Why I Don't Worship Jesus

I was recently invited by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig to look more closely at Jesus of Nazareth and consider his claim to be the absolute revelation of God and his resurrection (see his response to a question I submitted, which he shared on his website). I've written a whole book explaining why I don't believe that Jesus is God, which is called Politely Rejecting Jesus. I thought it might be good to summarize my thoughts on this topic.

Did Jesus claim to be God?

First, as to whether Jesus claimed to be the absolute revelation of God, my honest answer is, "It depends on what we mean, but basically I would agree that he did." I think that Jesus claimed (at least cryptically) to be the Messiah, and to be authorized by God to demand obedience and enact God's final judgment. In other words, he saw himself as a highly exalted and authoritative figure, someone who would sit on a throne at God's right hand. I don't know if he really said the words found in Matthew 11:27 ("All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him"), but I think he saw himself as having been authorized to speak and act on behalf of God.

Does this mean that Jesus claimed to be God? Here is where I feel more skeptical. At the very least, I don't think we can trust the portrait of Jesus that is given in the Gospel of John, since it embellishes the story of Jesus in certain significant ways, and since its author seems to consciously reject certain important, multiply-attested themes that come up in the earlier three Gospels. So I am doubtful, for instance, that Jesus ever said, "Before Abraham was, I am!" (John 8:58). The earlier Gospels do seem to present Jesus as a divine figure, but I think it's likely that this characterization of Jesus was rooted in early Christian memory of the way that Jesus presented himself as a highly authoritative agent of God.

In short, I don't think Jesus claimed to be God (although I am not closed off to the possibility), but I do think Jesus had a highly exalted view of himself, such that he saw himself as being authorized to speak for God.

Could Jesus really have been God?

I have some personal doubts about whether God becoming a human—not just appearing in a human form, but actually becoming a human—is even metaphysically possible, but we can leave that to the side. My main reasons for thinking that Jesus couldn't have been God have to do with his false teachings about God. Specifically, Jesus taught his followers that the final judgment would take place in the very near future. There are five pieces of evidence that each independently support this claim.

1. The early Christians expected Jesus to return in their lifetimes.
2. The first three Gospels portray Jesus as teaching that he would appear on earth to enact the final judgment within a single generation.
3. Jesus's teachings about the imminent final judgment are reflected in a wide range of sayings from multiple, independent sources written within forty or so years of his death.
4. Jesus's mentor was a man who proclaimed that the final judgment was imminent.
5. Jesus's symbolic selection of twelve specially-designated disciples reflects an expectation that the scattered tribes of Israel would soon be gathered together as a direct result of Jesus's ministry. This gathering of the scattered tribes was closely associated with the theme of final judgment in first-century Judaism.

I discuss each of these claims in my book, and I explain why each one should be taken as a fact. I want to note here that the evidence for point (1) is undeniable, since the promise that Jesus will return soon, that his coming is near, and that we are living in the last days is written all over the New Testament. Point (2) is heavily debated, but as I explain in the book, every argument that is used to undermine this claim is surprisingly weak and implausible. The most plausible reading of two key passages is also the most straightforward:

“Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” (Mark 9:1)

“Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. (Mark 13:26–30)

Point (3) is also undeniable, especially given Jesus's repeated assertions that the end will come "suddenly" and his different comments (including the parable of the tenants) in which he claims or implies that he is speaking to the final generation and that "this generation" will be held accountable. Point (4) is firmly established, fairly obvious from the relevant New Testament material, and widely accepted by New Testament scholars. And point (5) is a composite of two undeniable subpoints: Jesus's selection of twelve disciples, and the widespread ancient Jewish expectation that God was soon going to gather the scattered tribes of Israel.

Again, any of these facts, by themselves, would provide strong support for the claim that Jesus falsely proclaimed that the final judgment was imminent. But taking all five of these facts together, the conclusion seems as certain as any conclusion based on ancient evidence can be. I just can't see any sensible, honest way to deny that Jesus's ministry was built on a major false teaching. For this reason, I cannot worship Jesus as God in good conscience, no matter how much I may like some of his other teachings.

Did Jesus come back to life after dying?

Many Christian scholars are convinced that the historical evidence for Jesus's resurrection is powerful and compelling. For one thing, there is no good reason to deny that:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried in a sealed tomb.
3. A number of people, including one enemy of the Christian movement, sincerely believed that they had seen Jesus alive after his death.
4. His earliest followers quickly came to believe that God had raised him from the dead.

In addition to these points, we might add a couple more considerations. First, it is plausible (though still a matter of considerable debate) that Jesus's body disappeared from its tomb. Second, there is no good non-miraculous explanation that would account for all of these facts. For these reasons, I used to think that the evidence for Jesus's resurrection was simply overwhelming. Upon closer analysis, however, I eventually changed my mind about this. I can explain why in three steps.

First, I came to realize how limited our information is. Nothing I am about to say overturns the four facts listed above, but this information still makes an important difference in how we assess those facts. In spite of what many, many Christian scholars have claimed, the earliest accounts of what happened after Jesus's death are impossible to harmonize in a reasonable way. They contain significant conflicting details. I've given a longer discussion of this issue in my book, so I will just summarize some points here.

To begin with, Matthew and Mark both claim (well, Mark strongly implies) that the disciples did not see Jesus until they returned to Galilee, whereas Luke and John both claim that they saw him while they were still in Jerusalem. Combining the accounts doesn't work because it negates the inner logic of the angel/Jesus telling the women to let the disciples know that they will see Jesus when they return to Galilee. The author of Luke and Acts also has Jesus telling his disciples not to leave Jerusalem until well after Jesus ascends to heaven, which negates the narratives from Matthew and Mark and undermines much of what we find in John. Luke and John also disagree on the order in which certain events take place, and they also have a rather significant disagreement about when the disciples received the Holy Spirit.

The impact of these discrepancies is not insignificant, because they require us to elaborate on fact #3 in some important ways: (3a) Jesus's appearances were apparently intermittent; (3b) beyond the fact that he was allegedly seen both by individuals and by groups, we have no idea what the experience of seeing Jesus actually entailed in any single case; and (3c) Jesus is no longer present in the world as he was, and it seems to be generally agreed upon by his followers that his appearances eventually came to an end.

Second, I remain agnostic about whether Jesus's body really disappeared from its burial place. This doesn't come from a place of intellectual stubbornness, and I am not threatened by the possibility of the empty tomb, but I remain genuinely uncertain about how best to interpret the evidence here. On the one hand, I think that the empty tomb is historically plausible, especially given its alleged discovery by women and the fact that the location of Jesus's burial place was probably known to everyone who cared. On the other hand, I truly don't know what to make of the enigmatic ending of the Gospel of Mark, and I've never found the hand-wavy explanations by various Christian scholars to be all that convincing. Basically, the Gospel of Mark ends with the women running away from the tomb in fear and telling nobody what they've seen. It's a very strange way for the book to end. Christian scholars often claim that this should not be taken to mean that they never told the disciples what they had seen, but the arguments are not very good in my opinion (as I explain in the book). That this strange detail comes up in the first book to report on the event, forty years after it is supposed to have happened, seems important to consider. And the fact that Matthew specifically has to change Mark's wording in order to make the rest of his own narrative work is a key detail for me. So I just remain uncertain of what to make of this.

Finally, the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead seems to suffer from several important weaknesses, which I will summarize here:

1. It either requires a contrived understanding of "resurrection" in order to account for why Jesus was able to disappear and reappear in other locations at will, or it requires us to just assume the theological integrity of other parts of the New Testament's message. Either way, the hypothesis becomes more ad hoc.
2. Its ability to account for the appearances of Jesus is questionable inasmuch as we don't have any way to know what any of the appearances actually entailed, and the information we have is not unlike other reports of apparitions of recently deceased people (in the book I relate an experience like this that my mom had). The alleged appearance to over 500 followers at once is no more impressive or helpful than the alleged events that occurred in 1917 at Fatima in front of thousands of witnesses. While Christian scholars have often claimed that the disciples knew about ghost stories and would not have come to believe in Jesus's resurrection from his appearances alone, these responses fall short because (1) we know that Paul converted to Christianity purely on the basis of seeing Jesus, and he never says anything about the empty tomb; (2) even if the disciples were familiar with ghost stories, that doesn't mean that they knew what those experiences looked or felt like; and (3) given the context of Jesus's ministry, it seems perfectly reasonable to think that the disciples might be inclined to interpret postmortem apparitions of Jesus (or perhaps even "heavenly visions" of Jesus; see Acts 26:19) as an indication that he had been raised back to life.
3. The hypothesis does not explain why the appearances eventually stopped or why Jesus is no longer present in the world.
4. In order to resolve the problem just mentioned, the hypothesis needs to be combined with the claim that Jesus ascended to heaven. But the ascension hypothesis is difficult to take seriously, since it concerns an event that is only reported by one person (the author of Luke and Acts) no earlier than the late first century (at least fifty years after Jesus's death), and the person reporting on it claims that Jesus literally ascended upward toward heaven, disappearing behind a cloud, leaving his disciples staring up into the sky, all of which seems to reflect an outdated cosmology.
5. Christian apologists have always insisted that miracles need to be interpreted within their religio-historical context. But this context severely undermines the plausibility of Jesus's resurrection, since there is no good way to avoid the fact that Jesus's ministry was built on a major false claim about God.

In short, I see no good reason to affirm the resurrection of Jesus. Even though I believe that God could have raised Jesus back to life, I wouldn't be able to make any sense out of an event like this in light of Jesus's false teachings anyway. Thus, I am more inclined to think that God probably didn't raise Jesus back to life. As for what really happened, I freely admit that I have no idea.