Is Jesus God?

And that’s where they came up with what’s called the hypostatic union, where Jesus is 100% God, but Jesus is 100% human. How does that work? Shut up. Doesn’t make a ton of sense. It makes enough sense that we can threaten people if they don’t agree with it. And so it is.

The institution of the church is the only reason that the concept of the Trinity survived, because without the Roman Empire and all of the might and the coercion and the force behind it, it would have gone the way of the dodo long ago. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Rocking and rolling, man. I think this is. We’re. We’re delving into one that’s going to be a. A powder keg.

Yeah, we’re getting.

We’re getting into the good stuff here.

This is on. On social media. This is where I get the most pushback from folks, so.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. Gods, it’s surprising. Like, it’s not. It’s not that it causes, like, the biggest ruckus, but the people who are usually on my side about a lot of stuff when it comes to this will be like, but I’m. I’m still right, so.

All right, everybody, prepare to push back. This is going to be a fun one. And we’ll start with the. The. The first one. Look, I’m going to start us off with an idea. And it is an idea that is so fundamental to so many Christians’ religious cosmology, that to say otherwise seems absurd. And so before I present that, maybe you should just say it.

All right, let’s see it.

Okay. He said it. That means we’re live. We’re diving in.

The monkey has danced.

Dance, monkey. Here’s the idea. The idea is. So you actually came to me when we were discussing it the other night. And then. Yes, you came and visited me three times. And now.

Visions by night.

Yeah, now. Now I. I believe in Christmas. No, what you said was.

I thought you were going, now I’m digging up gold plates from a hill. But then you. You took it a different direction.

I went Dickens instead of Joseph Smith. So there we go. The idea. What. What you said was, let’s talk about the idea of if Jesus is God in the Book of John . So I took that to mean, when I first thought about that, I was like, aha, Jesus is God in all the other books. And John’s the one that’s like this crazy outlier that doesn’t seem to think Jesus is God. And then I looked into it and I went, oh, oops, I’m completely wrong. John’s the one. John is like, yeah, the place when you look up an article of is Jesus God? You’re gonna get citations to John all the way down. So this. So I feel like, Dan, you’ve got a tall order in front of you in.

Telling us how Jesus isn’t God in the Book of John .

Yeah, it is. It’s gonna be. It’s gonna be a ride.

It’s gonna be a ride. Let’s start off with John, Chapter one, verse one. We’re starting right at the top of John as.

As the great poet once said, en arche, or in the beginning. Let’s start with the beginning, John 1:1 , which in Greek is en arche. En arche en ho logos, in the beginning was the word kai ho logos en pros ton theon. And the word was pros ton. Theon means next to with beside God. And the word theon there has the definite article ton, which means the God. In Greek, you normally. If you’re referring to a specific person or thing or place, you have to include a definite article. In English, we just have the. In Greek, you had a few different ones. But anyway, that is God the Father, that is the God of Israel. And then you have the third clause in John 1:1 , kai theos en ho logos, which is translated in the KJV and most translations. And the word was God. It doesn’t say that.

It doesn’t say that. And it is.

I’m even looking at the NRSV. Yes, and it still says. And the word was God.

Yes, and it doesn’t say that. And it is the. And this is the part that. That really infuriates people. It is the academic consensus of Greek grammarians that it does not say that. So even the. The very same Greek grammarians people appeal to. To insist that Jesus is God will say, this is not identifying Jesus as the very God of Israel. And here’s why there’s no definite article here. The word theos comes before the to be verb. This is what’s called a copula or a x is y sentence, where they’re equating two things. And the word God comes before the verb, and the word comes after the verb. And in this kind of sentence, if there is a noun before the to be verb that is either has already been mentioned in close connection or is well known, and both of those things are true of God, then it will take the definite article.

So if this were a reference to the God of Israel, it would say kai ho theos en ho logos. And it simply does not. And there is no manuscript that is thought to be anywhere near original.

That says that.

So I am, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna, I’m gonna read the whole thing in English because you broke it up a lot with the, with, with the Greek. So the whole thing says in the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God. Now when we say the word, we’re not talking about the bird. The bird is not the word.

In this case, that doesn’t happen until the 60s, I think.

Right. We’re talking about Jesus. Jesus is the word that we are talking about.

Right. The word become flesh.

Right, let’s get back to that. So what you, the, the, the grammar thing that you just said went completely over my head.

Okay, so we’ve got. When it says the word was with God, that means the word was with.

The God of Israel was next to or adjacent. Was God of Israel adjacent?

Yeah. And, and the use of theos in the final clause, however, is qualitative.

Right.

It’s not definite. So it’s not a reference to the God of Israel. It is a reference to the qualities possessed by deity.

So the word was godlike or God.

Godlike. God. Well, it’s tricky because I, I’ve said the best translation would probably be the word was deity.

And so the idea being the word was divine or the word was. And this is still within the realm of, of plausibility. The word was a God.

Right.

Now a lot of people that, that’s how the New World Translation renders it. And, and a lot of people really don’t like that translation, and I am among them. But the idea is not Jesus is the God of Israel. The idea is the qualities that define deity. Jesus has those qualities.

So more than just being divine, the qualities of a God, which would be.

I would argue, would be what constitutes. It means to be divine. But there, there’s a. And, and so Daniel Wallace, who was a, was a very well-known Greek grammarian and is, is a Christian scholar, he has pointed out this, this has to be qualitative. It is not definite. But then he goes on to argue here’s how it’s still Trinitarian. He argues that Jesus is not the God of Israel. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity. And so it’s not that Jesus encapsulates all that God is. It’s that Jesus is another person of the Trinity. Which is, which is an argument that requires the logic of the Trinity. The notion of consubstantiality, the notion that God exhausts the category of deity, that you can have no deity apart from God. These are all assumptions that would develop between the 2nd and the 5th century CE as the Trinity developed.

Okay, but calm down because we’re going to get to that later in the show.

Yeah, we’re going to get to that later in the show. But what, but these assumptions, consubstantiality, these other things did not exist when the Gospel of John was written. The Gospel, the author of the Gospel of John , using this word qualitatively, as they are demonstrably doing, could not have been trying to say that Jesus was the second person of the Trinity because no such concept existed at the time. Okay, what the author of the Gospel of John is saying is that Jesus was deity, Jesus was divine. They’re trying to get close to saying that Jesus was God without saying Jesus was God, because in this time period, Jesus had some kind of very special relationship to God that they hadn’t really figured out how to articulate yet. They didn’t understand was still in kind of the realm of rhetoric. It had not yet been systematized, it had not yet been rationalized, and they had not come to an agreement on what exactly the nature of Jesus’s relationship to God was.

Does. Is there a sense in it? Because, and I don’t, I don’t want to be. I don’t want any Christians to be offended by this comparison. But like, you know, the. We’re in Greek times, there are plenty of examples of like a deity father, a God father, having a half mortal child, and then it becoming a, you know, a demigod, you know, a being with God qualities that is not a full God or whatever.

Right.

Is there any, any hint of that in this or is that just not even referenced?

Not really. Because while John is, is very well versed in, in Greek philosophy, not. He’s not very concerned with Greek mythology. Okay, so the concept of God here is not a Zeus concept. It is more like a Platonic Stoic concept, which is relevant because they had these ideas about the. The Word is the idea of the Word of God. And John is a little closer to the idea of the spoken word. Something that is a part of me that comes out of me that is an extension of my agency and my will and things like that, but is also semi autonomous. It is out there. So there’s a notion called emanation theology, that the Logos, the Word, is an emanation from God. And this is more common in later centuries as well. But we see something kind of similar in Philo, a Jewish author from the beginning of the first century CE, who also talks about the Logos as an extension of God, but also refers to the Logos as a second God.

And so the, the relationship of John’s theology to the Greek world is closer to Greek philosophical contemplation than it is to, to Greek mythology. But it’s. This is not to say that John is just stealing things from the Greco Roman world. It is. What we have here is Greco Roman period Judaism, which is both founded on Judaism while also accommodating Greco Roman thought. So it’s, it’s a combination of both kind of moving forward, trying to figure out how we’re going to think about these things. And, and John’s going to move from the beginning with kind of a more vague idea of Jesus, Jesus’s relationship with God, to a clearer expression of Jesus’s relationship with God. But it doesn’t come from the narrator and it doesn’t come from Jesus comes from a third party. So let’s move on.

Let’s stay. But I want. I mean, I’m going to stay in chapter one, because just 18 verses down. In verse 18, it says no one has ever seen God. It is only the Son himself, God who is close to the Father’s heart and who has made him known.

So this is your favorite translation, or the one that you often, that you often turn to. This is the NRSV.

He says himself. God.

Yeah. I have blown your mind.

Well, I’m looking at the NRSV, unless I need to look at the updated.

I mean, I’m in the NRSV. Updated. Yeah.

Oh, it’s. That’s the update. They changed that. All right, hang on a minute. I’m about to get real upset. Okay. Yeah, this is.

Oh, so. So if I go to the NRSV.

So this was up until last year. This is how the NRSV read.

No one has ever seen God. It is God the Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. Now this, now this is outright nonsensical too, because here’s the problem. This passage has a variant reading in the manuscripts, and it either reads monogenes, which would be the traditionally only begotten son, but would really mean unique or only son. And then there’s another tradition that reads monogenes theos. So only or unique God. So it’s either one or the other. And what the NRSV seems to be trying to do is split the difference. Say, let’s include both of them.

Let’s shoot right between them.

Yeah. And it’s complex because the difference between these two in the earliest periods of the transmission of New Testament manuscripts would be the difference of a single letter because they used what are called nomina sacra, sacred names, holy names. So divine names and divine titles were abbreviated. And frequently what it was was the first and the last letter of the word. So Jesus Christ, if you saw Jesus’s name, it’s iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon, sigma. And so you would just have the iota and the sigma, I S. And they would be brought together, and then there would be a little line over the top of them indicating this is an abbreviation for something. And so that’s one. That’s one of the nomina sacra. So this phrase would be reduced to just a couple of letters. And so the difference would be between a theta and an upsilon.

Those aren’t letters that are easily confused. But in this whole title, it would come down to one letter. So it would not be surprising for that to get mixed up. Now, Monogenes Theos would be the only time that phrase ever occurs anywhere. John uses monogenes several times throughout the Gospel of John . And so that would be, if we’re going by consistency, if we’re going by what the author uses elsewhere, it would have to be unique son. Now, there’s a principle of textual criticism that they call lectio difficilior, or the more difficult reading. And the principle there is that usually, not always, but usually a change is implemented where someone tries to make a reading simpler.

Right.

It is rare that the change goes from a simple reading to a more difficult reading. And so the argument goes, well, Monogenes Theos is, would be the more difficult reading since it doesn’t agree with anything else. Therefore, that must be the earlier reading. Now, there. There are two problems with this. And one is that all that helps you figure out is between two manuscripts which manuscript likely has the earlier reading. That does not necessarily mean that was the original reading, because that’s requiring. Requiring we accept that the author actually said the only God. Jesus is the only God here, which would conflict with the entire rest of the Gospel of John . And the other problem is when we’re getting into the Christological controversies, Monogenes Theos would be the more useful reading for a lot of Christians. And so it is no longer, I don’t think lectio difficilior is in play in 3rd 4th century CE.

And so there, there are a handful of different arguments, but basically it’s not settled what is supposed to be here. And so John 1:18 , I don’t think anybody, you, I don’t think you can appeal to that as proof that John calls Jesus God.

There’s a, there’s a. Because, because original, like the ear, the earliest texts that we have disagree with each other on what it says.

Yeah. And I, and I think the, the earliest one says the earliest one that we have. I. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this, so I don’t know which one is earliest, but. But yeah, in short, when we go look at the earliest manuscripts that we have, I think one of them may say Theos and a couple others say Huios. And ultimately Huios becomes the one that everybody settles on. But there’s an argument to make that Theos was original. And so Bruce Metzger published this book back in the seventies, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. And basically he’s going through all of the main textual issues, textual problems. And the entry on here says, oh, yeah, lectio difficilior says that Theos is probably earlier than Huios. But then there’s. The editors of the volume have a little note saying this is not likely because this would require the author actually have written this.

And, and that’s just doesn’t make any sense. And so it’s, it’s debated. It’s controversial. If someone, one is dogmatically defending the deity of Christ in the deity of Christ in the sense of the Trinity, then they’re going to be like, oh, that makes more sense. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And if somebody is not committed to that, then the huios reading is going to make more sense. And so I, I think the huios reading obviously makes more sense because I am not dogmatically committed to defending the notion that Jesus is God. No.

Although if after this episode, people will accuse you of dogmatically defending the opposite position.

Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah, Well, I get accused of that no matter what. Yeah. So.

All right, I’m moving on. Let’s go to chapter eight of John. Way down at the bottom of chapter eight, verse 58, it says Jesus said to them, very, very, very verily. Truly, I tell you, before Abraham was I am.

I am. Yeah, this one’s fun because this, yeah, because I am.

We recognize from, from the the Hebrew Bible as being a reference to a name for God, right?

Kinda yeah, a name for God. There are levels to this. But let’s start with I am. I am is something that we find. There are two different groups of seven I am statements in the Gospel of John and in Greek this is ego eimi. Now the thing about ego eimi is is this is a loaded phrase. This is a coded reference to God’s name, but it’s not actually God’s name. This is a reference to a statement in Exodus 3:14 which in the Hebrew Moses asked God who should I say sent me? And God says in Hebrew I will be what I will be or I am what I am. Tell them ehyeh sent you. Tell them I am sent you. Now in the, in the Greek translation, the Septuagint I am what I am is actually translated into a sentence I am the one who is or I am the being one. And then you say again, tell them ego eimi I am sent you.

But ego eimi is also the way that another Hebrew phrase is rendered in other parts of the Bible, specifically Deutero-Isaiah but Deuteronomy I think has it as well where God says I am He. There are a bunch of places where oh the per. The. The one who can do this, the one who can do that, tell them I am he or something like that. And that is ani hu in Hebrew but that also gets translated into Greek in the Septuagint as ego eimi. So we’ve taken these two different kind of divine self identifications and used the same Greek phrase to render them. And so this is now pregnant with import regarding the divine name, even though neither of them is actually Adonai and neither of them is the Tetragrammaton, but it’s a coded reference to that. So John has Jesus saying I am, I am the good shepherd, I am the door, I am the vine, the true vine, all this kind of stuff. And, and that’s ego eimi each time. And so here we have before Abraham was and most translations have before Abraham was comma I am.

And then the they get mad at him and cast stones at him. And so there, there are two grounds on which people argue that this is identifying Jesus as God. The first is Jesus saying I am is like Jesus saying I am God. Now it’s not that it is Jesus kind of winking at them saying look at me. Using this coded reference to the divine name. And then they get upset at him. And I’ve argued, I argue in, in my book that the divine name was a communicable vehicle of divine agency. This is how you activated or enlivened the standing stone. The divine image was by writing the divine name on it. And provided the materials were right, provided the authority was right. When you impose the divine name that charged the, the material media with the divine presence, which allowed the material media to presence the deity manifest the presence, the power, the authority of the deity.

And so in Greco-Roman period Judaism, we begin to see figures popping up in stories that are angels, that are exalted humans, that are figures who are not God but have God’s name and so are allowed to do the things that only God is supposed to do. And this starts in the Hebrew Bible with the angel of the Lord where we have these stories like when God appears to Moses in Exodus 3 , verse 2 says it’s the angel of the Lord. But in verse 6, the angel says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Originally that story was about God themselves visiting Moses. And somebody scribbled in malak before Adonai to kind of obscure God’s presence. No, no, no, it was kind of an angel. It was kind of God. And so we’ve got this tradition of an angel that’s going around saying, “I am God,” but is not God. And so in Exodus 23 , God says, “Look, I’m sending an angel before you to guide you on the way.

Don’t tick him off, don’t disobey him, because he does not have to forgive your sins because my name is in him." And I argue that this is a way to rationalize what’s going on with this angel who’s going around saying, “I am God.” They can say that because my name is in him. They are the authorized possessor or bearer of my name. And we see this in the Greco-Roman period. There’s an angel named Yahoel who tells Abraham in the Apocalypse of Abraham, “I’m able to do all these things by virtue of the Divine Name which dwells in me.” And then we have Metatron, who is confused for Adonai by somebody. There’s a verse where somebody says, “Hey, it says, ‘That’s Adonai.’” And. And the rabbi says, “No, no, that’s just Metatron.” But Metatron has God’s name. And so the text can refer to Metatron as God. And then we have the Son of Man. And the tradition talks about being endowed with the divine Name before the creation of the earth.

And this is why all the world will bow down and worship the Son of Man. And so there’s a tradition already in place whereby somebody is the authorized possessor or bearer of the divine name. And because of that, they’re allowed to do what only God is supposed to do, be able to do. And they’re allowed to assert identification with God. And so my, my argument is that by giving this little wink and saying ego eimi, if you guys know what I mean, Jesus is saying, “Guess who’s the possessor of the divine name? Guess who is the authorized bearer.” And this is a claim to a type of deity. This is a claim to being this exalted human or this name-bearing angel. And this is akin to saying I’m divine, which is a type of blasphemy. And so a lot of people will say they wouldn’t have tried to stone him for any other reason but claiming to be God.

But blasphemy includes so many more things than just claiming to be God, right?

Yes, that makes sense to me.

I’m glad it makes sense to you. It doesn’t seem to compute for, for an awful lot of folks. But yeah, just, you know, just saying, hey, God sucks, that would be a type of blasphemy. Any kind of trying to denigrate, demean, or lower God or even just God’s name is a form of blasphemy.

Well, and he’s saying this to a group of, of rabbis, right? He’s saying this to a group of. Is that what it is? It’s a group.

Well, here. Well, John tends to kind of reduce all of the different groups to just the Jews.

The Jews, yeah.

Because John is, John is the most anti-Semitic of, of the gospels.

Oh, okay.

And tends to be pretty, tends to, to speak pretty demeaningly. That’s true about the Jews.

So yes, it says, and then the Jews said to him, you are not yet 50 years old and have you seen Abraham? And he said, and that’s when he says, before Abraham was I am. Does it in the, in the, in the Greek because. Because before Abraham was I am. When you, when you have the, the past tense of was and then the present tense of am, right. Is it, is it basically the same in the Greek?

It is, it is very, very similar.

Makes it stand out in that way that, you know, the phrase I am isn’t just a, a reference to the past, but is a, is a reference to something greater or something different.

That’s, that’s what the consensus view is, is that this is just grammatically unusual enough to be a cue.

To this. There’s something more going on here. Wink, wink. However, there. There are some folks who will argue that the I am could be. Could mean I was and continue to be.

And so there is an argument to make for that. I don’t think it’s particularly strong. It’s certainly a minority view among grammarians. But. But yeah, I would argue that it. It is just. It is unusual enough in Greek to be kind of like English, where they’re like, what’s going on there?

And what’s going on there is. Is Jesus is saying, hey, guess who got the divine name.

Wasn’t you.

And then they picked up stones and he had to hide and run away.

Right.

Okay, I’m gonna move on. This is to chapter. Where am I in chapter 10. Yeah, chapter 10, chapter 10, verse 30, says very clearly, the Father and I are one. Case closed, you lose.

Yeah. So this is something that people like to appeal to, to show that God and Jesus are one. There’s a. There’s. The question, though, is what does it mean to be one? Because there you can conceive of a lot of different ways that two different people could be one. I mean, it talks about how a man will leave his father and mother and cling onto his wife, and they will be one flesh.

And like, not literally, but. So we’ve got to ask the question of what does it mean to be one?

Luckily, when it comes to this podcast, you and I are one.

Yeah, in a lot of different ways, except for probably the ways you’re thinking of. And here your is a reference to the listener or viewer and. Or both. So luckily, we. We have some. We have a clue here in John 10 , because at the end of John 10:38 , Jesus says, the Father is in me and I in Him. So. So this. This seems to be a reference to how they’re one. He’s in me, I’m in him. This is. This is a oneness that needs further exploration. Luckily, we get further explanation. Exploration and explanation in John 17 , the intercessory prayer. We have three different spots in the intercessory prayer where Jesus is praying for his followers. And he says in verse 11 in the middle of it.

I’ll start off. Where’s the NRSV? Okay. “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me.” Wink, wink. “Your name that you have given me.” So Jesus here is claiming to have the divine name, “so that they may be one, as we are one.”

And then a little further down, I think we’re looking at 21. Yes. “That they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May they also be in us.” So chapter 10 is not talking about a unique kind of oneness, because at the end, Jesus explains, I’m in him, he’s in me. And now here in chapter 17, Jesus is praying that his followers be one with Jesus and God, just like Jesus and God are one. And here we actually go back to the same idea. “They may be in us, I in you, you are in me. They may also be in us.” So whatever oneness Jesus is talking about in John 10:30 is the exact same kind of oneness Jesus prays his followers will achieve with each other and with Jesus and God. And we have it again in verse 22, “the glory that you have given me.”

And this is something that people also will point out. They’ll say, well, Isaiah says, “my glory I do not give to any other.” So obviously, if Jesus has God’s glory, that’s because Jesus is God. No, Jesus says, “you gave me your glory so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them.” So now Jesus is not just in God. Jesus is also in his followers and you and me, that they may be completely one. So the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

It’s everybody in everybody.

Yeah, it is one big— We’re not going to worry about what one big thing it is. But Jesus, or at least the author of the Gospel of John , is explaining what this oneness means. And it is a unity. It is a connection. It is not one being. It is not one substance. That is a much later development.

Well, and even earlier in that same chapter, in chapter 17, verse 3, Jesus explicitly says, “and this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent,” which seems to be a really strong distinction between these two entities.

He’s— He’s— He’s—because one thing he doesn’t say is that they may know you, the other guy that is part of the one true God, of which I am also a part. Just says, “you’re the only true God.” Yeah, I’m not—I’m not a part of this. And back in chapter 10, the— It says they— They try to stone him again. And people will argue, “Ah, ah, there’s the stoning. That means that Jesus was claiming to be God?” No, it just means they thought he committed blasphemy. And saying “God and I are one,” even a kind of unity type of one, would still be considered blasphemy. And then he says, “Well, for which of my good works are you stoning me?” And they said, “Not for a good work, but for blasphemy, because”— And I’m going to read from the NRSV—“because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.” Now. So a lot of people understand this to be the author suggesting that the Jewish folks correctly understood Jesus to be identifying himself as God.

And that’s wrong. Again.

It does seem to say that, Dan.

It seems to say that because you’re reading a poor English translation. Because if you look in the Greek, you are once again missing the definite article. And we have some parallelism going on here. You being man, being human. It’s anthropos. There’s no definite article. So it’s not saying you being the human. It. You being human, as in qualitative, having the, the qualities of, of a human make yourself theon. Which again does not have the definite article. So the parallel would suggest that you being human, make yourself divine. In other words, you having the qualities of a human, are trying to insist that you actually have the qualities of a deity.

Right.

And so it is not identifying Jesus, not saying Jesus trying to make himself the very God of Israel, but just divine. And Jesus’s response verifies that because Jesus quotes Psalms 82 , well, hey guys, your scripture says you are gods, every one of you are gods and sons of the Most High. If he called those people gods, then why are you getting upset with me for saying I’m the Son of God? If they understood Jesus to be saying I’m the God of Israel, his response would be a complete straw man. It would not be addressing their claim. If they are accusing Jesus of making himself a God divine, then his response is perfectly on target. Because they’re saying you’re saying you’re a God. And he says the scriptures say humans are gods. So I’m off the hook because so humans can be gods, and so you’ve got nothing on me. And so the, the argument that Jesus makes is entirely fallacious.

If we understand John 10:33 to be saying Jesus is making himself the very God of Israel, he’s not doing any such thing whatsoever. Right?

All right. You know, the, the last thing that I had was, was from chapter 20, verse 28, it’s doubting Thomas finally, no longer doubting and saying And Thomas answered him, my Lord and my God. Yes, and we don’t have a lot of time for this one, so let’s just, let’s just power through it quick.

Yeah, so, so basically this is an, an adaptation of the Shema. And also Paul talks about, kind of expands the Shema, talks about one Lord and one God. Thomas is referring to Jesus as God. But here, notice it’s not the narrator, it’s not Jesus, it’s somebody else recognizing that Jesus is manifesting the presence of God, which is precisely what divine images do. So you can refer to a divine image as the God this is. And the divine image, if it is sentient, can refer to itself as the God. Go back to Exodus 3 . It’s the angel of the Lord who then says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. So, so Thomas saying my Lord and my God is appealing to this idea that Jesus is functioning like a divine image. Jesus as the authorized bearer of the divine, is bearing the presence of God, is manifesting the presence of God, and could even go so far as to identify as God.

But again, there’s still some squishiness here because Jesus is not saying I am God. Jesus is allowing a follower to say that. So there is still a little bit of distance between what’s going on and Jesus actually explicitly identifying as God. So the Trinitarian concept of God is a very different concept from what we have in the Gospel of John . Even though it gets right up next to it, it is not, it does not have the philosophical frameworks available to it yet to assert Jesus is God the way the Trinitarians would later determine.

Well, since you’ve been saying it, Dan, let’s go on to our next segment, because the next thing is Trinity. The Trinity. What does that mean? So, Dan, yes, we’ve got this concept of the Trinity. You keep referring to it. What is it? What are we talking about? Why is it? Why, why have we, I mean it, I, it’s not in the Bible itself. Right? We don’t have, we don’t have the word Trinity. We don’t have any word or even any concept presented that is like what is now believed and understood, believed as and understood to be the Trinity.

Right. My, my argument is that the conceptual package of the Trinity, the framework of the Trinity develops between the 2nd and the 5th centuries CE. We get our most, our kind of main articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and that is where there is a debate over whether or not Jesus. Whether or not there was a time when Jesus didn’t exist and whether or not Jesus is subordinate to the Father or equal to the Father. And Arius is basically defeated. And we sign the Nicene Creed, which argues that this concept, for this concept of consubstantiality. And this is the first time that Christians actually assert this notion of consubstantiality as a whole. The idea being that the Trinity is. Comprises three different persons within the one being that is God.

And we’ll get into a little more detail about that in a moment. But the whole reason this develops is because we’ve got this New Testament that seems to be treating Jesus as having some kind of special relationship with God, but also seems to be distinguishing Jesus from God. And we just finished talking about the Gospel of John , which is coming really, really close to saying Jesus is God without actually having Jesus come out and say it. But then, now that the New Testament has come together, we now have to consider all these other texts, all Paul’s texts. We got to look at the Gospel of Mark , we got to look at all these other texts, and we’ve got to create a unifying framework that makes all of them work together. So how can Jesus be all of these things at the same time? And we’ve got to come up with a framework that is philosophically defensible to the Greco-Roman intelligentsia. Because in this time period, a group of Christians, the, the educated Christians, we now refer to them as apologists, are trying to kind of spread the Gospel among the more educated Greco-Roman populations.

And they need to make it palatable to folks who are educated in Middle and then later Neoplatonic thought, in Stoicism, in Pythagoreanism, in Epicureanism. And there’s kind of this. There are a bunch of different ways people are going about trying to intellectualize the Gospel, which requires this unifying framework. So we have people talking about, well, Jesus seems to be God, but let’s figure out how. And in the previous segment I mentioned that Philo identifies the Logos as a second God. We also have Justin Martyr, one of the early apologists, who’s writing right in the middle of the second century CE, right around 150 CE, who also refers to Jesus as the Logos, as another God. And so in the earliest periods, we’re still kind of trying to figure out how to, to make this work. And we’re using a bunch of different ideas. By the end of the second century, we’ve got this, this word trinity, but we’re not exactly sure how to fill it out.

It’s a little kid in a big oversized suit coat. It just, it’s not, you know, he’s not able to walk without tripping over himself yet. And so what happens is, is we just have a bunch of people in, in texts that they’re writing where they’re, they’re engaging in this kind of dialectic back and forth with imaginary opponents. Sometimes they’re their real opponents, but usually it’s imaginary opponents or they’re at least representing the arguments of real opponents, but probably not in perfectly accurate ways.

Right.

Trying to consolidate all these things and trying to use Greco-Roman philosophical frameworks to make it all fit together. And the main principles we have are, well, we got these three people, we got God, we got Jesus, and we got the Holy Ghost. Now the Holy Ghost is, is kind of an outlier, an afterthought. This is just somebody. It’s like, don’t forget the Holy Ghost. And so people are like, oh, okay, the Holy Ghost too.

Yeah, we may have to do a show about the Holy Ghost because I am very confused about who and, or what that is.

And it’s, and it’s different from text to text exactly what the Holy Ghost is. But yeah, I think that would be, that would be a fun show to do. And so some of the things that, that develop are concerns for, well, one, how many gods are there? And, and pretty quickly it’s like, well, we, we can only recognize one highest God. And so we, you know, we can recognize demons and we can recognize angels and all of these things, but we don’t want to call them gods. They are subordinate, they are contingent. So they don’t deserve that title. And so pretty quickly they decided. Well, because Judaism is well known as kind of the, the only one God religion. And this is one God rhetoric. This is not monotheism as we understand it today. We, we should find a way to make Jesus and God one God, whether it’s through this emanation idea, whether it’s through some other concept.

And, and we get this, this bishop in Alexandria named Arius, who is looking at the New Testament, it says it’s very clear that Jesus is subordinate to God and that Jesus is a creation of God. Which means that there was a time when Jesus didn’t exist and then God created Jesus. And this was actually pretty standard in the third century CE, but by the fourth century CE, we’re exalting Jesus more and more and so it begins to become problematic to say Jesus. There was a time when Jesus didn’t exist and that Jesus is subordinate because one of the main two features of deity is one, that it is eternal, it has always existed, and two, that there is no change, there is no hierarchy, there is no alteration in deity. It is always the same and it can never change. And so it was undermining the attempt to make the gospel palatable to Greco-Roman intelligentsia if their concept was flatly contradicting the received wisdom of Greek philosophy.

And so by the beginning of the 4th century, that’s a problem we call the Council of Nicaea. We get a bunch of bishops together. There are different accounts of how many bishops were there, but in short, Arius and a couple of his buddies are in the minority. They get overruled, they get slapped around. Literally. This is where St. Nicholas is supposed to have slapped Arius.

Oh, Santa Claus, calm down.

We’re giving out gifts and punching heretics and, and we’re all out of gifts. So there’s, there’s an account that suggests that, that Constantine, who is the, the Roman Emperor who has convened the Council of Nicaea, basically he wants his kids to stop fighting, right? So he’s calling a family meeting and he’s just like, I don’t care what you fight. Figure out, figure it out.

And so sorry, you, you mentioned the guys who were the guys that Nicholas slapped. Arius, Arius, and, and what was Arius’s position?

He was the one saying that one, Jesus was subordinate to God the Father, and two, there was a time when Jesus did not exist. And up until around the beginning of the 4th century CE, pretty much everybody would have agreed with him to, to one degree or another. But now it was becoming increasingly problematic. So the majority of bishops were like, no, no, they’re, they’re the same. And you get the hammering out of this concept of homoousios, which is translated as consubstantiality. Basically, the idea is they are equal and co-eternal because they are all of the same substance, right? And so you can’t divide the substance, but you also can’t confuse the persons. And so when, when we think of a person today, we think of a being who also has a psychological unity, a single psychological identity. And what they did was basically divide the idea of the psychological identity and the being and say now that they’re different and one is subordinate or maybe not subordinate, maybe that’s a bad word.

But one, one is internal to the other. We can have multiple psychological identities inhabiting the one being, the one substantial being. And so this was a philosophical way of making this all work. And it was literally imperial might that kept it together because Constantine then said, okay, everybody, sign on the dotted line or you get exiled. And there’s a story that one of the bishops came up and really quickly added a little iota to make it homoiousios, which would be of, like, substance rather than of the same substance. And then, you know, banished.

And so you can’t just sneak in a letter.

Come on, guys, we all know they tried. No, there’s no. We don’t know if. If Santa Claus punched him too, but.

We know, we know he punched him.

But Arius gets exiled and. And this becomes the Nicene Creed. And then we have another controversy that pops up that is settled a century later in the Council of Chalcedon. And that controversy was, okay, Jesus is God, but Jesus was also a human. How’s that work? Is it 50? 50? And, and that’s where they came up with what’s called the hypostatic union, where Jesus is 100% God, but Jesus is 100% human. How does that work? Shut up.

Yeah, it’s.

It’s a mystery. We’re not. It’s. It just is the way it is. And, and what you see in. In these arguments is basically, we just need to make it work. And so we just need to come up with an argument that is plausible enough that everybody can be like, yeah, I can get on board with that. Okay, then get on board with it. Sign right here. Okay. Anybody you see saying anything else, you report them to us. We’re going to exile them, and we’re going to use the empire to enforce this new philosophical framework. Doesn’t make a ton of sense. It makes enough sense that we can threaten people if they don’t agree with it. And so it is the. The institution of the Church is the only reason that the concept of the Trinity survived. Because without the Roman Empire and all of the might and the coercion and the force behind would have gone the way of the dodo long, long ago.

I’m just, you know, one of the questions that comes up for me is did that era, Greco-Roman period, did everything have to be more solid? Did they not have figurative ideas? Because it seems like, you know, in our first segment, we’re talking about John. You know, in John, we’re talking about Jesus using figurative ideas or, you know, ideas of I am God in the way that, like, God is me and you all could be God, and, like, we’re all, you know, we’re all going to be part of God or we’re going to be in God and God’s going to be in us. And like, he’s using language that makes perfect sense to me. If we’re thinking figuratively.

And there’s no reason why we can’t think figuratively about it. It makes sense. Like, throughout the Bible, there’s figurative language all the time.

Did something get more literal in the. In the 4th century or something?

So what happened is the church became part of a powerful institution that had oversight over the entire population. And suddenly the ideas that resonated with different groups and everybody just kind of was drawn to the group or the idea that resonated with them. You now had a powerful social institution that needed to harmonize things and needed everything to work together in order to be able to establish boundaries and in order to be able to say, this one’s in, this one’s out. Because boundary maintenance becomes monumentally important in a. In a circumstance like that where you are. There’s a very strong in group and you are opposed to the out group, and you want to make sure that you know who is who. And so it had to be systematized. It all has to be reduced to something that. That we can draw lines around in a very simple binary way.

And so, yeah, that’s exactly what happened is initially you had your Markan folks who were like, yeah, Jesus is really human. Like, and Jesus is doing this and that, and. And, you know, the Messianic secret. Yay. And then you had your Lukes, and then you had your Matthews, who were the Judaizers, who was like, Law of Moses, man. Yeah, we got to keep it. And. And you had your Johns, who were their own little group of people, and everybody was just happy doing their own thing. But when you all bring. When you bring them all together and you say, this is now one book we need then. And there’s a social institution that is. Has authority over all the people who are associated with this one book. Suddenly, they’re not going to allow them to. To operate, you know, function in their own little corners of this thing. We need to bring it all together. We need unity. And that’s precisely what Constantine was doing, is saying, there’s too much disunity. I don’t care how you fix it, just fix it.

And so that is imposing that unifying framework which results in, well, Greek philosophical ideas are going to be the most efficient and effective means of doing this. Let’s come up with Greek philosophical ideas that are going to allow us to say all the texts fit together and here’s what they are all, they’re all pointing in the same direction, and here’s the thing that they’re pointing at. And don’t ask how it works because we’re just going to exile you. And so it is, it is institutional pressure, imperialism, that is the reason that the Trinity survived in the way it has. The. But, and, and the, the thing that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge is the Trinity is the result of that systematization, that unifying framework. Prior to the unifying framework, when the texts were written, there was no Trinity because no one was forced to try to reduce it to a single conceptual framework.

Everyone was allowed to let it work whatever way resonated with them. And so the author of John had no concept of Jesus as God and anything remotely approximating the way the Trinity would later shake out. Which is why I just. You can’t say that Jesus is God in the Gospel of John , at least in no way, shape or form like the way you say Jesus is God in the Trinity.

Yeah. You know, as an outsider, as a non-believer in this, I look at it and I just don’t see the problem. You know, I feel like God. I feel like Jesus invoking God or like you like to say, you know, sort of housing God’s name or, you know, housing God’s authority in himself. Seems plenty to me. Like this can be a being that has divinity, you know, sort of instilled in him by virtue of his authority, his title, his, his, his sort of, of provenance. But like, it doesn’t feel problematic to me looking at it, for it to be, for, for, for him not to be God himself.

You know what I mean? It feels actually more problematic for him to be God. Like that feels.

Wildly problematic. You’ve created so many more problems than you’ve solved.

Yeah. And, and I, I feel the same way. That’s, that’s probably exactly how it happened is you had, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, that totally get it. And then somebody was like, doesn’t work for me. But then once you have the two of them as part of the same institution and the institution’s like agree, then you gotta, you gotta figure out a way to, to agree which always. Which has one of two ways of working, one per, one defeats the other. Or you create a new third thing that tries to reconcile the two. And that’s what happened. We created the new third thing, which was the Trinity. And Greek philosophy was the way. And, and it was also. They were also arguing with the philosophers and the Gnostics and others. And, and this is how a lot of the doctrines of earlier early Christianity developed was Greek philosophers. Philosophers were like the resurrection. But flesh can’t be eternal.

Flesh is changing. Flesh is. Or it can be divine. Flesh is. It’s coeternal. The material world has always been there, but it’s not divine. Why would you even want back a body that, that decomposed, that was lost at sea, that maybe was eaten by an animal and passed through its digestive system? Why would you want that body back? They were like, this is weird, guys. What are you doing? And they had to be like, well, look, okay, no, all the material world is contingent upon God. God created it out of nothing. Yeah, that’s. That’s what happened. And then they came up with an argument that was like, okay, that’s different, that’s new. I see where you’re going. I want to sign up for your newsletter. And so the idea of creation out of nothing was an invention of the late second century CE. In fact, we can say it was between 170 and 180 CE that we created the doctrine of creation out of nothing in order to respond to criticisms from Greek philosophy.

And so the, the doctrines of, of Christianity develop out of trying to reconcile everything that’s going on under this social institution while also trying to make it sound defensible to the broader intellectual world, which is deeply entrenched in Greek philosophy.

Wow. All right, finally, I think this is a good, a good note to end on. What’s your favorite Trinity metaphor? We got the shamrock. We got the states of water. I like that one. Have you heard that one? You can, you know, solid, liquid, gas.

That’s the, that’s modalism. That’s the heresy of modalism.

There’s the, the, the three-headed dog. That’s a, that’s another Cerberus.

The. I forget what movie it was. Shoot. I forget what movie it is, but there’s, there’s a movie where somebody is kind of going to, to chat with a priest, but is kind of being annoying to him and he’s like, is the Trinity like, is it like Rice Krispies with Snap, Crackle and Pop? And the priest is like, what do you want?

I like, okay, we’re sticking with Snap, Crackle and Pop. That’s it for this week’s show. So if you friends at home would like to write into us about any questions you might have or future ideas for shows please feel free to do so. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com or if you would like to support the show, gain early access to an ad-free version of every episode and also be a part of how this show goes. You can become a patron over on on patreon.com/dataoverdogma that’s it for us. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Is Jesus God?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology