From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Did Jesus Claim to be God (Finally?)
Date: 24 Jul 92 05:17:35 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

I'm concerned that your search in the Bible is based on an
oversimplified view of Christian theology.  Christian theology does
not make a simple identification between Jesus and God.  Thus you
shouldn't expect to find Jesus saying "I'm God".  If Jesus is simply
identical to God, he would be invisible, immortal, etc.  But we don't
believe that.  Rather, we believe that Jesus is the *incarnation of*
God.  The exact way this is currently expressed came out of
discussions in a few centuries later, using Greek terminology.  It's
silly to expect to find Jesus saying the same thing in Jewish
Palestine.  What you would hope to find is that he makes claims which
are equivalent, given the language and concepts appropriate of the
people he was talking to.

In fact I think you do.  You seem to be mostly interested in the
Synoptics.  This is a position I understand, though of course your
request for the earliest sources should really lead you to Paul.  So
what do we find in Mark?  We find that he forgives sins.  The crowd
reacts to this as an implicit claim to a status equal to God (Mk 2:7)
Several passages seem to envision Christians who follow Jesus.
Consider passages like Mk 8:35, where people lose their life for his
sake, and 9:35ff, where people do things in his name.  This doesn't
seem like a kind of honor that you would give a teacher.  The parable
of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1) implicitly speaks of him as God's
heir.  I realize that the term "son of God" could be used of any godly
person, but I think the implications of this parable go beyond that.
I suspect I could find more examples if I took longer.  What is clear
is that the claims are implicit, in contrast to John.  But they're
still there.

In my view Mark and John simply use different ways of explaining the
same thing.  John has long reflective sections, where we're given
explicit theology.  Mark tends to go for narrative, and lets us draw
conclusions from it.  (There are some reasons to think that he is
being intentionally canny.  Scholars make a lot about the "Messianic
secret" in Mark.  If Morton Smith is right, the copy of Mark we have
was intended for outsiders.  Things that would link it closer to John
were present only in a non-public version, one section of which
survives in a letter from Clement.  Recall that in the early church,
some aspects of the faith were considered a "mystery", not appropriate
for outsiders.)  Mark, John, Paul, I Peter, Hebrews, Rev, etc, each
speaks of Jesus using different images and terminology.  But for all
of them he is a person with unique authority, who represents God's
intervention into our history.  I think that's what the later
doctrines are trying to say as well.  None of them says that Jesus is
simply God wearing a human body.  That idea is a heresy.  There's more
"indirectness" in the identification between Jesus and God than many
people realize.  Orthodox theology is well aware that Jesus was fully
human.  I would suggest that a lot of the problem here is due to an
oversimplification of what it means to say that Christ is both a human
being and God.
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