None of the Bible’s Writers Believed That Jesus is God

by Jibrail Sun Feb 03, 2008 11:14 am

Christians and Muslims both believe in Jesus,
love him, and honor him. They are, however, divided over the question of
his divinity.

Fortunately, this difference can be resolved if
we refer the question to both the Bible and the Quran, because, both the Bible
and the Quran teach that Jesus is not God.

It is clear enough to everyone that the Quran
denies the divinity of Jesus, so we do not need to spend much time explaining
that.

On the other hand, many people misunderstand the
Bible; they feel that the belief in Jesus as God is so widespread that it must
have come from the Bible. This article shows quite conclusively that the
Bible does not teach that.

The Bible clearly teaches that Jesus is not
God. In the Bible God is always someone else other than Jesus.

Some will say that something Jesus said or
something he did while on the earth proves that he is God. We will show
that the disciples never came to the conclusion that Jesus is God. And
those are people who lived and walked with Jesus and thus knew first hand what
he said and did. Furthermore, we are told in the Acts of the Apostles in
the Bible that the disciples were being guided by the Holy Spirit. If
Jesus is God, surely they should know it. But they did not. They
kept worshipping the one true God who was worshipped by Abraham, Moses, and
Jesus (see Acts 3:13).

All of the writers of the Bible believed that God
was not Jesus. The idea that Jesus is God did not become part of Christian
belief until after the Bible was written, and took many centuries to become part
of the faith of Christians.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, authors of the first
three Gospels, believed that Jesus was not God (see Mark 10:18 and Matthew
19:17). They believed that he was the son of God in the sense of a
righteous person. Many others too, are similarly called sons of God (see
Matthew 23:1-9).

Paul, believed to be the author of some thirteen
or fourteen letters in the Bible, also believed that Jesus is not God. For
Paul, God first created Jesus, then used Jesus as the agent by which to create
the rest of creation (see Colossians 1:15 and 1 Corinthians 8:6). Similar
ideas are found in the letter to the Hebrews, and also in the Gospel and Letters
of John composed some seventy years after Jesus. In all of these writings,
however, Jesus is still a creature of God and is therefore forever subservient
to God (see 1 Corinthians 15:28).

Now, because Paul, John, and the author of
Hebrews believed that Jesus was God’s first creature, some of what they wrote
clearly show that Jesus was a pre-existent powerful being. This is often
misunderstood to mean that he must have been God. But to say that Jesus
was God is to go against what these very authors wrote. Although these
authors had this later belief that Jesus is greater than all creatures, they
also believed that he was still lesser than God. In fact, John quotes
Jesus as saying: “...the Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28).
And Paul declares that the head of every woman is her husband, the head of every
man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God (see 1 Corinthians 11:3).

Therefore, to find something in these writings
and claim that these teach that Jesus is God is to misuse and misquote what
those authors are saying. What they wrote must be understood in the
context of their belief that Jesus is a creature of God as they have already
clearly said.

So we see then, that some of the later writers
had a higher view of Jesus, but none of the writers of the Bible believed that
Jesus is God. The Bible clearly teaches that there is only one true God,
the one whom Jesus worshipped (see John 17: 3).

In the rest of this article we will explore the
Bible in more depth, and deal with the passages which are most often misquoted
as proofs of Jesus’ divinity. We will show, with God’s help, that
these do not mean what they are so often used to prove.