be reasonably interpreted in a way that they do not imply that Jesus is God[3], and given that it is also dubious that the historical Jesus spoke the words attributed to him in those five passages, the evidence from those passages fails to provide any significant support for the assertion that Jesus claimed to be God.

The McDowells also provide two quotations of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, and one quotation of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark.

Aware of the serious problem with their assertion that Jesus claimed to be God, the McDowells appear to slide into making a weaker claim:

Even if Jesus never explicitly stated that he is God, he certainly made many implicit and indirect claims to deity. (EFJ, page 63)

If Jesus “made many implicit and indirect claims” to be God, then perhaps some modified version of the Trilemma could get off the ground, based on that weaker assertion. 

The problem with "implicit and indirect claims" by Jesus is that such "claims" are usually dubious because they require a significant degree of interpretation, thus allowing believers and Christian apologists to exercise subjective bias grounded in their wishes or desires that Jesus was God and claimed to be God. This is clearly the case with the Gospel passages put forward by the McDowells.

END NOTES

1.The Gospel of John is a historically unreliable source of information about the life, ministry, and death of Jesus. There are a number of good reasons supporting this skeptical view of the Gospel of John:

• The Gospel of John was the last of the four canonical gospels to be written, according to most NT scholars.
• The Gospel of John was written about 90-100 C.E., sixty to seventy years after Jesus was crucified, according to most NT scholars.
• The Gospel of John was probably not written by an eyewitness of the life, ministry, and crucifixion of Jesus, according to most NT scholars.
• The Gospel of John was written in Greek by a Greek-speaking author for a Greek-speaking audience, but Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, not Greek.
• The Gospel of John disagrees with the earlier Gospels on a number of points (e.g. what Jesus said about himself, exorcisms by Jesus, whether Jesus was crucified on Passover, and whether the first time the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples took place in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday or in Galilee a week or more after Jesus was crucified).
• The “sermons” of Jesus in the earlier Gospels are just collections of various short sayings of Jesus, while the “sermons” of Jesus in the Gospel of John are actually long, coherent sermons. Short sayings repeatedly spoken by Jesus could have been accurately remembered by his followers, but it is very unlikely that his followers would be able to accurately remember a long sermon that Jesus delivered only once or twice. Most NT scholars do not believe that the “sermons” of Jesus presented in the Gospel of John represent accurate memories of what Jesus actually said.
• The Gospel of John features a number of dramatic one-on-one conversations between Jesus and specific individuals. An omniscient narrator tells us about these private conversations, which is a lovely literary device, but this casts serious doubt on the historicity of those private conversations. Who was there to hear and remember these conversations?
• The Gospel of John contains some of the finest writing in the NT and is known for its extensive use of theological metaphor and symbolism.  Some of the most notable passages in this gospel, especially in John’s passion narrative, were clearly written as short plays, with distinct scenes. The pronounced theological and dramatic emphasis of this gospel indicate that historical accuracy was not a high priority for the author of the Gospel of John.
• For nearly two centuries, scholars who specialize in studying the historical Jesus have focused their attention on the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and have largely ignored the Gospel of John because they view the Gospel of John as historically unreliable.
• For a more in-depth case for the historical unreliability of the Gospel of John, see my posts on this subject:

The Unreliability of the 4th Gospel - Part 14: Summary and INDEX  

2. The Gospel of John is considered by Jesus and NT scholars to be significantly less historically reliable than the other (“synoptic”) gospels.

Marcus Borg is a leading Jesus scholar, and he writes this about the Gospel of John:

Cumulatively these differences [in how the Gospel of John portrays Jesus vs. how the other gospels portray Jesus] have persuaded scholars that a foundational choice must be made: The historical Jesus was either more like the Jesus of the synoptics [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] or more like the Jesus of John.  The differences are so great that the synoptic and Johannine portraits of Jesus cannot be harmonized into a single whole.  For mainline scholars the choice is the synoptics. 

(“The Historical Study of Jesus and Christian Origins” by Marcus Borg, in Jesus at 2000, p. 132, edited by Marcus Borg)

E.P. Sanders is a leading NT scholar, and after pointing out a number of differences between the 4th Gospel and the synoptic gospels, he writes this about the Gospel of John:

It is impossible to think that Jesus spent his short ministry teaching in two such completely different ways, conveying such different contents, and that there were simply two traditions, each going back to Jesus, one transmitting 50 per cent of what he said and another one the other 50 percent, with almost no overlaps.  Consequently, for the last 150 or so years scholars have had to choose.  They have almost unanimously, and I think entirely correctly, concluded that the teaching of the historical Jesus is to be sought in the synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] and that John [the Gospel of John] represents an advanced theological development, in which meditations on the person and work of Christ are presented in the first person, as if Jesus said them.

(The Historical Figure of Jesus, by E.P. Sanders, p. 70-71)

Dwight Moody Smith is a leading scholar on the Gospel of John, and his view of the Gospels agrees with that of Borg and Sanders:

Because the Synoptics [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] do not generally present Jesus as proclaiming himself, i.e. presenting Christological doctrine, and because the issues they portray him dealing with are largely indigenous to early first-century Palestinian Judaism, historians have rightly preferred their renditions particularly of Jesus’ teaching but also of his healing activity and his death [over those of the Gospel of John].

(“John, the Gospel According to” by Dwight Moody Smith in The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, revised edition, edited by Paul Achtemeier, p.533-534)

3. In the next part in this series of posts on the Trilemma Argument, I will examine each of the five passages from the Gospel of John that the McDowells put forward as evidence that Jesus claimed to be God.