The NT documents are historically accurate and reliable as ancient documents, and have been reliably transmitted to the modern day. They therefore preserve an accurate record written by contemporaries of the things Jesus did and said. In multiple passages, only some of which we've looked at in the previous few pages, Jesus definitely claimed to be God. Not an "Everyone is God" God, but the Biblical Sovereign God as described in the Jewish and Christian religions, the Creator and Almighty Ruler of the Universe. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity writes, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a mad man or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." More --> |
