Did Jesus ever claim to be ‘divine’?

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[I started to write an article with exactly this title, only to discover we had already posted one on April 29,2014 from our MUST READ book: Kosher Jesus, by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, specifically Chapter * with the original title “Jesus Never Claimed to be Divine.”  Who better than a Rabbi is qualified to make such an analysis, right? So here’s a revisit.

Other posts from this book are:

Reformatted and highlighted for this post. —-Admin1]

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Whether or not the miracles attributed to Jesus actually occurred, what is clear is that as a devout Pharisee and rabbi, he would have been appalled at how his followers would later define him.  No doubt Jesus hoped and believed he was the messiah sent by God to save his suffering people.  However, he understood his own messiahship in traditional and biblical terms.  He was a Jewish king who sought to eliminate Roman rule and reestablish an independent Jewish commonwealth, as in the days of his ancestor King David.  He was a redeemer.  But he absolutely did not consider himself divine.

Nearly all the expressions Christians use to prove that Jesus declared himself God are textual misunderstandings.

For example, the phrase “son of man” occurs frequently in this usage.  Christian texts capitalize the word man, as if it refers to a deity.  This is actually a common expression, employed many times by other Jewish prophets.  Ezekiel, for example, uses the term repeatedly — literally translated from the Hebrew as “son of Adam,” the first man.  Adam was not a deity.  The capitalization of the term is erroneous and misleading.  By referring to himself as the “son of man,” Jesus joins a longstanding tradition among Jewish prophets.

Similarly, when Jesus speaks in the first-person singular in God’s name, it is not a declaration of his own divinity.  Moses does the same in Deuteronomy, when he tells the Jews that if they obey the word of God, “I,” Moses, will give them material wealth.

Prophets speaking in the name of God often sound as though they are channeling the deity.  This is not to be confused with their being divine.  It is commonplace for prophets not to distinguish themselves and God in their speech.  We have no reason to believe Jesus ever thought of himself as a deity.  As a Jew, he surely would have regarded any such interpretation as blasphemous.

Prevailing currents in religious thought may have injected such thinking into Jesus’ teachings.  As Hyam Maccoby explains, Gnostic religious beliefs, which pervaded the Middle East in Jesus’ era, maintained that the world was created by a demiurge, or sub-God, who was evil.  The true good god was too important to concern himself with human beings.  These Gnostic sects believed the god of goodness would send down an incarnation of himself to lead human beings toward goodness and away from the demiurge.  And this is not the only tradition of corporeal gods.  Much of the Greek Pantheon included beings that were part human.

The emergence of Jesus as a deity mimicked Gnostic and pagan beliefs and began decades after his death.  It culminated in the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, when the Church declared it heretical to believe that Jesus was mortal.  This gathering of men decided, some might argue almost arbitrarily, which believes constituted the truth about their religion’s namesake.  Among these ideas was that besides being wholly human, Jesus was also divine—an ironic decision given the earthly and political nature of many of Jesus’ central concerns.

Jesus the Politician

From the time of Abraham, the figure of the Hebrew prophet stood at the forefront of two fights.  One was against oppression, injustice, and immorality.  The other was for self-determination and the actualization of one’s unique potential in the service of God.

The greatest prophet was Moses, who led the Jews from slavery and the grasp of the tyrant Pharaoh to Mount Sinai so they could each hear God directly.  His successors fought an array of oppressors that brutalized the innocent and the helpless.  Jesus undoubtedly saw himself as part of this tradition as he protested against eh Roman occupiers.

Taken at face value, the Gospel’s characterization  of Jesus has him unconcerned with early goings-on.  His saintly character makes him seem oblivious to the oppression of the Jews.  But how could a man such as Jesus remain so aloof?  He was by all accounts a holy and wholesome man, focused on the real practice and enactment of justice.  It is therefore impossible to picture Jesus without imagining his political nature.

An examination of the evidence suggests that after Jesus’ death, editors removed his political diatribes against Rome from his life story.  Indeed as Hyam Maccoby insightfully notes, they removed the Romans themselves almost completely.

Think about it.  The Romans were militarily occupying Judea.  They had won over an entire religious faction, the Sadducees, to ensure their continued dominance in the region.  They had the most powerful army in the world occupying the Holy Land.  Yet where are the Romans in the Gospels?  They are barely seen at all.  And when they do appear, they are described as uncharacteristically virtuous and passive.  The Book of Matthew tells the story of Jesus healing the servant of a Roman centurion and marvelling at the man’s faith.  “Truly I tell you,” he says to his apostles, “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.”  A Roman soldier tasked with oppressing the Jews also had great faith?  Hard to believe, yet Luke expands on this idea.