Where did Jesus say he is God? 6 answers to the turnaround

The reply’s sharpest challenge is to name the chapter and verse in which Jesus says that he is not God and should not be worshipped. The Quran answers it in Jesus’s own first-person speech. As an infant in the cradle he says, “Indeed, I am the servant of God. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.”^[1] A servant of God is, by definition, a creature. In three separate passages he tells his hearers, “God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. This is a straight path.”^[2] In another he warns the Children of Israel to worship God, his Lord and theirs, and adds that whoever associates partners with God is barred from Paradise.^[3]

The plainest passage comes at the Judgement. God asks Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods besides God. He answers: “Glory be to You. It was not for me to say what I had no right to say. I told them only what You commanded me: worship God, my Lord and your Lord.”^[4] That is a denial, from Jesus himself, that he ever asked to be worshipped, and it names the only one who is to be worshipped. The Quran adds in its own voice that the Messiah would never disdain to be a servant of God.^[5]

The English words “I am not God” do not occur, any more than “I am God” occurs in the gospels. The difference is that the Quran’s Jesus states the content directly, more than once, with no inference needed. The challenge asked for an unequivocal statement, and these verses are as unequivocal as language allows.

The reply argues that Muhammad never said “I am the final prophet, follow me,” and that Muslims infer the doctrine from 33:40, which calls him the seal of the prophets. Two corrections are due. Muslims hold that the Quran is the speech of God, so a statement that God makes about Muhammad carries more weight for them than one Muhammad makes about himself. And the Quran tells him to say both things in the first person: “Say: if you love God, follow me, and God will love you,” and “Say: O mankind, I am the Messenger of God to you all.”^[6]

He also said the second half himself. In al-Bukhari he compares the prophets to a house complete except for one brick, and says, “I am that brick, and I am the seal of the prophets.”^[7] When he left Ali in charge of Medina, he told him that he stood to him as Aaron stood to Moses, “except that there is no prophet after me.”^[8] In Sahih Muslim he lists the ways in which he was favoured and says that the prophets were sealed with him.^[9] The doctrine of the final prophet rests on a verse of the Quran and on his own repeated words. The comparison was meant to show that Muslims infer their central beliefs as Christians do, and on this point it shows the opposite.

The reply treats the original question as a demand for courtroom wording. The better reading is that it asks for the kind of statement the Bible’s own God makes. In Isaiah, God says, “I am God, and there is no other,” and “I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour.”^[10] At Sinai he says, “I am the LORD your God,” and forbids any other gods before him. The Shema states the creed in a single line: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.”^[11] The identity of God is the one doctrine the Hebrew Bible states in plain sentences, again and again.

When Jesus was asked which commandment is first, he quoted that same Shema.^[12] In the Gospel of John, the one most often cited for his divinity, he speaks to the Father as “the only true God” and of himself as the one whom God sent.^[13] After the resurrection he tells Mary Magdalene that he is ascending “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”^[14] The phrase is close to the Quran’s “my Lord and your Lord”. A Muslim who asks where Jesus said “I am God” is pointing to this pattern: the gospels contain many statements in which Jesus distinguishes himself from God, and none in which he applies the Bible’s own formula of divine identity to himself.

The reply lists practices that Muslims keep without a single verse to name them. Some items on the list are stated in the Quran. Both halves of the Shahada are there word for word: “know that there is no god but God” and “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”^[15] The oneness of God, the content of the word tawhid, is stated in whole surahs, among them “Say: He is God, the One.”^[16] Muslims do not claim that the technical term tawhid is Quranic, and they have never asked Christians to find the word “Trinity” for its own sake. Where Muslims raise the word, the objection worth answering is about the teaching, which no single verse sets out.

The rest of the list is conceded without difficulty. The number of daily prayers, the units (rakah) of each, the two festivals and the night prayers of Ramadan come from the Prophet’s practice, and Muslims say so openly. The Quran commands prayer at fixed times, bowing and prostration, and night prayer, and it tells believers to obey the Messenger and take what he gives them.^[17] The Prophet said, “Pray as you have seen me pray.”^[18] The schools of law are human scholarship, and no Muslim claims that the Quran lays them out. All of these concern how God is worshipped. The deity of Jesus concerns who is worshipped, which the Bible itself treats as the first commandment, and which it states plainly whenever it speaks of God.

The reply’s first evidence is that Jesus forgave sins, and that only God can do so. The thought “who can forgive sins but God alone?” belongs to the scribes in the story. Jesus answers that he heals the man “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” and Matthew records that the crowds glorified God, “who had given such authority to men.”^[19] The authority is given. After the resurrection Jesus gives the same authority to his disciples: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.”^[20] In the Hebrew Bible the prophet Nathan tells David, “The LORD has put away your sin.”^[21]

The second is that Jesus accepted worship. The Greek verb in Matthew 14:33 and John 9:38 is proskyneo, to bow down or pay homage, and the New Testament uses it of homage to people. A servant in one of Jesus’s parables bows in this way before his king, and the King James Version translates the verb as “worshipped”.^[22] In Revelation, Jesus promises to make his opponents come and bow down at the feet of the church in Philadelphia, with the same verb.^[23] The Greek Old Testament uses it of Abraham bowing to the Hittites, and it says that Israel “worshipped the LORD and the king.”^[24] Peter and the angel in Revelation do refuse homage, and that is the reply’s strongest support. Jesus himself, though, answers Satan with the rule that worship belongs to God alone: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”^[25] Herod was struck down for accepting the cry that his was the voice of a god, which is a different matter from a man kneeling.^[26]

The third is judgement. John 5:22 says that the Father judges no one and has given all judgement to the Son, and five verses later the reason is given: the Father has given him authority to judge “because he is the Son of Man.” In the same passage Jesus says, “I can do nothing on my own.”^[27] Elsewhere he promises the twelve apostles that they will sit on thrones judging the tribes of Israel, and Paul tells the Corinthians that the saints will judge the world and even angels.^[28] Delegated judgement is a theme of the New Testament, and it does not make the delegate God.

“I and the Father are one” is answered within the same chapter. When his hearers accuse him of making himself God, Jesus replies by quoting the psalm in which God calls human judges “gods”, and asks why he is accused of blasphemy for saying that he is the Son of God.^[29] Later he prays that his disciples “may be one, just as we are one.”^[30] The unity he claims is one that his followers can share, which is a unity of purpose and obedience. Muslims have made the same point for centuries, and the site’s article on why Muslims believe Jesus is not God takes it further.

“Before Abraham was, I am” is the strongest of the five. The Greek is ego eimi, and Christians link it to God’s answer to Moses at the burning bush. In the Greek Old Testament, though, God says ego eimi ho on, “I am the one who is,” and the divine name in that verse is ho on, “the one who is.”^[31] The plain words ego eimi mean “I am” or “it is I”, and the man born blind uses them of himself one chapter later.^[32] What John 8:58 claims is that Jesus existed before Abraham. That is a claim about his origin in God’s purpose. The Quran says of Jesus that he is a word from God, and pre-existence of that kind is still a statement about a creature.^[33]