Is Jesus God? This is the all-important question. If He is, then Christianity is true. Period. If not, then Christianity is the biggest, most successful hoax in the history of humanity, and billions of people throughout the ages have been duped into believing a lie. Since Jesus' divinity is of the utmost importance, Christianity's credibility would soar if it can be demonstrated to be probable. But can we do this? Let's see.
We know from the New Testament (John 5:18, Philippians 2:6, 2 Peter 1:1, etc) and secular sources that the early Christians believed that Jesus was God. Pliny the Younger, in a letter to the Roman emperor Trajan, said
"They [Christians]�chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god�"
The second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata, in his book The Death of Peregrinus, refers to Jesus as
"that one whom they [Christians] still worship today, the man in Palestine who was crucified�"
I think that pretty much settles the issue; the early Christians believed that Jesus was God. Now, we have two options: either Jesus claimed that He was God or He didn't. If He did claim to be God, then we have four options: either He really was God, He was insane, He lied, or He meant that we are all God (in some Eastern, pantheistic way). If Jesus never claimed to be God, then the only explanation is that some time after He died, His followers divinized Him and built a whole religion around their "Jesus myth." If all of the alternate theories about Jesus fail to adequately explain the facts, then there's a good possibility that Jesus really is God (although we would, of course, need to look into other issues as well, such as the resurrection, the historical reliability of the New Testament, etc., before we can make an intelligent decision and come to a final conclusion), and Christian apologists try to show that they do fail to adequately explain the facts. So, let's examine the alternate theories and see whether or not they can explain the facts.
I. Jesus Lied
Did Jesus lie? This theory says that Jesus knew that He wasn't God, but He tricked all of His disciples into believing that He was God and that He could perform miracles. After He died, His disciples either hallucinated that He had risen from the dead or had some other similar, life-changing experience and preached it to the world. Then, for the next 2,000 years, people have continued to be fooled by this man from Palestine to this very day.
This theory is deficient for a few reasons.
1) The Jews were fiercely monotheistic, so for Jesus to think that He could trick them into believing that He was God was unrealistic. Even though they kept falling into paganism during Old Testament times, by the first century, they had conquered that fault and were unflinching in their monotheism. In addition, Jesus also knew that the penalty for blasphemy was death and rejection, so there would be no motive for this lie.
2) Nobody would doubt that Jesus was one of the greatest moral preachers of all time. He preached love, compassion, and self-sacrifice, and to say that He lied about being God goes against everything we know about His character.
3) Under Jewish law, a man who was crucified was considered to be cursed by God. When Jesus was crucified, not only did God die, but He died in a way that, to the Jews, meant He was cursed. In addition, after the crucifixion, the apostles would have had to have lied about the resurrection, but they were persecuted and killed for this lie, and people don't normally endure persecution and death for what they know to be false.
4) In addition, how would a lie account for the conversion of skeptics like Paul?
II. Jesus Was Insane
Maybe Jesus sincerely thought that he was God but was mistaken. According to this hypothesis, Jesus was a lunatic who, to use a comparison from C. S. Lewis, was on the level of a guy who thinks he's a poached egg. Jesus sincerely thought that He was God, but He was really a total lunatic whose view of reality was way off the mark.
This theory also fails to adequately explain the facts for a few reasons.
1) In Lee Strobel's interview with Dr. Gary Collins in his book The Case for Christ, Dr. Collins lists several qualities of disturbed individuals: they show inappropriate depression, vehement anger, anxiety, paranoia, they can't carry on logical conversations, they dress oddly, or they're unable to relate socially to others. However, we know that this is the exact opposite of Jesus. He was never irrationally angry, He was a powerful speaker, and He had close relationships with a wide variety of people.
2) In Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli's book the Handbook of Christian Apologetics, they write:
There are lunatics in asylums who sincerely believe they are God. The "divinity complex" is a recognized form of psychopathology. Its character traits are well known: egotism, narcissism, inflexibility, dullness, predictability, inability to understand and love others as they really are and creatively relate to others. In other words, this is the polar opposite of the personality of Jesus!
3) Points three and four in my critique of the liar hypothesis also apply here.
III. Jesus Was An Eastern-Type Guru
Okay, maybe Jesus sincerely thought He was God but wasn't crazy. According to this idea, Jesus was really an enlightened Eastern-type guru who came to the realization (or at least thought He did) that we are all God in a pantheistic way. While this theory is not too common, it is not unheard of for a non-Christian to claim this as a possibility.
This theory is also deficient for a few reasons.
1) Jesus was a Jew, and Jews and Eastern gurus don't mix. No Jew has ever been an Eastern guru, and no Eastern guru has ever been a Jew.
2) Jesus never taught anyone to equate himself with God. On the contrary, He repeatedly affirmed that only He (with the Father and the Holy Spirit, of course) is God (Matthew 7:21-22, 25:31-45; John 5:22-23, 14:6, 15:1-13). In addition, the earliest Christians believed that only Jesus is God (Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1). So, either Jesus was not an Eastern guru, or He was worst teacher ever and could not properly get His message across.
3) Jesus taught His disciples to call God "Father," something they would never be able to do if they themselves were God.
IV. Jesus Never Claimed To Be God
Maybe Jesus never claimed to be God. Maybe He was just a moral teacher who was divinized by His followers after His death. Buddha's followers divinized him some time after he died, so why couldn't Jesus' followers have done the same? Isn't it reasonable to believe that, with time, stories about Jesus became exaggerated (much like a game of "telephone") to the point of making Him equal to God?
This theory also falls when compared to the evidence.
1) The New Testament documents were written within the lifetime of some eyewitnesses to Jesus, so the apostles' error could have been refuted by those who had first hand information about Him.
2) No competent scholar today denies that Jesus was crucified (even the Jesus Seminar agrees that He was), but without Jesus' claim to divinity, there would be no reason to crucify Him. As John Meir has said in the first volume of his A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,
A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field - such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one.
3) The Jews were fiercely monotheistic, so Jesus' followers would've been the last ones to fabricate myths about His being God.
4) The New Testament documents were written way too early for a full-blown myth about Jesus' divinity to have developed. As William Lane Craig has said in his essay on the resurrection in Jesus Under Fire,
The writings of Herodotus enable us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of oral tradition. Such a gap with regard to the Gospel traditions would land us in the second century, precisely when the apocryphal Gospels began to originate.
5) Points three and four in my critique of the liar hypothesis also apply here, as they do to the lunatic hypothesis
Conclusion
So, what does this all mean? Does it prove that Jesus is God? No. What it does do is demonstrate that Jesus' divinity is the most likely hypothesis and the only one that fits all the facts. On its own, it doesn't prove Christianity, but, along with the other historical proofs for Christianity, it makes for a powerful argument in its favor.
