Evidence for Christian Theism
30
The Life of Jesus
In Chapter 21 I gave Swinburne’s a priori argument for the Incarnation. This showed that, if there is a God, then it is highly probable that he will respond to our sin and suffering by entering into history in human form: in order to discharge an obligation to share in the suffering which, though for good reason, he allows; to offer wrongdoers a means of making atonement and to help us live morally good lives by example and instruction. The fulfilment of these purposes requires that the life of God Incarnate satisfy five initial criteria: he himself must live a life that is morally perfect and filled with suffering; he must claim to be divine; he must claim to be making an atonement for human sin; he must give plausible teachings and establish a worldwide church to tell future generations what he has done and how they may avail themselves of it. A sixth and final criterion is that his life must receive a divine signature; that is, God must involve himself in the life of the person in whom he became incarnate by means of some action only God can perform. This will prove that the life, claims and teaching of that person have received divine approval and so that person was, indeed, God Incarnate.
In this chapter I am going to argue that on the evidence we have the life of Jesus satisfies the first five criteria and in the next chapter I will argue that it satisfies the sixth. My general discussion here follows Swinburne point by point with interpolations from other sources. [1]
Jesus Led a Morally Perfect Life Filled with Suffering
The only possible evidence for the moral character of a person’s life is their public behaviour. However, the evidence we have for the life of Jesus is the evidence we would expect if he had led a perfect life. It is, for example, almost universally acknowledged that Jesus befriended and ate with the outcasts of society. In Jesus the Jew, distinguished Jewish scholar Geza Vermes writes of Jesus that,
In one respect more than any other he differed from both his contemporaries and even his prophetic predecessors. The prophets spoke on behalf of the honest poor, and defended the widows and the fatherless, those oppressed and exploited by the wicked, rich and powerful. Jesus went further. In addition to proclaiming these blessed, he actually took his stand among the pariahs of his world, those despised by the respectable. Sinners were his table companions and the ostracised tax collectors and prostitutes his friends.
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In first century Judea, tax collectors were loathed because they had a reputation for extracting more taxes than they were authorised to by the Roman authorities for whom they worked. Thus when Jesus went to stay with the tax collector Zacchaeus, those who learned of it complained that, “He has gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner.” Jesus showed love to all.
The Gospels also report that Jesus was often swarmed and harried by crowds and always met them with the same unwavering compassion, generosity and love. Luke, for instance, tells us of one occasion on which so many people surrounded the house in which Jesus was staying that a group of men carrying a cripple could find no way in. And so the men ripped a hole in the roof and lowered the cripple and stretcher on which he lay into the house. At this means of entry, farcical in its intrusiveness, Jesus did not evince the slightest annoyance. “Friend,” Jesus told the cripple, “your sins are forgiven.” And so generally thought his ministry. “When he saw the crowds,” Matthew tells us, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Prayer and religious experience played an important part in the life of Jesus who consistently taught his followers to seek repentance from, pray and give thanks to God. This is a great moral good for at least three reasons. God, if he exists at all, is the consummation of all love, power, beauty and intelligence lying at the heart of reality. It follows that a relationship with God is the greatest possible good available to the creature. And since it is a moral truism that we owe gratitude to our benefactors and God, as the holy source of our existence from moment to moment, is our supreme benefactor, it follows also that it is good for us to show gratitude to God. And, finally, since we all wrong God directly by failing to show him that gratitude and indirectly by wronging each other, it is good that we should show repentance to God and seek his forgiveness. Like John the Baptist, Jesus did not reserve his teaching for committed disciples or a spiritual elite; he taught publicly to all who were willing to listen. The personal and public spiritual life of Jesus is therefore a further mark of moral perfection.
In the previous chapter it was noted that the Baptism of Jesus seems theologically problematic. However, the fact that Jesus sought baptism from John the Baptist does not imply that Jesus considered himself a sinner: Not until the foundation of the Christian Church in the years after the Resurrection was baptism administered solely for the remission of the sins of the person being baptised. There is no evidence that John’s baptism of Jesus had this character and Jewish historian Josephus denied that it did. Baptism was sometimes sought as a means of identifying oneself with the Israelites and their collective need for the remission of sins and in I Corinthians 15:29 Paul mentions the practice, which did not continue, of being baptised on behalf of the dead.
Throughout his three year ministry Jesus lived as an itinerant teacher and, in the absence of a reason to think otherwise, we should believe him when he states that, “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” All the Gospel accounts of his betrayal, arrest, trial and execution also emphasise that he willingly yielded himself at each stage of his ordeal despite knowing that doing so would result in death. Jesus therefore showed a radical commitment to the cause of changing people by reason and example rather than by force or insurrection.
That Jesus also led a life involving pain and suffering is more obvious on the historical evidence than almost anything else. But let us examine it in a little more detail.
The life of Jesus ended with his Crucifixion engineered by the Jewish high court and carried out by the Romans. The charge pressed against Jesus by the Jewish authorities was “blasphemy” which is how they characterised and understood the fact that Jesus claimed rights that belonged to God alone. However, if, as the evidence will suggest, Jesus was in fact God Incarnate, then Jesus was innocent of that charge.
The Gospels all claim that the Jewish authorities told the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, that Jesus claimed to be “King of the Jews.” On the criterion of dissimilarity, the historicity of this detail is highly probable: The phrase “King of the Jews” was not used by Jews or by anyone else in the Gospels but is very plausibly a way of explaining the Jewish concept of “Messiah” to Romans ignorant of the Jewish religion. However, it was also a phrase all too easy for them to misunderstand: Pilate might understand it to mean that Jesus planned to overthrow the Romans by force.
So: The claims which Jesus made were claims which, if he were God incarnate, he had the right to make and which were plausibly misunderstood by the Roman authorities. And this means that the Roman authorities, at the instigation of the Jewish authorities, condemned an innocent man to death. In being deserted by his followers and dying by crucifixion when innocent of the charges against him, Jesus shared in the suffering and injustice of human life in a very profound way—as is quite evident during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Just how brutal death by crucifixion was we shall see in the next chapter. And the Gospels all make it clear that Jesus willingly submitted to both the agony and the injustice.
Jesus Claimed to be Divine
The Gospel writers report Jesus referring to himself as, “Son of God.” This phrase did not mean then what it came to mean in later Christian theology or imply that Jesus was divine: It may simply have meant “Messiah” or “Righteous Person.” However, there is evidence that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his Crucifixion and evidence that he proclaimed it openly afterwards. And there is also a good reason why he needed to proceed in this way rather than simply claim, “I am God,” from the beginning of his ministry.
If God were to become incarnate for the reasons discussed in Chapter 21, he needed to take on a human body and a human way of thinking and acting in addition to his divine nature—as eventually codified in the Council of Chalcedon. This is something it is difficult to understand and very easy to misunderstand. Thus if Jesus had announced during his earthy ministry, “I am God,” his listeners and those who learned of the claim would have understood him to be telling them that he was a pagan god: a powerful and lustful being who had emerged from the primeval chaos and now occupied a human body but not the holy source of all being incarnate. Indeed, Geza Vermes writes that, “It is no exaggeration to contend that the identification of a contemporary historical figure with God would have been inconceivable to a first century Palestinian Jew.” The absence of an explicit declaration of divinity is not therefore evidence that Jesus did not believe himself to be God as this was something he could only proclaim openly after his Crucifixion had laid bare his humanity and his Resurrection had demonstrated the unique sense in which he was human. In short: Only under the aspect of his Crucifixion and Resurrection together did the Incarnation have any hope of being properly understood.
The Gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did after his Resurrection are consistent with this view. All manuscripts of Matthew conclude with Jesus commanding the remaining disciples to baptise, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” thereby denoting that the Son, Jesus himself, is equal in status to God the Father. John also records the explicit confession of Thomas who did not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus until he saw it with his own eyes. “My Lord and my God,” Thomas exclaims and Jesus does not correct him. Moreover, on two occasions after the Resurrection Matthew reports that the disciples “worshipped” Jesus and many manuscripts of Luke report the same.
This evidence is particularly compelling placed in its proper historical and social context; i.e., when it is remembered that the authors of the New Testament knew that it would be wrong to worship anyone but God. Matthew and Luke record Jesus quoting at Satan the Old Testament command to, “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only,” when Satan invites Jesus to worship him. And in Acts 10:26, when Cornelius tries to worship Peter, Peter admonishes him with the words, “Stand up! I am only a mortal.” And, finally, twice in Revelation the angel commands John, its purported author, not to worship him with the words, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you. Worship God!” Jesus, by contrast, is never reported rejecting worship and Matthew also records some occasions on which the disciples worshipped Jesus prior to his Resurrection. All of this evidence is the evidence we would expect to find if Jesus believed he were God Incarnate.
I noted earlier that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his crucifixion. This is evident in several ways.
It is evident first in the very charge of blasphemy which the Jewish authorities pressed against Jesus during his trial. Clearly enough, Jesus did not curse God. What was "blasphemous" in the view of his accusers was that Jesus did things and claimed rights which only God could do and claim. It is in this way that John understands the accusation; for instance, in 10:33 he records the Jews picking up stones to throw at Jesus. “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.”
That Jesus was indeed insinuating his divinity prior to his Resurrection also emerged during his trial. Challenged by Caiaphas to confirm or deny that he was the Messiah and “Son of the Blessed One,” Jesus replied, “I am,” and then quoted Daniel 7:13: “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of Heaven.” His words, according to Mark, caused an uproar. Caiaphas tore his clothes and exclaimed, “You have heard the blasphemy! What do you think?” and all those present agreed that he should be condemned to death.
However, the strongest insinuation of divinity to emerge during the trial of Jesus relates to his predictions about the Temple. Mark and Matthew record that witnesses testified that Jesus had said he could or would destroy the Temple and build in three days, “another Temple not made with hands.” And John, too, quotes Jesus as saying this. “It is hard to imagine a purely fictional origin for the accusation that Jesus threatened to destroy the Temple,” writes the liberal biblical scholar E. P. Sanders. What is interesting is that Mark describes the accusation as “false.” If Mark was indeed written after AD 70 he would have known that the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in that year and, in any case, he elsewhere relates another prediction by Jesus of its destruction. All this implies that Mark believed that the Temple would be destroyed and so the falsity of the accusation lies in something else: Jesus did not predict that he himself would destroy and rebuild the Temple; rather, he predicted that the Temple would be destroyed and replaced by something else that had been destroyed and “raised up” after three days; namely, Jesus himself. In other words, Jesus predicted that in due course the Temple would be abolished and God would be accessed and experienced through him. [2] Nowhere does Jesus claim that he has been commissioned by God to do this. And to replace the divinely ordained place of worship, and, moreover, to declare himself to be its replacement, is a claim to divinity.
A fourth and final way in which Jesus insinuated his divinity was by forgiving sins as the Gospels report he did on at least two occasions. “Why does this fellow speak in this way?” protests a scribe on one of these occasions. “It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Brief Digression on the Humanity of Jesus
The purpose and nature of the Incarnation was introduced in Chapter 21 and because of it we need to keep the humanity of Jesus in view during any discussion of his divinity. Again, briefly: To share in our humanity God allowed himself to develop a second and separate system of human beliefs acquired through the sensory experience of a human body. The separation of these two belief systems, the human and the divine, was a voluntary act known to his divine mind but not to his human mind. And so while the divine consciousness would include a human consciousness the human consciousness would exclude the divine consciousness. And this means that, while remaining divine, Jesus would act and feel much like ourselves.
We find this doctrine reflected throughout the New Testament. Thus Luke claims that Jesus “increased in wisdom,” which suggests that he was not always fully omniscient and Mark likewise reports that the Son did not know something which the Father knows; namely, the “day or hour” when the world will come to an end. The cry of dereliction which Jesus sent up from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” further suggests that Jesus experienced a moment during which he ceased to believe that God was sustaining him. And there is, finally, a passage in Mark that suggests Jesus was not always omnipotent: During a visit to the region of Palestine where Jesus grew up he could, “do no deed of power there.” That Jesus was tempted is also clear from the accounts of the beginning of his ministry in the Synoptic Gospels; experiences which Hebrews implies involved real temptations to which Jesus could have succumbed but did not.
All of this shows that, if Jesus were God Incarnate, he become God Incarnate in just the way discussed in Chapter 21: By taking on a separate and limited human nature in addition to his divine nature.
Jesus Claimed to be an Atonement for Human Sin
We have already seen that Jesus claimed he was providing a replacement for the Temple at which Jews offered sacrifices to God in atonement for sin. And it is consistent with this understanding that, during the Last Supper, Jesus gave his disciples bread and wine with the words, “This is my body,” and, “This is my blood.” Since body and blood are elements of sacrifice, Jesus was telling his disciples that his life was an atonement for human sin. New Testament accounts of the Last Supper all understand it in this way—as the “New Covenant” for the forgiveness of sin which the Old Testament had prophesied would one day replace the Old Convent system of Temple sacrifices.
That Jesus wanted his life to be understood as an atonement for human sin is also very clearly reflected in the final days of his earthly ministry. It is clear, for instance, that after challenging the authorities Jesus took pains to avoid arrest until the Passover by staying outside Jerusalem and holding the Last Supper in secret; clear, in other words, that Jesus timed his trial and execution to coincide with the Passover which commemorates the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt. And just as the Exodus told of the Jews' escape from enslavement, so, claims the New Testament, did the death of Jesus vouchsafe an escape for all humanity from enslavement to sin, guilt and death. Instituting the Eucharist shortly before allowing himself to be crucified at Passover therefore conveyed an unmistakeable message within first century Jewish culture: That Jesus understood himself to be, “dying for our sins.”
Jesus Gave Plausible Teaching on God and Morality
On God. Jesus taught that God is the all powerful, all knowing and morally perfect creator and sustainer of the world—an understanding of God consistent with that of philosophical theology. He also taught the great love of God for sinful human beings who in turn should love, rely on and worship God. All of this is clearly reflected in the parables of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin, along with his explicit statements to the same effect: That God loves man more than the lilies and the birds on whom he also bestows love. And all this, in turn, is consistent with the omnibenevolence of God.
In Chapter 22 we saw that if God exists and is all powerful and all loving God is necessarily a Trinity. And Jesus is reported to have said things which insinuate just this. It is no objection to this doctrine that Jesus did not teach it explicitly by saying, for example, “God is a Trinity.” For if a claim by Jesus to be God Incarnate would have been misunderstood before his Crucifixion and Resurrection so, a fortiori, would a claim that God was a Trinity have been misunderstood; mistaken, almost certainly, for the polytheism held by ordinary Greeks and Romans. Nevertheless, there are two insinuations made by Jesus which provided the Church with material to develop the doctrine.
Firstly, while implying his divinity, Jesus sharply differentiated himself from God the Father. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” Luke reports Jesus as saying, “and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Secondly, there is much in the New Testament about the role and personhood of the Holy Spirit. Mark and Matthew report Jesus seeing the Spirit descend on him in the form of a dove during his baptism and thereafter claim the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. The disciples themselves could not have known of the latter unless Jesus himself had told them and it seems that the Spirit was recognized at his baptism only by Jesus himself. Acts tells of the guidance of the Holy Spirit in spreading the Gospel. And John reports Jesus as teaching his disciples that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church after Jesus is no longer among them in bodily form. In that passage Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Advocate” and also with the personal pronoun he. And there is, finally, the command of Jesus at the end of Matthew to baptise “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” which denotes that the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is equal in status to God the Father.
On Love and Forgiveness. It is also consistent with the moral perfection and the moral authority of God that Jesus taught us to show unconditional love for each other and to forgive each other for wrongdoing, “not seven times but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,” as Matthew reports Jesus saying. This is the obvious application of the Parable of the Two Servants and the Lord’s Prayer in which we are enjoined to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” In other words, to avoid hypocrisy by forgiving others before ourselves seeking the forgiveness of God. That, above all else, we should love one another is the central theme of the Sermon on the Mount. And asked to summarise his message, Jesus declares, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
On Morality. Jesus seems to have endorsed the Old Testament teaching contained in the Ten Commandments concerning the minimum moral requirements of a good human life: To worship God alone, respect our parents, refrain from theft, murder, adultery and lying and the importance of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are also important elements of his teaching. However, Old Testament also contains detailed Jewish laws concerning ritual and sacrifice which the Church (inspired, as it claimed, by the Holy Spirit) taught Christians need no longer conform to. In doing so they understood themselves to be acting in the spirit of the teachings of Jesus and Jesus himself taught that following him was more important than conforming to exact details of ritual. I noted earlier that, when asked to summarise his teaching, Jesus declared the two greatest commandments were, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And then, critically, Jesus adds, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Paul, understanding the point, compendiates it in seven words: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Both the teachings of Jesus on basic morality and the interpretation of those teachings by the Church are therefore consistent and plausible.
In Chapter 21, we also saw that God may create obligations to help us form the habit of doing what is supererogatorily good. When a parent tells a child to do the shopping for a sick neighbour the parent makes a nonobligatory good action obligatory in the hope that the child will develop a habit of doing good beyond what is obligated and so become a morally exemplary person. And Jesus certainly created some moral obligations of this kind. For example, during his discussion of the Old Testament command to “Love your neighbour as yourself,” Jesus was asked, “And who is my neighbour?” and in reply told the parable of the Good Samaritan with its clear message that our neighbour is anyone at all with whom we are in contact. So interpreted the Command is very demanding and presses us to conform to the standard of morality which a morally perfect God would want to become natural to us. And this, too, is consistent with what a morally perfect God would be likely to teach and so evidence of a kind we would expect if Jesus were God Incarnate.
On the End of the World and the Afterlife And finally: It was noted at the start of Chapter 26 that while God has good reason for allowing humans to suffer he has equally good reason to place sensible limits upon that suffering—both by placing a limit on the duration of a human life (and so on the suffering that a human being can experience or cause) and also by one day bringing the whole world to an end. And Jesus indeed taught that, sooner or later, there would be a Parousia, or end of the world, followed by a Last Judgment. This second teaching entails that human beings will enter into different final states according to the moral character they freely formed during their earthly life—a subject discussed in Chapter 26 and, with the careful qualifications made there, also something we might expect God to do. [3]
Jesus Founded a Church
It was noted in Chapter 21 that since the human life of God Incarnate would be of limited duration he would need to ensure that his message was passed on to future generations and the obvious way of doing this would be to found a worldwide institution or church. At the end of Matthew, Jesus tells the Apostles to, “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them everything I have commanded you.” This suggests, plainly enough, that Jesus was entrusting the community he had formed with the task of taking his message to the world.
Within the context of first century Judaism there are indications that this community was intended to have institutional character. For instance: That there were twelve Apostles is recorded throughout the New Testament and fixed so firmly in the minds of its authors that after Judas betrayed Jesus and only eleven remained they continued to refer to them as “the Twelve.” Israel, meanwhile, had traditionally had twelve tribes deriving from twelve leaders. And so any Jewish prophet who founded a community of twelve leaders with a sacrificial ceremony had to be understood as founding a “New Israel.” The sacrificial ceremony was, of course, the Eucharist and all subsequent Christian communities regularly met to celebrate it in keeping with what Jesus had instructed them to do.
Moreover, Matthew twice records Jesus saying, “Whatever you bind on earth with be bound in Heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven” which suggests that the Church would continue the teachings of Jesus. And there are, finally, various passages throughout the Gospels in which Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide the Church after his departure. Thus John reports Jesus saying, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.” And Matthew closes with Jesus promising, “I am with you always until the end of the age.”
Conclusion
It has been my concern in this chapter to show that the life of Jesus satisfies the five initial criteria discussed in Chapter 21. And we have now seen that the evidence we have is the evidence we would expect if Jesus had lived a perfect life filled with suffering, claimed to be divine and an atonement for human sin, given plausible teachings and founded a church. We come now to the sixth and last criterion; namely, that on the evidence it is plausible to suppose that God affixed his signature to the life of Jesus by raising him from the dead.
The Gospels also report that Jesus was often swarmed and harried by crowds and always met them with the same unwavering compassion, generosity and love. Luke, for instance, tells us of one occasion on which so many people surrounded the house in which Jesus was staying that a group of men carrying a cripple could find no way in. And so the men ripped a hole in the roof and lowered the cripple and stretcher on which he lay into the house. At this means of entry, farcical in its intrusiveness, Jesus did not evince the slightest annoyance. “Friend,” Jesus told the cripple, “your sins are forgiven.” And so generally thought his ministry. “When he saw the crowds,” Matthew tells us, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Prayer and religious experience played an important part in the life of Jesus who consistently taught his followers to seek repentance from, pray and give thanks to God. This is a great moral good for at least three reasons. God, if he exists at all, is the consummation of all love, power, beauty and intelligence lying at the heart of reality. It follows that a relationship with God is the greatest possible good available to the creature. And since it is a moral truism that we owe gratitude to our benefactors and God, as the holy source of our existence from moment to moment, is our supreme benefactor, it follows also that it is good for us to show gratitude to God. And, finally, since we all wrong God directly by failing to show him that gratitude and indirectly by wronging each other, it is good that we should show repentance to God and seek his forgiveness. Like John the Baptist, Jesus did not reserve his teaching for committed disciples or a spiritual elite; he taught publicly to all who were willing to listen. The personal and public spiritual life of Jesus is therefore a further mark of moral perfection.
In the previous chapter it was noted that the Baptism of Jesus seems theologically problematic. However, the fact that Jesus sought baptism from John the Baptist does not imply that Jesus considered himself a sinner: Not until the foundation of the Christian Church in the years after the Resurrection was baptism administered solely for the remission of the sins of the person being baptised. There is no evidence that John’s baptism of Jesus had this character and Jewish historian Josephus denied that it did. Baptism was sometimes sought as a means of identifying oneself with the Israelites and their collective need for the remission of sins and in I Corinthians 15:29 Paul mentions the practice, which did not continue, of being baptised on behalf of the dead.
Throughout his three year ministry Jesus lived as an itinerant teacher and, in the absence of a reason to think otherwise, we should believe him when he states that, “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” All the Gospel accounts of his betrayal, arrest, trial and execution also emphasise that he willingly yielded himself at each stage of his ordeal despite knowing that doing so would result in death. Jesus therefore showed a radical commitment to the cause of changing people by reason and example rather than by force or insurrection.
That Jesus also led a life involving pain and suffering is more obvious on the historical evidence than almost anything else. But let us examine it in a little more detail.
The life of Jesus ended with his Crucifixion engineered by the Jewish high court and carried out by the Romans. The charge pressed against Jesus by the Jewish authorities was “blasphemy” which is how they characterised and understood the fact that Jesus claimed rights that belonged to God alone. However, if, as the evidence will suggest, Jesus was in fact God Incarnate, then Jesus was innocent of that charge.
The Gospels all claim that the Jewish authorities told the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, that Jesus claimed to be “King of the Jews.” On the criterion of dissimilarity, the historicity of this detail is highly probable: The phrase “King of the Jews” was not used by Jews or by anyone else in the Gospels but is very plausibly a way of explaining the Jewish concept of “Messiah” to Romans ignorant of the Jewish religion. However, it was also a phrase all too easy for them to misunderstand: Pilate might understand it to mean that Jesus planned to overthrow the Romans by force.
So: The claims which Jesus made were claims which, if he were God incarnate, he had the right to make and which were plausibly misunderstood by the Roman authorities. And this means that the Roman authorities, at the instigation of the Jewish authorities, condemned an innocent man to death. In being deserted by his followers and dying by crucifixion when innocent of the charges against him, Jesus shared in the suffering and injustice of human life in a very profound way—as is quite evident during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Just how brutal death by crucifixion was we shall see in the next chapter. And the Gospels all make it clear that Jesus willingly submitted to both the agony and the injustice.
Jesus Claimed to be Divine
The Gospel writers report Jesus referring to himself as, “Son of God.” This phrase did not mean then what it came to mean in later Christian theology or imply that Jesus was divine: It may simply have meant “Messiah” or “Righteous Person.” However, there is evidence that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his Crucifixion and evidence that he proclaimed it openly afterwards. And there is also a good reason why he needed to proceed in this way rather than simply claim, “I am God,” from the beginning of his ministry.
If God were to become incarnate for the reasons discussed in Chapter 21, he needed to take on a human body and a human way of thinking and acting in addition to his divine nature—as eventually codified in the Council of Chalcedon. This is something it is difficult to understand and very easy to misunderstand. Thus if Jesus had announced during his earthy ministry, “I am God,” his listeners and those who learned of the claim would have understood him to be telling them that he was a pagan god: a powerful and lustful being who had emerged from the primeval chaos and now occupied a human body but not the holy source of all being incarnate. Indeed, Geza Vermes writes that, “It is no exaggeration to contend that the identification of a contemporary historical figure with God would have been inconceivable to a first century Palestinian Jew.” The absence of an explicit declaration of divinity is not therefore evidence that Jesus did not believe himself to be God as this was something he could only proclaim openly after his Crucifixion had laid bare his humanity and his Resurrection had demonstrated the unique sense in which he was human. In short: Only under the aspect of his Crucifixion and Resurrection together did the Incarnation have any hope of being properly understood.
The Gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did after his Resurrection are consistent with this view. All manuscripts of Matthew conclude with Jesus commanding the remaining disciples to baptise, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” thereby denoting that the Son, Jesus himself, is equal in status to God the Father. John also records the explicit confession of Thomas who did not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus until he saw it with his own eyes. “My Lord and my God,” Thomas exclaims and Jesus does not correct him. Moreover, on two occasions after the Resurrection Matthew reports that the disciples “worshipped” Jesus and many manuscripts of Luke report the same.
This evidence is particularly compelling placed in its proper historical and social context; i.e., when it is remembered that the authors of the New Testament knew that it would be wrong to worship anyone but God. Matthew and Luke record Jesus quoting at Satan the Old Testament command to, “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only,” when Satan invites Jesus to worship him. And in Acts 10:26, when Cornelius tries to worship Peter, Peter admonishes him with the words, “Stand up! I am only a mortal.” And, finally, twice in Revelation the angel commands John, its purported author, not to worship him with the words, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you. Worship God!” Jesus, by contrast, is never reported rejecting worship and Matthew also records some occasions on which the disciples worshipped Jesus prior to his Resurrection. All of this evidence is the evidence we would expect to find if Jesus believed he were God Incarnate.
I noted earlier that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his crucifixion. This is evident in several ways.
It is evident first in the very charge of blasphemy which the Jewish authorities pressed against Jesus during his trial. Clearly enough, Jesus did not curse God. What was "blasphemous" in the view of his accusers was that Jesus did things and claimed rights which only God could do and claim. It is in this way that John understands the accusation; for instance, in 10:33 he records the Jews picking up stones to throw at Jesus. “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.”
That Jesus was indeed insinuating his divinity prior to his Resurrection also emerged during his trial. Challenged by Caiaphas to confirm or deny that he was the Messiah and “Son of the Blessed One,” Jesus replied, “I am,” and then quoted Daniel 7:13: “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of Heaven.” His words, according to Mark, caused an uproar. Caiaphas tore his clothes and exclaimed, “You have heard the blasphemy! What do you think?” and all those present agreed that he should be condemned to death.
However, the strongest insinuation of divinity to emerge during the trial of Jesus relates to his predictions about the Temple. Mark and Matthew record that witnesses testified that Jesus had said he could or would destroy the Temple and build in three days, “another Temple not made with hands.” And John, too, quotes Jesus as saying this. “It is hard to imagine a purely fictional origin for the accusation that Jesus threatened to destroy the Temple,” writes the liberal biblical scholar E. P. Sanders. What is interesting is that Mark describes the accusation as “false.” If Mark was indeed written after AD 70 he would have known that the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in that year and, in any case, he elsewhere relates another prediction by Jesus of its destruction. All this implies that Mark believed that the Temple would be destroyed and so the falsity of the accusation lies in something else: Jesus did not predict that he himself would destroy and rebuild the Temple; rather, he predicted that the Temple would be destroyed and replaced by something else that had been destroyed and “raised up” after three days; namely, Jesus himself. In other words, Jesus predicted that in due course the Temple would be abolished and God would be accessed and experienced through him. [2] Nowhere does Jesus claim that he has been commissioned by God to do this. And to replace the divinely ordained place of worship, and, moreover, to declare himself to be its replacement, is a claim to divinity.
A fourth and final way in which Jesus insinuated his divinity was by forgiving sins as the Gospels report he did on at least two occasions. “Why does this fellow speak in this way?” protests a scribe on one of these occasions. “It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Brief Digression on the Humanity of Jesus
The purpose and nature of the Incarnation was introduced in Chapter 21 and because of it we need to keep the humanity of Jesus in view during any discussion of his divinity. Again, briefly: To share in our humanity God allowed himself to develop a second and separate system of human beliefs acquired through the sensory experience of a human body. The separation of these two belief systems, the human and the divine, was a voluntary act known to his divine mind but not to his human mind. And so while the divine consciousness would include a human consciousness the human consciousness would exclude the divine consciousness. And this means that, while remaining divine, Jesus would act and feel much like ourselves.
We find this doctrine reflected throughout the New Testament. Thus Luke claims that Jesus “increased in wisdom,” which suggests that he was not always fully omniscient and Mark likewise reports that the Son did not know something which the Father knows; namely, the “day or hour” when the world will come to an end. The cry of dereliction which Jesus sent up from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” further suggests that Jesus experienced a moment during which he ceased to believe that God was sustaining him. And there is, finally, a passage in Mark that suggests Jesus was not always omnipotent: During a visit to the region of Palestine where Jesus grew up he could, “do no deed of power there.” That Jesus was tempted is also clear from the accounts of the beginning of his ministry in the Synoptic Gospels; experiences which Hebrews implies involved real temptations to which Jesus could have succumbed but did not.
All of this shows that, if Jesus were God Incarnate, he become God Incarnate in just the way discussed in Chapter 21: By taking on a separate and limited human nature in addition to his divine nature.
Jesus Claimed to be an Atonement for Human Sin
We have already seen that Jesus claimed he was providing a replacement for the Temple at which Jews offered sacrifices to God in atonement for sin. And it is consistent with this understanding that, during the Last Supper, Jesus gave his disciples bread and wine with the words, “This is my body,” and, “This is my blood.” Since body and blood are elements of sacrifice, Jesus was telling his disciples that his life was an atonement for human sin. New Testament accounts of the Last Supper all understand it in this way—as the “New Covenant” for the forgiveness of sin which the Old Testament had prophesied would one day replace the Old Convent system of Temple sacrifices.
That Jesus wanted his life to be understood as an atonement for human sin is also very clearly reflected in the final days of his earthly ministry. It is clear, for instance, that after challenging the authorities Jesus took pains to avoid arrest until the Passover by staying outside Jerusalem and holding the Last Supper in secret; clear, in other words, that Jesus timed his trial and execution to coincide with the Passover which commemorates the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt. And just as the Exodus told of the Jews' escape from enslavement, so, claims the New Testament, did the death of Jesus vouchsafe an escape for all humanity from enslavement to sin, guilt and death. Instituting the Eucharist shortly before allowing himself to be crucified at Passover therefore conveyed an unmistakeable message within first century Jewish culture: That Jesus understood himself to be, “dying for our sins.”
Jesus Gave Plausible Teaching on God and Morality
On God. Jesus taught that God is the all powerful, all knowing and morally perfect creator and sustainer of the world—an understanding of God consistent with that of philosophical theology. He also taught the great love of God for sinful human beings who in turn should love, rely on and worship God. All of this is clearly reflected in the parables of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin, along with his explicit statements to the same effect: That God loves man more than the lilies and the birds on whom he also bestows love. And all this, in turn, is consistent with the omnibenevolence of God.
In Chapter 22 we saw that if God exists and is all powerful and all loving God is necessarily a Trinity. And Jesus is reported to have said things which insinuate just this. It is no objection to this doctrine that Jesus did not teach it explicitly by saying, for example, “God is a Trinity.” For if a claim by Jesus to be God Incarnate would have been misunderstood before his Crucifixion and Resurrection so, a fortiori, would a claim that God was a Trinity have been misunderstood; mistaken, almost certainly, for the polytheism held by ordinary Greeks and Romans. Nevertheless, there are two insinuations made by Jesus which provided the Church with material to develop the doctrine.
Firstly, while implying his divinity, Jesus sharply differentiated himself from God the Father. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” Luke reports Jesus as saying, “and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Secondly, there is much in the New Testament about the role and personhood of the Holy Spirit. Mark and Matthew report Jesus seeing the Spirit descend on him in the form of a dove during his baptism and thereafter claim the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. The disciples themselves could not have known of the latter unless Jesus himself had told them and it seems that the Spirit was recognized at his baptism only by Jesus himself. Acts tells of the guidance of the Holy Spirit in spreading the Gospel. And John reports Jesus as teaching his disciples that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church after Jesus is no longer among them in bodily form. In that passage Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Advocate” and also with the personal pronoun he. And there is, finally, the command of Jesus at the end of Matthew to baptise “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” which denotes that the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is equal in status to God the Father.
On Love and Forgiveness. It is also consistent with the moral perfection and the moral authority of God that Jesus taught us to show unconditional love for each other and to forgive each other for wrongdoing, “not seven times but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,” as Matthew reports Jesus saying. This is the obvious application of the Parable of the Two Servants and the Lord’s Prayer in which we are enjoined to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.” In other words, to avoid hypocrisy by forgiving others before ourselves seeking the forgiveness of God. That, above all else, we should love one another is the central theme of the Sermon on the Mount. And asked to summarise his message, Jesus declares, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
On Morality. Jesus seems to have endorsed the Old Testament teaching contained in the Ten Commandments concerning the minimum moral requirements of a good human life: To worship God alone, respect our parents, refrain from theft, murder, adultery and lying and the importance of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are also important elements of his teaching. However, Old Testament also contains detailed Jewish laws concerning ritual and sacrifice which the Church (inspired, as it claimed, by the Holy Spirit) taught Christians need no longer conform to. In doing so they understood themselves to be acting in the spirit of the teachings of Jesus and Jesus himself taught that following him was more important than conforming to exact details of ritual. I noted earlier that, when asked to summarise his teaching, Jesus declared the two greatest commandments were, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And then, critically, Jesus adds, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Paul, understanding the point, compendiates it in seven words: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Both the teachings of Jesus on basic morality and the interpretation of those teachings by the Church are therefore consistent and plausible.
In Chapter 21, we also saw that God may create obligations to help us form the habit of doing what is supererogatorily good. When a parent tells a child to do the shopping for a sick neighbour the parent makes a nonobligatory good action obligatory in the hope that the child will develop a habit of doing good beyond what is obligated and so become a morally exemplary person. And Jesus certainly created some moral obligations of this kind. For example, during his discussion of the Old Testament command to “Love your neighbour as yourself,” Jesus was asked, “And who is my neighbour?” and in reply told the parable of the Good Samaritan with its clear message that our neighbour is anyone at all with whom we are in contact. So interpreted the Command is very demanding and presses us to conform to the standard of morality which a morally perfect God would want to become natural to us. And this, too, is consistent with what a morally perfect God would be likely to teach and so evidence of a kind we would expect if Jesus were God Incarnate.
On the End of the World and the Afterlife And finally: It was noted at the start of Chapter 26 that while God has good reason for allowing humans to suffer he has equally good reason to place sensible limits upon that suffering—both by placing a limit on the duration of a human life (and so on the suffering that a human being can experience or cause) and also by one day bringing the whole world to an end. And Jesus indeed taught that, sooner or later, there would be a Parousia, or end of the world, followed by a Last Judgment. This second teaching entails that human beings will enter into different final states according to the moral character they freely formed during their earthly life—a subject discussed in Chapter 26 and, with the careful qualifications made there, also something we might expect God to do. [3]
Jesus Founded a Church
It was noted in Chapter 21 that since the human life of God Incarnate would be of limited duration he would need to ensure that his message was passed on to future generations and the obvious way of doing this would be to found a worldwide institution or church. At the end of Matthew, Jesus tells the Apostles to, “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them everything I have commanded you.” This suggests, plainly enough, that Jesus was entrusting the community he had formed with the task of taking his message to the world.
Within the context of first century Judaism there are indications that this community was intended to have institutional character. For instance: That there were twelve Apostles is recorded throughout the New Testament and fixed so firmly in the minds of its authors that after Judas betrayed Jesus and only eleven remained they continued to refer to them as “the Twelve.” Israel, meanwhile, had traditionally had twelve tribes deriving from twelve leaders. And so any Jewish prophet who founded a community of twelve leaders with a sacrificial ceremony had to be understood as founding a “New Israel.” The sacrificial ceremony was, of course, the Eucharist and all subsequent Christian communities regularly met to celebrate it in keeping with what Jesus had instructed them to do.
Moreover, Matthew twice records Jesus saying, “Whatever you bind on earth with be bound in Heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven” which suggests that the Church would continue the teachings of Jesus. And there are, finally, various passages throughout the Gospels in which Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide the Church after his departure. Thus John reports Jesus saying, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.” And Matthew closes with Jesus promising, “I am with you always until the end of the age.”
Conclusion
It has been my concern in this chapter to show that the life of Jesus satisfies the five initial criteria discussed in Chapter 21. And we have now seen that the evidence we have is the evidence we would expect if Jesus had lived a perfect life filled with suffering, claimed to be divine and an atonement for human sin, given plausible teachings and founded a church. We come now to the sixth and last criterion; namely, that on the evidence it is plausible to suppose that God affixed his signature to the life of Jesus by raising him from the dead.
[1] See Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? (2008).
[2] The Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as coming as "a high priest" through the "greater and more perfect tent not made with hands."
[3] While Jesus refused to name an exact date when the end of the world, or "Parousia," would occur, his followers expected it to happen very soon. However, as Swinburne notes, "there is no good reason to suppose that in the final days of his life or after his Resurrection Jesus himself expected the Parousia to happen soon." On the contrary, the institution of the Eucharist implied a continued belief in Church organisation after his death and all the remarks attributed to him after his death concern his commissioning of the disciples to convert the whole world through the non-miraculous process of evangelism—something that would clearly take a very long time.