Scripture and God in Christianity

from the beginning, a certain logic on Christology. To understand or evaluate Jesus christologically
means, on the one hand, to ask about his relation to God and, on the other, to seek a way of
expressing his representative character as a human being-his status as the one in whom humanity's
common destiny is both summed up and determined." 213
There are many Christologies in the New Testament. The fundamental issue in connection with
the transcendence of God and anthropomorphism is the Christology of the person i.e. the doctrine
of Christ's person and divinity. Modern scholarship is more widely divided on the issue of
Christ's divinity and interpretations of the person of Jesus than Christians of the past generations.
Almost all of the old christological issues and trends, often declared heresies by the Church,
could virtually be traced in many modern scholars in one way or the other.
It has been customary with the Christians untill the late nineteenth century to believe in Jesus' divinity.
The Church as well as the Christian population in general, as we will have the opportunity
to see later in the chapter, had always contended that Jesus had proclaimed himself to be God the
Son, second person of a divine Trinity, living among the human beings a complete human life
like them except sin.
Still, in this modern age and time, there are scholars who argue that Jesus was divine and was
conscious of his identity. R. E. Brown argues: "Jesus knew his own identity which involved a
unique relationship to God that we call the divinity of the Son. Christians of later period were
able to formulate Jesus' identity as "true God and true man," a formulation better than any other
that had been attempted but certainly not exhaustive of the mystery....The idea that he was divine
I find in most Gospel pages. An attempt to lessen the self-evaluation of Jesus to something like
"he thought only that he was a prophet" would, in my judgment, involve proving the Gospels
misunderstood Jesus. No Old Testament prophet acted in such independence of the Mosaic Law;
and it is remarkable that one never finds in reference to Jesus a prophetic formula such as, "The
word of God came to Jesus of Nazareth."...Jesus' intuitive knowledge of his self-identity would
have been a knowledge of what we call in faith being God and being man, and certainly such
self-knowledge can have been no less difficult to express than our knowledge of being human. I
regard the term "God" applied to Jesus to be formulation of Christians in the second half of the
first century seeking to express an identity that Jesus knew better than they and which is scarcely
exhausted by the term "God"...It is not evident that Jesus formulated...his self-identity in the
terms of later New Testament Christianity, such as...God. [Nonetheless] I have no difficulty with
the thesis that if Jesus ... could have read John, he would have found that Gospel a suitable expression
of his identity ... The affirmation that Jesus had knowledge of his self-identity ... is not
meant to exclude a development in his existential knowledge of what that identity implied for his
life." 214
Ben Witherington, III fully agrees with Brown's thesis. He writes: "Material in the Synoptics
hints that Jesus had a transcendent self-image amounting to more than a unique awareness of the
Divine. If, however, one means by divine awareness something that suggests either that Jesus
saw himself as the whole or exclusive representation of the Godhead or that he considered himself
in a way that amounted to the rejection of the central tenet of Judaism, (i.e., monotheism),
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