Was Jesus divine

Was Jesus divine?

If “divine” is a relative or metaphorical term, then he probably was. Pick any one of the four gospels and read it straight through (it takes about two hours, maybe less). If you are not moved by what you read, you are one hard-hearted dude.

Jesus is undeniably one of the great moral teachers of all time. As with most great moral teachers, he did not say much that had never been said before, but he said it with great force and in a novel manner that is nearly as striking today as it must have been in his own time. Moreover, he spoke in defiance of the religious authorities of his day – criticizing their hypocrisy and complacency. Most of all, he strove to place a moral rule of love ahead of a moral rule of law. This was so powerful and so strange, that even 2000 years later it is rarely enough observed (including by Christians with political agendas).

In his day, as in ours, it is not those who cry out “Lord, Lord” who are the holy ones – rather, it is those who aid the poor and the sick and the hungry and the naked and the imprisoned. It is, he said, as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle (the “Eye of the Needle” being a particularly small gate into the city of Jerusalem, through which a camel could pass only on its knees and unburdened of whatever treasure it was carrying). These were innovative and difficult teachings in the time of Jesus, and they are just as difficult today.

If you are skeptical of all the miracle stories that speckle the Gospels – as they similarly adorn the stories of other prophets, gods, kings, and leaders both spiritual and worldly of ancient times – then ignore them. Lying beneath and around them is the tale of a great man, a great teacher, and a great martyr to the highest aspirations of humankind. If any man could be divine, Jesus was.

But no man can be divine, and Jesus surely was not. Even if you take every word of the New Testament as literal truth, it merely proves that Jesus could be as mistaken about the most important things as any other mortal. His biggest prophecy, too, came to nothing.

His biggest prophecy was not his own resurrection. Yes, that was big, but it directly involved only himself. Whether it actually happened or not, of course, is open to dispute. If you do believe that the Bible is the Word of God in a way that guarantees its essential truth, then you are more likely to believe that Jesus rose from the dead two nights after his crucifixion, as the story is told. But when you understand that the Bible is a collection of old books that have no extraordinary claim to our belief, then the story falls into that category of miracle tales that are just too wild, and too weakly documented, to be taken seriously.

Resurrection stories do not begin and end with Jesus. They are not exactly common, but neither are they unheard of in the ancient world. Presumably, the other ones are mere legends or myths, and presumably the same is true of Jesus’s resurrection. Even in the New Testament there are no actual witnesses to the resurrection, only a series of brief and relatively private appearances that occurred afterward and involved a handful of his closest followers.

Although before his crucifixion Jesus preached to throngs of people, after his supposed resurrection he never did. He was not above flaunting his miraculous powers to thousands at once before his death, so why the relative modesty afterwards, when he really would have had something unique in history to demonstrate? The easiest answer is: because he never did come back. The New Testament claims that he was back only briefly, then ascended bodily into the sky, promising to return before long. Even so, there was plenty of time for public appearances. Yet neither the New Testament nor secular history records any such thing.

The claims of his followers are not only unproven, therefore, but they are highly suspicious. Yet later readers of the relevant scriptures, including many in our own day, have found it natural to believe the tales of a small number of people who might have simply lied or might have allowed themselves to be deluded – or more likely, some of both.

Believers might ask, how could even that number of people (perhaps a few dozen) be wrong? Unfortunately, this phenomenon happens all the time. Even today, in a world of modern journalism and electronic recording devices, people in large numbers will believe things that have no foundation at all. Some are urban legends that swarm through the populace. Some are deliberate lies planted by political leaders, by advertisers, by media blatherers, by advocacy groups, or by anyone with a message they believe is true or wish were true. There is no validity in something just because people proclaim it vociferously, cherish it fervently, or defend it to the death.

It is certainly conceivable that Jesus rose from the dead, but it is no more than conceivable. The more extraordinary the claim, the more persuasive the evidence should be. The resurrection of Jesus is an astounding claim, but there is no correspondingly astounding evidence for it – when there easily could have been, if Jesus had been truly divine and eager to demonstrate that fact.

But as I say, none of this is the big prophecy that failed – it is just a preliminary failure. The true failure is, again, the failure of a central prophecy. Jesus was supposed to come back in power and glory – and he never did.

As hesitant as we are to speak harshly of our friends and relatives who remain believers, the idea that somehow this is still going to happen reflects an impressive gullibility. Perhaps this is because going to church on Sunday and listening to scattered excerpts from the Bible does not give you a true picture of what the Bible contains. In particular with regard to the New Testament, only reading it from beginning to end makes clear that the primary message of these books is not just the good news that Jesus came and died for our sins, but the even better news that he is coming back any day now and we will all be swept up into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Who’s “we”? Clearly it is not us, those of us living two millennia later. Rather, it is those living in the years and decades immediately after Jesus’s death. To speak plainly: both Jesus and his immediate followers believed that all of this – Jesus’s return in power and glory as the Messiah, and the opening of the gates of heaven to his disciples – was going to happen during their own lifetimes. Jesus said that it would happen “before this generation passes away.” Paul, who wrote many of the letters (“epistles”) preserved in the Bible, also believed this, and clearly was writing to communities of the faithful who also believed it. Peter believed it, too. The theme pervades the New Testament.

Prophecies of the end of the world have been a common religious delusion from ancient times until today (it is particularly prevalent today, in fact, among a certain type of Christian). But the failure of such prophecies as we have recently witnessed[1] has happened in every generation. The whole Jehovah’s Witness movement was based on the fact that the world was going to end about a century ago – it didn’t, and of course neither did the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Why should they be dismayed by the failure of their central prophecy, when all of Christendom can blithely ignore that its founder made the same kind of prophecy two thousand years ago, and all the men who wrote the supposedly inspired and true books of the New Testament also believed it, and every one of them was flat wrong?

As we observed before, there is always an excuse – usually something like, “the prayers of the faithful stayed the hand of God.” But since when are the faithful praying for the kingdom not to come? The rest of us need not look for arcane and implausible reasons why the end has not come. The answer is self-evident: the prophecies are false, as are the prophets who made them.

Jesus was a brilliant and wonderful man who had a huge impact, the kind that comes along once every thousand years or so. But ultimately he, too, was a false prophet. We may admire him as a moral teacher, and we may even choose to follow what he taught. But we are kidding ourselves, and not in a helpful way, if we suppose that he was literally divine.

So is it OK to believe that Jesus was divine? As with the Bible, this is going way beyond anything that is reasonable, and if it leads you to believe that every story about him or every word that is attributed to him is somehow infallibly true, then you are just grasping onto air. You would make the same mistake if you believed that everything Moses said was true, or everything that Mohammed or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy – or for that matter, Casanova or Mark Twain or Truman Capote – wrote was true.

It would be nice if someone had the Truth, and he or she could just hand it to us. But so far, no one has come along who could plausibly make that claim. And that includes Jesus. So do read his story and his words and, if they suit you, ponder all of it in your heart, and think about how you can make some of it work for you. Listen to it as you would to the teaching of one of the greatest moral leaders of all time, for that’s what Jesus was. But don’t take it for more than that.

The Truth, if it is accessible to us at all (and maybe it isn’t), doesn’t come at such a cheap price.

return to Table of Contents

[1] According to various prophecies, the year 2000 would be the beginning of the end. According to others, John Paul II was to be the last pope.