Concept

Christ is God

Intro

Did Jesus claim to be God? Yes. Did the early church believe it? Yes. Is this a fourth-century invention by Constantine, as Dan Brown novels and pop-atheist YouTube videos claim? No. This is the central confession of Christianity from day one.

Jesus said it about Himself. "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), using the divine name Yahweh gave Moses from the burning bush. His listeners picked up stones to kill Him on the spot, which is the Jewish penalty for blasphemy. When Thomas saw Him risen, Thomas said "my Lord and my God" (John 20:28), and Jesus accepted it. He forgave sins, which only God can do. He claimed to be the judge of all humanity at the end of history.

The first Christians said it about Him before any creed was written. Paul, writing within 20 years of the cross, said Jesus existed "in the form of God" (Phil 2:6) and that "every knee will bow" to Him (Phil 2:10), borrowing language Isaiah had used for Yahweh alone. The book of Hebrews opens with the Son as the "exact representation of God's being" (Heb 1:3). John starts his Gospel with "the Word was God" (John 1:1).

The Council of Nicaea (AD 325) did not invent the deity of Christ. It defended what Christians had believed all along against a fourth-century challenge from Arius, who claimed the Son was a created being. The bishops at Nicaea looked at Scripture, looked at how the church had worshiped Christ for 300 years, and said: same substance as the Father, not a creature.

Modern alternatives (Jehovah's Witnesses say Jesus is a created angel; Mormons say He is a junior god; Muslims say He was just a prophet) are repeats of heresies the early church already considered and rejected.

Quick reply: "Read John 8:58 and Thomas's response in John 20:28. Either Jesus accepted worship as God, or He let people misunderstand the most important thing about Him. Which is it?"

In full

Yes, the New Testament presents Jesus as fully God and fully man. This is the historic Christian position: the Chalcedonian formula (Council of Chalcedon, AD 451), one person in two natures, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." Jesus is not a created intermediary, not a uniquely-inspired man, not a god in a derivative or junior sense. He is the one true God, the eternal Son, who became human in the Incarnation while remaining everything he had always been.

This page is a search-landing entry, short, navigational, pointing to the deep treatments. For the full proof-text compendium, see Christs Deity. For the metaphysical articulation of how the two natures relate, see Hypostatic Union. For the integrated Christian-theistic package, see Christianity (Part II).

The position

Jesus Christ is homoousios tō Patri, "of one substance with the Father" (Nicene Creed, 325/381). He is fully God and fully man, not 50/50, not a hybrid, not a divinely-empowered human, but the eternal Son who added a complete human nature to his eternal divine nature without compromising either. The classical formulation:

Fully God, eternally pre-existent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, worshipped without rebuke.
Fully man, really born of Mary, really hungry, really weeping, really dying, with a human body and a human soul.
One person, two natures, the natures are not blended (against Eutychianism), not separated into two persons (against Nestorianism), not such that the divine nature was reduced to fit the human (against kenoticism in its strong form), not such that the human nature was absorbed by the divine (against Apollinarianism).

The contemporary alternatives, Watchtower (Jehovah's Witness) Arian Christology, Mormon grade-of-deity Christology, Muslim prophet-only Christology, are each reproductions of an early-church heresy (Arianism, polytheistic-progressive Christology, Ebionism) that the church considered and rejected for textual and doctrinal reasons.

Biblical evidence, eight categories at a glance

The full compendium is in Christs Deity. The eight categories of New-Testament evidence:

Direct identification of Jesus as God, John 1.1; John 1:18; John 20.28; Rom 9:5; Titus 2.13; 2 Peter 1.1; Hebrews 1.8; 1 John 5:20; Isaiah 9.6 (OT messianic).
Divine attributes ascribed to Christ, eternity (John 8.58), omnipotence (Matthew 28.18), omniscience (Colossians 2.3), omnipresence (Matt 28:20), immutability (Heb 13:8).
Divine works ascribed to Christ, creation (John 1.1; Colossians 1.16; Hebrews 1.2), providential sustaining (Colossians 1.17; Hebrews 1.3), forgiveness of sin (Mark 2:5-7), final judgment (John 5.22; Matt 25:31-46).
Divine names and titles applied to Christ, Kyrios (LXX YHWH), I AM (John 8.58), Alpha and Omega (Rev 22:13), Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:8), Lord of lords (Rev 19:16).
OT YHWH-texts applied to Jesus, Joel 2:32 → Rom 10:13; Isa 6:1-5 → John 12:41; Isa 40:3 → Matt 3:3; Isa 8:13 → 1 Pet 3:14-15; Ps 102:25 → Heb 1:10.
Divine worship offered to Christ, Matt 14:33; Matt 28:9, 17; Heb 1:6 ("let all the angels of God worship Him"); Rev 5:11-14, and accepted without rebuke (contrast Acts 10:25-26; 14:13-15; Rev 22:8-9 where worship of non-divine beings is refused).
Christ's own claims, equality with the Father (John 5:17-18); pre-existence (John 8.58; John 17:5); authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-10); authority to judge the world (John 5:22); authority over Sabbath, law, temple (Mark 2:28; Matt 5:21-48; John 2:19).
The hostile-witness Christology (see below).

The hostile-witness Christology

The strongest internal evidence that Jesus was understood by his contemporaries, including those who rejected him, to have claimed divine identity, is the reaction of his enemies. Three passages are load-bearing:

John 5.18, "For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God." The narrator names the equation: Jesus's hearers heard him as claiming equality with God, and the response was a capital charge.
John 10.30-33, "'I and the Father are one.' The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him... 'We are not stoning You for a good work, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.'" Same response, same stated rationale.
Mark 14:62-64 (see Mark 14.61-62), at his trial, the high priest: "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus: "I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." The high priest tore his robes and the Sanhedrin convicted him of blasphemy. The blasphemy was unintelligible unless Jesus's answer claimed something more than messiahship, he claimed the Daniel-7 / Psalm-110 prerogative of sitting at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven, prerogatives reserved for God himself.

The hostile-witness argument: the people who knew the language and the cultural-religious context, who were hostile to Jesus's claim, heard him to be claiming divine identity, and killed him for it. The deflationary modern reading ("Jesus never really claimed to be God; that was a later church development") cannot account for the first-century legal response.

The early-church controversy

The early church received this Christology from the apostles and articulated it under controversy:

Arianism (4th c.), Arius of Alexandria (c. 256-336) taught that the Son was the first and greatest created being, not eternally divine, "there was when he was not." Rejected at the Council of Nicaea (325), which formulated the homoousios ("of the same substance") clause to make the heresy linguistically impossible. See Arianism, Council of Nicaea.
Apollinarianism (4th c.), the divine Logos took the place of a human rational soul in Jesus. Rejected at Constantinople I (381), "what is not assumed is not healed" (Gregory of Nazianzus).
Nestorianism (5th c.), two distinct persons in Christ, divine and human. Rejected at Ephesus (431).
Eutychianism / monophysitism (5th c.), the human nature was absorbed into the divine. Rejected at Chalcedon (451), which produced the four-fold negation ("without confusion, change, division, separation") that remains the orthodox standard. See Council of Chalcedon.

Contemporary alternatives, and their answers

Jehovah's Witness / Watchtower Arian Christology, Jesus is Michael the Archangel, the first creature. The NWT translation of John 1.1 ("the Word was a god") is the load-bearing move; it fails because (i) the anarthrous theos in predicate-nominative position is qualitative, not indefinite (Colwell's rule + Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics); (ii) the NWT renders the same Greek construction differently elsewhere in the same chapter when consistency would damage their theology (John 1:6, 12, 13, 18). The full Christology of Hebrews 1 (especially Heb 1:6, "let all the angels of God worship Him", and Heb 1:8, "to the Son, 'Your throne, O God, is forever and ever'") is incompatible with making Jesus an angel.
Mormon Christology, Jesus is a separate god, the spirit-brother of Lucifer, the firstborn of the Father's spirit-children. Fails on (i) the Shema and monotheistic-confession passages which exclude polytheism; (ii) Christ's claim to absolute pre-existent identity with the Father, not derivative or progressive deity (John 8.58; John 17:5); (iii) the absence of any biblical warrant for the Father-as-formerly-a-man, men-may-become-gods schema.
Muslim prophet-only Christology, Jesus is a prophet, not God; the crucifixion did not happen (Crucifixion Denial in Islam); the deity-of-Christ doctrine is shirk (associating partners with Allah). Fails on (i) the historical near-universal-scholarly-consensus on the crucifixion as a historical event; (ii) the internal Christian-scriptural evidence above; (iii) the structural problem in the Qur'an's own treatment of Jesus, which preserves Jesus's miracles, virgin birth, and unique relationship with God while denying the conclusions those features warrant, see Islamic Dilemma.