Is Jesus the Son of God?

Within both biblical and extrabiblical accounts of Jesus, it is documented, either directly or indirectly, that he claimed to be the Son of God. This was an audacious claim which has serious consequences. As the writer C. S. Lewis once wrote: “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.”[1] Let’s take a look at the evidence to determine whether Jesus is the Son of God or whether he was merely a lunatic who was greatly deceived about who he was.

Jesus’s Claim as Documented in the Bible

After Jesus was arrested and placed on trial, Mark tells us that the Jewish leaders asked, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus answered them by saying, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61-62).

At one point during his ministry, Jesus said to a group of Jews, “Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). In the Old Testament, God (Yahweh) called himself “I am” (Exodus 3:14). For Jesus to call himself “I am” was equivalent to calling himself God.

At another point during his ministry, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter responded by saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus answered him by saying, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:15-17).

According to Luke, Jesus healed a paralytic and said to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” The Jewish religious leaders immediately recognized this as either blasphemy or as being spoken by God since only God can forgive sins. Jesus responded to them by saying that he had been given authority to forgive sins, thereby claiming to be equal with God (Luke 5:20-24).

In all of these verses from four different biblical writers, Jesus either directly or indirectly claimed to be the Son of God.

Jesus’s Signs in the Bible to Support His Claim

How do we know whether Jesus’s claims are true? If we believe the prophet Isaiah who claimed to have heard directly from God between the years 739 and 686 BC, then we can know that the Messiah, the Son of God, would demonstrate certain signs to indicate that he was the Messiah such as giving sight to the blind, raising the lame to walk, cleansing lepers, giving hearing to the deaf, raising dead people to life, and preaching the gospel to the poor (Isaiah 29:18, 35:4-6, 61:1-2). Jesus demonstrated all these signs, some of them supernatural feats, during his three and a half years of public ministry. See my footnotes for a brief listing of them.[2]

Extrabiblical Supporting Evidence for Jesus’s Signs

Shortly after the Protestant Reformation, scholars began questioning whether the supernatural feats in the Bible actually happened such as Jesus healing peoples’ blindness and raising dead people to life. For example, one scholar, Thomas Jefferson, went through the Bible and using his scalpel, cut out all the supernatural signs Jesus performed because he couldn’t make sense of them. However, extrabiblical evidence has been uncovered which affirms that Jesus really did perform supernatural feats. The Babylonian Talmud, “a collection of rabbinic teachings that was finalized in the sixth century,”[3] provides evidence which supports the fact that Jesus performed supernatural acts:

On the eve of the Passover they hanged Jesus the Nazarene. And a herald went out before him for forty days, saying: “He is going to be stoned because he practiced sorcery and enticed and led Israel astray. Anyone who knows anything in his favor, let him come and plead in his behalf.” But, not having found anything in his favor, they hanged him on the eve of Passover. (emphasis mine)[4]

This passage was written by a group of people who were unsympathetic towards Jesus. However, they acknowledged the fact that Jesus was performing supernatural feats, albeit they attributed it to the work of the devil in the same way that Matthew, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, recorded that the Jewish religious leaders believed Jesus’s supernatural feats were a work of the devil (Matthew 12:22-32).

Extrabiblical Supporting Evidence for Jesus being the Son of God

In the writings of Pliny the Younger around AD 111, Pliny noted that Christians in Rome were gathering together before dawn on a particular day of the week to address prayer “to Christ, as to a divinity.”[5] Pliny was also not sympathetic towards Christians since this line is found in a letter to Emperor Trajan requesting approval for his handling of Christians, which he noted to be extreme, such as torturing them to the point of death. This writing is important because it confirms that Christians in AD 111 worshiped Jesus as God, meaning that they understood him to not just be a good teacher or a good prophet, but actually the incarnation of God in human form who was worthy of their worship.

Conclusion

Jesus’s claim to be the Son of God and the signs to affirm this claim appear in the accounts of multiple biblical writers. Both the fact that Christians worshiped Jesus as God and the fact that his signs are supported by extrabiblical sources offer even more reliability to the claims of the Bible.

Therefore, my conclusion is that Jesus was not merely a good teacher, another prophet, or even a madman who was confused about his identity, but rather, Jesus is the Son of God.

What does this conclusion mean for us? I’ll be addressing this question in next week’s post.

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Collins, 1952), 54–56.

[2] For Jesus giving sight to the blind, see John 9. For Jesus raising the lame to walk, see Luke 5:17-26. For Jesus cleansing lepers, see Luke 5:12-16. For Jesus giving hearing to the deaf, see Mark 7:31-37. For Jesus raising the dead to life, see John 11:38-44. For Jesus preaching the gospel to the poor, see Matthew 15:29-39.

[3] Andreas Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2009), location 3356, Kindle.

[4] Babylonia Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin Folio 43a, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.come-and-hear.com/sanhedrin/sanhedrin_43.html. Although this document provides little historical help since it contradicts other more reliable historical accounts, it does provide some affirmation that Jesus really did perform supernatural acts.

[5] Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, “XCVII–To the Emperor Trajan” in Letters of Pliny, trans. William Melmoth, rev. ed., 2016, accessed March 28, 2017, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2811/2811-h/2811-h.htm.