Can the Gospels Be Trusted? Jesus as God, Not Merely Messiah

Before He ascended, the risen Jesus gave His disciples one final commandment: “go and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). He had already shown Himself to them, risen from the dead, and so proved to them that He is God. What did they then teach the world, and on what grounds? And can we trust the records of His life and teaching that we have today?

What the Disciples Took to the World

For the first three centuries, the disciples of Jesus, and those they taught after them, went everywhere teaching what He had commanded. History tells us that by the end of the third century Christianity had spread to Jerusalem, Antioch, Asia Minor and Greece (Galatia, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth), Alexandria and Rome, and to Byzantium, which later became Constantinople. It had also reached India in the first century, through Thomas, one of the apostles who had been with Jesus.

What did they teach the Gentiles? “Gentile” comes from the Latin for “nation” (Hebrew goyim, Greek ethnē, “the nations”). It is not an insult in itself, but it must never be used with contempt, as it often was. What did they teach these nations? Not the Law, and not the history of Israel. To teach the Law to people who had never heard of it, they would have had to explain that there was a nation called Israel, that God brought it out of Egypt, that He gave it all these laws, and much more besides. None of that was essential for these people to have eternal life. It would have been redundant, since they had already been given something better and easier to understand. And it would have been confusing, because it needed a great deal of history and explanation. They did not need to tell a foreign people that Israel went through all these things, that the people spoiled everything, that a Messiah had to come, that there was a prophet called Isaiah, and then explain what a prophet is.

This was not because the Law was inferior. The Law and the teachings of Jesus are the same teaching, because they come from the same God. Had the disciples spoken about Moses, there would have been nothing wrong in it. But for these people the Law was not essential; it was not part of their culture or their history. For Israel it was different. The Law was already part of their life, and that is why Jesus, speaking to Jews, could say “this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

The message was simple: God stepped into history, and His name is Jesus. He is God. He was killed. He rose again. He gave these teachings, and if you obey them, you are united with God for eternity.

The book of Acts gives us a glimpse of this. In Athens, a Gentile city, Paul looked at the idols and found an altar “to an unknown god” (Acts 17:23). He made no reference to the prophets. He spoke of the God they worshipped without knowing Him, and pointed to the proof: God “has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). On Malta the islanders read a viper bite through their own gods, first as the judgement of “the goddess Justice” and then as a sign that Paul was a god (Acts 28:3–6). This was the non-Jewish world the apostles spoke to, a world in which “Messiah” meant nothing. At Lystra too, before a crowd that was not Jewish, Paul spoke of “the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them” (Acts 14:15). No Jewish expectation, no Messiah and no prophecy entered into what was preached at Athens or Lystra.

When the disciples spoke to Jews, it was different. Peter, preaching in Jerusalem, spoke of Jesus as the Messiah (Acts 2:22–36), and so did Stephen (Acts 7:52) and the others who addressed a Jewish crowd. The Messiah was a Jewish expectation, and it meant something to them. To everyone else it was a foreign concept. So to the Gentiles the disciples presented Jesus as God, not as the Messiah.

Outside the book of Acts, we know of the early missionaries from historical references. We do not have Thomas’s own writings, for example, but the references to him show what he taught. The message of every apostle who went into the Gentile world came down to the same points. They said, in effect: “God stepped into history; His name is Jesus. We know that He is God because He rose again from the dead. We know that He rose again because we are witnesses. And this did not happen centuries ago. It happened in this century. Check it with the Roman authorities; check it with the leaders of Judaism. They could not silence us, and they could not disprove what we say. That is not merely a proof. It is the proof, the definitive proof that He is God. And what are you to do now? Obey His teachings. If His teachings are in you, you are united with Him for ever.” That is what the disciples taught for three centuries.

Jesus Is a Historical Person

That message was easy for its hearers to accept as reliable, because it concerned recent events, and there were eyewitnesses. Even today, researchers and those who consider themselves intellectuals have little difficulty accepting that Jesus lived, because the historical record is strong. “Scholars”, and I put the word in quotation marks, will say that He was a historical person, and that He was killed. Not all of them accept that He rose again, but they accept that He is historical.

Yet when the same people are asked about Moses or the Exodus, few of them accept it as reliable history. The parting of the Red Sea, forty years in the wilderness, God standing against the Amalekites and the other nations, and a nation born out of it all: most would call that a fabricated history, written by the Jews so that their children would believe in some divine intervention. What is far more reliable, historically, is the life and teaching of Jesus.

The reliability of the Gospels is an attested fact. They are not something invented. I always put two questions to them. The first is whether the person named as the writer really wrote it: is John’s Gospel really the work of John the apostle? The second is whether they wrote what really happened, or tampered with the facts. Both have been answered. The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, or by those close to them (Luke 1:1–4). They can be traced back to the first century: they were written then, not in the second or third century. They were written while the contemporaries of these events, who had seen them, were still alive, and no one rose up to say that they were false.

We have thousands of manuscripts of them, some of them only fragments. Textual criticism puts them all together and looks for discrepancies, and it finds very few: a difference of spelling here or there, and little else. The Gospels have not been tampered with. Their reliability is an attested fact, attested by scholars and researchers who know what they are talking about. That is why the reliability of the Gospels matters. If the Jesus they present is true, then the words He spoke are true, and in those words He always stresses His own teaching. When He sent His disciples to the towns of Israel, He told them to proclaim the kingdom (Matthew 10:5–7). When He sent them into the world, He told them to teach everything He had commanded (Matthew 28:19–20).

What “Messiah” Means

Messiah is not a term attributed to one person alone. There were many messiahs before Jesus. The word means “anointed”, and in its simplest definition a messiah† is someone appointed by God to serve the people. And the best way, the only way, by which people could really be served was by teaching them the Law and bringing them back to it.

The high priests were anointed. God made Aaron the first high priest, and he and his sons were anointed (Exodus 29:7; 40:12–15). Every high priest after him was anointed. Their primary task was to teach the Law. When someone had failed to keep it, not in rebellion but in weakness, they helped him to repent, to make restitution, and, as a sign of his repentance, to offer a sacrifice. All of this was so that people could live according to the Law and have a relationship with God.

The prophets were anointed too (1 Kings 19:16). They were sent and appointed by God to serve the people, and their primary role was to say, “You have gone against the Law; come back to the Law, or you will be destroyed.” That was the office of a prophet, and the reason prophets existed. The priests’ work was proactive; it was done before society broke down. The prophets did their work after things had broken down and society had fallen apart. In the mind of God, the only service, the only ministry, is this: to teach people, so that they are able to follow God.

Then came the monarchy, and the whole idea was turned upside down. God was very upset when the people asked for a king (1 Samuel 8:6–8). He warned them that the king would not serve them; they would serve him. He would take their sons and daughters, their fields and vineyards, and a tenth of their flocks, and they themselves would become his slaves (1 Samuel 8:11–17). The anointed one was supposed to serve the people (Leviticus 16:32). Now the people would serve the anointed one. With a heavy heart, with frustration and with anger, and at the same time almost playfully, God said, in effect: I will anoint this man, and he will be your “messiah” (1 Samuel 9:16; 10:1). The whole paradigm fell apart. Even the priests became part of the monarchy, and things did not go well for the people. The same reversal continues whenever a leader calls himself “the anointed of God” in order to place himself above others. To be anointed is to be sent to serve people, not to lord it over them.

The Messiah Isaiah Spoke Of

The monarchy ruined them. They lost their equality and their dignity; they became slaves among themselves. After Solomon, the nation was divided into Israel and Judah (1 Kings 12:16–20), and both failed miserably. Idolatry came in, and oppression was everywhere. Assyria was at the door. The people’s hearts cried out: we need a messiah, someone who will really serve us.

Then, for the first time, a prophet spoke of the messianic kingdom: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him … He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth” (Isaiah 11:1–4). If anything in the Prophets is to be called a messianic prophecy, it is this. The passage needs nothing read into it. Let it speak within its own context, and it says plainly that God will send someone anointed to uplift the poor. He will not judge by appearances or by hearsay, as the monarchs had done with their partiality and nepotism. He will see to it that justice is done, and he will break the wicked (Isaiah 11:4). Then comes the picture of the wolf with the lamb, the leopard with the goat and a little child leading them, with no harm done anywhere (Isaiah 11:6–9). That is the first glimpse given of the coming messianic kingdom. And he will not come from David, the “great” king, as they thought of him; that line has been cut down to a stump. He will be a new shoot, growing from the stump of Jesse. The credit for this does not go to Isaiah. It was God who revealed it.

So from Isaiah’s time, the devout Jews expected that God would send a Messiah: someone through whom there would be equality, harmony, justice and righteousness, and the Edenic ideal* would be established again. This was the expectation of the devout Jews. By devout Jews I mean the godly, not the ungodly. It was the common people who looked for him, not the elite. Jesus came and did what the Messiah was to do. He brought the elite down and lifted up the poor and the common people. The common people understood: He is the Messiah. The elite would not accept Him.

Jesus Is More Than the Messiah

Jesus did fulfil the role of the Messiah. But He was not merely the Messiah. He was God who had stepped into history, and none of the prophets ever knew that this would happen.

Prophecy is, first of all, teaching people. If there is any element of foretelling in it, even that foretelling comes from God, and so we should never say that the prophets foretold anything. It was God who gave them the message. And God never foretold that He Himself would step into history. He said that He would send a person, a messiah, a human being. What He did instead was a surprise. That is why Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon in the temple and Anna all rejoiced that the Messiah had come (Luke 1:41–45, 67–79; 2:25–38). They did not understand that God had stepped into history and was also playing the role of the Messiah. Even John the Baptist sent to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:2–3). God stepping into history was completely new. There was no precedent for it, and no one expected it, because God had never foretold it.

The only ones who truly understood were the disciples. When Jesus asked them, “Who do you say I am?”, Peter answered, almost on behalf of the whole group, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:15–16). “Son of God” did not mean, in their minds, a son born of God. It meant that He is God: the epitome of every attribute of God, the fullest revelation of God. “Christ” and “Messiah” are the same word. Messiah is the Hebrew; Christ is the Greek. Both mean “anointed”, and the anointed one is not God; he is anointed by God. Messiah was not Jesus’ identity. It was a role He took upon Himself, the role of the one anointed to serve. His identity is that He is God.

Jesus was not interested in being called merely the Messiah, because a messiah’s teaching is still a teaching that comes from God. He wanted to establish that He is God. So He did not speak of “God’s words” as a messenger would. He spoke of “my words”. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). “If you remain in me and my words remain in you…” (John 15:7). In John’s Gospel alone there are at least twenty such references to His words, His commandments and His teaching (for example John 8:31, 51; 14:15, 21, 23–24). “Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). Everything is about His own words, because He is not someone sent by God. He is God who stepped into history.

The Resurrection Is the Proof

There are no prophecies that foretell God stepping into history. There are passages about the coming of the Messiah, beginning with Isaiah 11. But the only way we know that Jesus is God is not by what had supposedly been spoken about Him. It is by what He did, and by what happened in His own life. Every disciple who went out and proved that Jesus is God did it in the same way, except when speaking to a Jewish crowd. They did not point to things that had been spoken about Him. They said one thing: “Jesus rose again from the dead, and we are His witnesses.” His resurrection defied everything natural. It was the ultimate proof that He is God.

That is why someone with no Jewish background needs neither the Law nor the Prophets in order to understand Jesus and His teachings. The history and the background help. But no one can say that we cannot understand Jesus, or His claim to be God, without them. All that anyone needs to know is that this Jesus is a historical person, and how He proved that He is God: through His life, through His teachings and through His resurrection. Once that is established, He has given us teachings, and those teachings are for us to live by.

When we tell someone who knows nothing about Jesus that He is God and that they must follow Him, they will ask, “How do I know that Jesus is God?” We tell them that God stepped into history, and His name was Jesus. He walked the earth, He taught these things, He was killed, and He rose again. That is the ultimate proof that He is God. It is not a matter of whether they choose to believe it. It is a matter of accepting the fact of what happened. That is what faith is: not belief, which needs no reason, but the acceptance of a reality. Once the evidence is given, there are only two choices: to accept that He is God or to deny it. And if He is God, accepting that means obeying what He has commanded. And there is a great deal of historical evidence that the resurrection really happened. It was not invented, manufactured or fabricated later. And it was preached in Jerusalem, the very city where Jesus was killed, among people who could have refuted it; they were not able to disprove it (Acts 2:22–24, 32).

His Teaching Is Complete

Because He is God, nothing can be added to His teaching. An explanation can sometimes come to be treated as more important than the text it explains. Homer’s epics, or the plays of Shakespeare, are hard for a modern reader without someone to explain them, and the explanation becomes as important as the text. We can live without the text, it seems, but not without the explanation. The teachings of Jesus are not like that. He is God, and He knew what was needed and what was not. His principles were lofty, but the way He taught was plain, so that people could understand Him. He gave all the content we need, and He gave it simply. If His teaching needed someone else to explain it, either He left things out, or He spoke so confusingly that someone had to make Him clear. Either way, He would not have done His work well. What would have been the point of God coming into the world as a human being if He had not given us a full understanding, so that someone else had to step in later and fill the gaps? That is not how we understand Jesus. His teaching is complete. The Epistles were written to particular churches, to address particular problems. They do not fill gaps that Jesus left, because He left none. The teachings of Jesus are universal; the Epistles are not. And no new teaching from God arrives after Him. God stepped into history and taught us all that we need to know.