Modern skeptics of the
Bible, such as Dr. Bart Ehrman who wrote How
Jesus Became God, have asserted that Jesus didn’t think of himself as
divine, that his disciples never thought of him as such, and that all such
references in the NT are later changes made by the Church. Aside from the lack of evidence for such
claims, there is the additional problem that the entire message of the New
Testament, and the Bible as a whole, falls completely flat if Jesus Christ, the
long-awaited Messiah, was simply a man wrongfully accused and executed by the
Romans. If Jesus isn’t God, in the same
sense that Abraham and Moses spoke to God, Christianity has no reason to exist
and all of its teaching are useless. The
disciples did believe in the
divinity of Jesus, as did his earliest followers because they witnessed things
that could not be explained any other way, among that ample evidence was the
Transfiguration of Jesus witnessed by Peter, John, and James.
The Transfiguration, during a time of prayer on a
mountain in Galilee, was not a transformation of Jesus, but rather a revelation
of that which was already within him. As
the “Word became flesh”, to use John’s description, Jesus had within himself
both all of humanity, except sin, and all of divinity, willingly limited in
time and space. Why such a fuss? Why would God go to such great lengths when
he could have just sent another prophet to share the same message as
Jesus? The answer is simple, no one else
could have accomplished the task that the Father required of the Messiah. Another messenger would not have fixed the
fundamental problem that separated humanity from God: human sinful
rebellion. Only by coming amongst us,
only by accepting the role of vicarious savior, could Jesus forever open up the
path to redemption; only he could do it, and only if he was indeed the Son of
God.
The Church has always taught the divinity of Jesus, those
who denied it in the Early Church were opposed, their teachings labeled as
heresy. This belief is absolutely
foundational to everything that the Church and Christians think, say, and
do. Jesus is God.
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