Did Jesus disciples misinterpret?

Creative Followers?

If Jesus never claimed to be divine, and never claimed it in the sense that is indicated in the Gospels, it is reasonable to expect that:

• The enemies of Christianity and the early church would have declared that Jesus never made such claims, or was misunderstood. Some did indeed do this, but wrote quite some time after the fact. There is no record contemporary or closely contemporary with Jesus (first century AD) that indicates that He never made any special claims for Himself, or that the church invented the claims. Even after that time, however, the major skeptics of the first several centuries never argued this point. Celsus, for example, said that Jesus called Himself the Son of God, but wrongly. Porphyry, one of the most-feared skeptics in the early church, did not deny Jesus' claims to divinity, but instead tried to 'downgrade' Jesus into a hero-type deity (a third-class deity in the Roman hierarchy!). This adds up to strong evidence that (a) the Jesus-never-claimed-divinity argument had not been advanced by skeptics of the time, and (b) if it was used, perhaps by some skeptic whose works we have totally lost, it was so easily dismissed or so lacked adequate credibility that it could not be used by the best anti-Christian skeptics.
• A parallel movement, that acclaimed Jesus as merely a good teacher, would have emerged alongside Christianity. To be sure, there are those such as Burton L. Mack, author of The Lost Gospel, who would have us believe that a such a movement did exist; but conveniently enough, he tells us, it came and went too quickly to leave behind any concrete physical evidence for us to know what happened to them!

As it is, there are no extant texts from the first century, or even from the century thereafter, that represent Jesus as claiming to be only human or only a prophet--He is ALWAYS portrayed as making exalted claims to a super-human status. Later heresies of the church, such as Gnosticism, involved paganistic and/or mystical additions upon what Jesus meant in the Gospels when He claimed to be God; they never denied that He made any special claims about Himself. As we noted previously, the earliest known pagan critic of Christianity to address the issue, Celsus, argued that Jesus did apply the title "Son of God" to Himself, but wrongly [Wilk.ChrRom, 109]; only much later did those critics deny that Jesus made such claims. The argument that Jesus never claimed to be divine is in fact nothing more than an unsupportable conjecture, an argument from silence competing against the scream of the available data. Each of the above claims, and every known document of the church, even the heretical ones, acknowledge that Jesus claimed divinity. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary that can be cited. Saying that there is no evidence that Jesus claimed divinity can only be managed by ignoring reams of evidence, or by facile dismissal.

And now the final point, If we allow that Jesus' claims were manufactured by His followers, or that His claims were misunderstood by them, we do nothing more than create a different sort of trilemma! Jesus' followers were either:

A.Telling the truth, and they knew it;

B.Telling a lie, and they knew it; or,

C.Telling a lie, and they didn't know it because they misunderstood.

If we choose B), we are left to wonder what motivated Jesus' followers to begin lying and maintain that lie. They did not benefit at all by claiming that their Master was God incarnate: They were ostracized, criticized, rejected, persecuted, and in many cases martyred. Nor did they make loads of money by claiming what they did - no Jim Bakkers in this crowd! This being the case, we may ask why none of Jesus' followers cracked under pressure, or got fed up with persecutions and inconveniences, and admitted that the divinity claims by Jesus were a fabrication. We may, of course, speculate that it is possible that Jesus' followers lied, but there are no signed confessions, no counterclaims by the Pharisees trumpeting the recanting of a disciple of Jesus - nothing. To argue this, we must argue from silence. More than that, we must argue AGAINST the data of their lives and the witness of history. To raise it as a MERE possibility does not constitute advancing evidence for the speculation.

Choosing C) offers a slightly more hopeful refuge for the skeptic. It may be objected that Jesus spoke rather cryptically at times, so that perhaps He truly was misunderstood. But as we have shown in the linked essays, it is hardly plausible that Jesus' claims were misunderstood; they are too clear-cut when understood in the context of the time and place they were made. Moreover, are there not also degrees of metaphorical difficulty? Some metaphors are easier to understand than others, and some people understand and interpret metaphor better than others! So, how can we be sure that Jesus' followers didn't at some point correctly grasp what He was saying? It is only in our modern-day arrogance that we say that they were incorrect, and we, looking down the tunnel of 2000 years, are better qualified to understand (and contrary to evidence!) what Jesus actually said!

Finally, we are told that Jesus DID explain things to His disciples privately after the crowds were gone: "He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything." (Mark 4:34 - this was standard practice for an inner circle of disciples. For a practical example of this, see the Parable of the Sower in Matt. 13.) These, of course, represent the people who wrote (Matthew, John) or else supplied information for (Mark, Luke) the Gospels. And at any rate, many of the claims to divinity are quite direct, and not in the least metaphorical.

Conclusion

Jesus claimed to be God the Son. No matter how hard we try to dissect it or explain it away, the evidence points directly to that most special claim made by Jesus. One must now answer His question: "Who do you say that I am?"