The burning bush on trial

Dear Friends,

Jesus’s egotheism…it’s not just for the Gospel of John anymore!

Open series outline: Going for the jugular

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The Narnia guy proposes a trilemma

Chronicles of Narnia author C. S. Lewis famously argued that we need to stop patting Jesus on the head. I keep running across his argument in various books, and recently decided it was finally time to give it center stage.

It goes like this (note the three choices in bold…that’s why it’s called a trilemma):

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teach, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about HIs being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (1)

And since I’m still considering this blog post as part of my Resurrection studies, I would also ask: How much credence should we give to the teachings of a guy who repeatedly claims He’s going to rise again (2), but then dies….without rising again?

“Ah, but what if Jesus didn’t actually claim to be God?” the critic asks.

Well, my friends, it turns out that, yes, Jesus went there.

Dr. Blomberg pivots his book around it

The latest book I’ve been browsing is called The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, by Dr. Craig Blomberg (1987).

Blomberg presents Lewis’s trilemma at the beginning of the book, but points out one of the most common rebuttals: The Gospels are not a reliable record of what Jesus said. After attempting to demonstrate said reliability throughout the book, he then revisits the trilemma at the end and declares it justified.

For the rest of this post, we’ll briefly skim the surface of Blomberg’s argument and consider an opposing view. This was quite a fascinating study for me…I hope you enjoy it!

A few surprises

Late in the book, Blomberg offers an unexpected comment about German Bible scholars (emphasis mine):

“German scholarship, so often criticized as promoting extremely radical theories, has actually produced several of the chief proponents of this new openness to the trustworthiness of the gospel records” (page 246).

One of those proponents is Martin Hengel, and in a moment, we’ll hear from Hengel himself.

But first, have you ever heard that the Gospels are just rehashings of ancient Greek or other mythologies? Then you might have another surprise coming. A few pages earlier (239), Blomberg quotes another noted German Bible scholar named W. G. Kümmel (emphasis mine):

“Viewed as a literary form, the Gospels are a new creation. They are in no way lives after the manner of Hellenistic biographies, since they lack the sense of internal and external history (as in lives of heroes), of character formation, of temporal sequence, and of the contemporary setting. Neither do the Gospels belong to the genre, memoirs, in which the collected stories and sayings from the lives of great men are simply strung together. Nor do they belong to the genus, miracle stories, in which the great deeds of ancient wonder-workers are glorified in a more or less stylized manner.”

So, the eminent scholar (Kümmel) emphatically rejects the ever-popular microwaved-mythology theory of the Gospels (and BTW, Lewis lodges his own objection to the legend theory of the Gospels, based on his formidable expertise as an Oxford literary historian (3)).

So, what is this new creation?

Blomberg then helpfully asks the next logical question, which is: What previous genre is closest to this new genre of the Gospels, even if significant differences remain? He turns at this point (page 239) to the aforementioned Hengel, who “maintains that the Gospels should be compared to that form of ancient biography which supplied a ‘relatively trustworthy historical report‘”.

Now, admittedly, a relatively trustworthy historical report can’t be expected to get all the details right. So, you may object to my usage of this Hengel quote, since I’m a Christian and believe the Scripture cannot be broken. But you have to keep in mind what my current contention is; if the Gospels are even “a relatively trustworthy historical report”, never mind infallible, then it’s reasonable to actually believe the accounts that are repeated over and over in the Gospels, especially the non-miraculous ones. And someone claiming to be God is not a miraculous event.

So, your question now might be…does Jesus claim over and over in the gospels to be God? Let’s find out!

Jesus 2.0 or Jesus from the get-go?

A contemporary heavy hitter of New Testament scholarship, the Princeton-trained atheist Dr. Bart Ehrman, favors the Jesus 2.0 theory (4): although Mark (writer of the earliest Gospel) sees Jesus as a divine being, Jesus Himself doesn’t claim divinity until you get to John (the latest Gospel). Therefore, the divinity claims in John were probably a later addition, and do NOT represent Jesus’s actual self-image.

(BTW, if you want to see those divinity claims in John, see (5) and scroll almost to the end).

So I looked at Mark for myself (with some hints from Blomberg) and was able to easily dismantle Ehrman’s position (at least in my own mind!). To wit:

Definite burning-bush vibes

[Mar 13:6 KJV] 6 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am [Christ]; and shall deceive many.

See how “Christ” is bracketed in that verse? That means the KJV translators suggested this word as an addition to complete the thought. And in a parallel passage in Matthew 24:5, “Christ” appears without brackets, meaning it was actually in the original Greek; so the translator’s suggestion in Mark 13:6 is reasonable.

However, notice what happens if you read Mark 13:6 without “Christ”; suddenly, Jesus is claiming the appellation of “I AM”!!!

But no, Jesus didn’t claim to be God in Mark 😉

How hard do you have to work to miss this?

[Mar 14:61-64 KJV] 61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, ART THOU THE CHRIST, THE SON OF THE BLESSED? 62 AND JESUS SAID, I AM: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? 64 Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

Granted, Jesus does not say “I am God” here, but He never says those exact words in John either. So what is He saying in Mark 14:61-62? First of all, He claims the title of “Christ”. And according to Matthew 22:41-46, Jesus considered “Christ” to be “Lord”. Secondly, Jesus claims to be THE Son of THE Blessed. Seems you have to work VERY hard to make “Blessed” in this verse not refer to God. And if you can’t pull that off, then you have a real problem on your hands; Jesus is here claiming to be THE Son of God. That was the same claim He made in John 5:16-18 which prompted the Jews to pick up stones to stone Him. And, sure enough, His claim in Mark 14:62 prompts the Jews to…wait for it…condemn Him to execution!

But no, Jesus didn’t claim to be God in Mark 😉

Matthew! Don’t forget about Matthew!

But it’s not just Mark. Yet another synoptic (i.e., not John) Gospel has Jesus making the very claims…

[Mat 11:27 KJV] 27 All things are delivered unto me of MY FATHER: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and [he] to whomsoever the Son will reveal [him].

…which are treated in John as claims of Godhood (i.e., “egotheism”, as I recently learned)!

[Jhn 5:17-18 KJV] 17 But Jesus answered them, MY FATHER worketh hitherto, and I work. 18 Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but SAID ALSO THAT GOD WAS HIS FATHER, MAKING HIMSELF EQUAL WITH GOD.

But no, Jesus didn’t claim to be God in Matthew 😉

Honest, I tried

I figure it’s impossible for someone of Ehrman’s background to be unaware of the verses I cite above. However, his interpretation of these verses appears to be behind a paywall on his blog. Undeterred, I plan to read his book How Jesus Became God, but for now I will just have to wonder what his response is. If you already know how critics of Jesus’s divinity respond to these verses, let me know.

One thing I did notice in (4) is that Ehrman doesn’t even admit that Jesus claimed to be God in John’s narrative. Ehrman admits only that the narrative has Jesus claiming to be a “divine being”. It seems rather desperate to me, especially when John 5:18 explicitly says that the Jews understood Jesus to be “making himself equal with God”. If the Jews’ understanding was incorrect, wouldn’t Jesus have told them so, as they stood there with stones ready to kill Him??

Whom say ye that I am?

This question from Matthew 16 continues to echo down through the ages. So much of your inner peace will depend on how you answer this question each day, in your thoughts, words and actions.

Jesus didn’t carve out space for Himself to be a “wonderful teacher”. He repeatedly claimed to be God, repeatedly claimed He would rise again,  and then He….either backed up His claims and thus deserves our worship, or came up short and showed Himself to be a liar or a lunatic.

I will close with a truncated account (6) of Cambridge-educated classics, philosophy and theology scholar John Rist’s journey from agnosticism to “thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”, via the trilemma.

“A study of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark convinced him that the compilation of Matthew was to be dated before 70 A.D./C.E., and so he became convinced that ‘the full range of Christian beliefs must go back to the very earliest followers of Jesus, and in all probability to Jesus himself. The solution that either Jesus was a lunatic or his earliest followers were all blatant liars again seemed the only alternative possibility if their claims were false…. I had to decide only whether the totality of Jesus’ recorded behavior looked like that of a madman; it was not difficult to see that it did not.'”

Yes, Jesus went there.

God bless, and thanks for reading!

TFOTF

Links/references:

(1) C. S. Lewis as quoted on page 257 in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, by Craig Blomberg (1987)

(2) Jesus claimed He would rise again

(3) Lewis v. legend theory

(4) Ehrman vs. Williams

(5) Lots of verses where Jesus said He was God

(6) John Rist on Wikipedia