Is Jesus God?

EVIDENCE
1. What he says about himself.
 - "Anyone who seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9)
 - "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?". "I am" replied Jesus. (Mark 14:62)
 - Authority to forgive sins (Mark 2: 1-12)
 - Accepts worship (John 14:33), (John 22:28-9)
 
 Jesus claimed to be God, now there seem to be only 3 possible reasons why he might have claimed this:
  i) He was evil, deliberately deceiving his disciples and since then billions of people through history.
  ii) He was insane, "on level with a man who claims to be a poached egg" (C.S.Lewis)
  iii) He was who he claimed to be.

2. His teaching
  Jesus is generally regarded as one of the most brilliant moral teachers ever. He presented old testament ideas in  a new light with new layers of meaning. He told the most  amazing parables, which are simple enough to understand  immediately, yet so full of meaning that scholars can spend lifetimes examining them. Much of his teaching was    challenging and unheard of such as "love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 4: 44).

 How does this aspect of Jesus as a teacher fit with the 3 possibilities (evil/insane/God)?

3. His character
  "I don’t believe in Christianity, but I think Jesus was a wonderful man" (Billy Conelly). Looking at the life of  Jesus we see something very beautiful. He not only taught about love, but lived a life of love. Spending time with lepers  (Luke 5: 12-14), tax collectors (Luke 5: 27-31), beggars (Mark 10: 46-52) and adulteresses (John 8: 3-11) - people  labelled as outcasts and unclean by society. He had time for the loudest crowd and the quietest individual, for rich rulers  and for poor widows alike.
  There is no evidence of Jesus anything doing anything wrong. Neither the Sanhedrin (Mark 14: 55-59) nor  Pilate (Matthew 27:23-24) could find any fault in him, to use as a pretext to kill him. Peter and John, who had spent 3  long difficult years on the road with him, could testify that he was without sin (1 Peter 2: 22), (1 John 3: 5).

 How does Jesus’ character fit with the 3 possibilities (evil/insane/God)?

4. His works
   "Even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles" (John 10: 38). Jesus did not make unsubstantiated claims, he backed them up with miracles, demonstrating God’s power in him to work outside physical laws. In the story of the paralysed man, Jesus heals his to prove that he had "authority on earth to forgive sins" (Mark 2: 10). He cured diseases, drove out demons, restored sight/hearing/speech, created food for 5000 people, calmed storms, walked on water, turned water into wine and even raise the dead. His miracles centred around compassion and love for all he met, but they were also clear signs of God’s life giving power in him.
 
 How do Jesus’ miracles fit with the 3 possibilities (evil/insane/God)?

5. His fulfilment of prophesies
   The old testament is full of prophesies, interwoven with history, songs and teaching. In the course of his life Jesus fulfilled over 300 of these prophesies. 29 in one day alone, that of his death.
   " Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them." (Matthew 5: 17). It is a sound argument that because Jesus knew his scripture extremely well, he could have deliberately fulfilled these prophesies. On some occasions, such as the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (John 12: 12-16), he probably did engineer the situation, in this case by choosing a colt to ride in on (fulfilling Zechariah 9: 9), he did this as another way of demonstrating who he was. But how could he affect his birth in Bethlehem (fulfilling Micah 5:2)? His betrayal by Judas Iscariot (fulfilling Psalm 41: 9)? His treatment on the cross (Psalm 69: 21)?
 
 How does his fulfilment of prophesies affect your view of Jesus and his claims?

6. His conquest of death
   This then, if true, is the proof of the pudding. No mere man could rise from death into eternal life, no lunatic or liar could do so, only the 3rd possibility fits, that Jesus was God in human form. A great number of books have been devoted to evidence for the resurrection, roughly speaking it falls into 4 categories:
 

a) The empty tomb
  After the Sabbath, the women came to embalm his body but found that it was gone and the stone had been  rolled away from the tomb. Here are some possible explanations.
THEORY: Jesus was merely unconscious on the cross and revived in the cool of the tomb.
EVIDENCE: To check he was dead the Romans pierced his side with a spear, out ran ‘blood and water’ (John 19:34), modern medicine understands this as the separating of clot and serum, one of the surest signs of death.
THEORY: The disciples stole the body.
EVIDENCE: The crucifixion reduced them to demoralised and frightened men. Yet within a few days these men were full of hope and vigour. It seems very improbable that they would risk their lives for a lie of their own concoction.
THEORY: The authorities removed the body.
EVIDENCE: For 300 years they tried to crush the Christians through persecution, yet they never produced Jesus’ body, evidence which would have shown the disciples up a frauds and ended the troublesome Christian church.
THEORY: Unknown thieves stole the body.
EVIDENCE: Why? It  had no valuables on it, and was sealed with a huge stone and guarded by Roman soldiers.

b) His appearances after death
  Not only was the tomb empty, but many people claimed to have seen the risen Jesus (see the last few chapters of the Gospels + Acts 1 + 1 Corinthians 15). Hallucinations are occasionally seen by people who are sick, on drugs or highly imaginative. Burly fishermen, tax collector and sceptics like Thomas are unlikely to hallucinate. Yet for a period of 6 weeks after crucifixion, Jesus appeared to many different people on different occasions. He talked to them for long periods (Mark 16: 12-20), he was touched by them (John 20: 27), he ate with them (Luke 24: 42-43) he even cooked them breakfast (John 21: 1-14). Also he did not only appear to individuals, but often to large groups, 500 on one occasion (1 Corinthians 15:6). Then his appearances suddenly stopped. Does this fit with a hallucination theory?

c) The effect on the disciples
  In the 40 days between the crucifixion and Pentecost, the disciples transformed completely. Peter is a good example. During Jesus’ trial he was so scared he denied knowing him (John 18: 15-27), yet now he stood confidently before the Sanhedrin and told them that they had killed the Messiah (Acts 4: 1-22). Throughout the Gospels we see Peter weakly blundering about, yet now he preached to a huge crowd with such clarity and authority that 3000 became Christians (Acts 2: 1-41). The early Christians were so full of hope and confidence in Jesus’ resurrection, that they calmly risked their lives to bring that hope to others (all the disciples were martyred + a large proportion of the church for 300 years).

d) The testimonies of Christians, both in the past and today
  Many millions of Christians from ever conceivable background have and do testify that Jesus is alive. They experience his love, power and presence in the most amazing way which convinces them that he is alive. It is not something that they believe religiously, but something which they know practically. Many are willing to suffer and die to proclaim that fact.

THE BIBLE
 Almost everything above rests on evidence in the Bible, why should we trust it?

Q: Has it been copied accurately?
A: Two things are important when considering this; the period between composition and our oldest copy, the number of ancient copies in existence today. For contemporary sources such as Tacitus’ ‘Histories’ and Caesar’s ‘Gallic War’, the gap is about 800 years, and the number of copies less than 10. For the New Testament, the gap is less than 300 years for a full set of books, with the number of copies numbering over ten thousand. What is more there are copies of all the Gospels (Chester Beatty and Bodmer Papyri) dated before 250AD, even a fragment of John’s Gospel from 130AD, only a generation after the composition! The New Testament is our most reliably copied ancient source.

Q: Did the writers invent the material.
A: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, Jude, the writer of Hebrews. The New Testament is not one source but many different sources by different authors. For most ancient events,  such as the Roman conquest of Britain, we rarely have more than a few main sources (often historians writing centuries later), plus a few scraps of evidence from elsewhere. For the life of Jesus we have 27 contemporary books by 9 authors. Look at the books of the New Testament, the Gospels in particularly, are there contradictions and conflicts which suggest that parts are invented? Someone must have made up the parables and teaching of Jesus, because it is written down there in the Bible. Could the writers of the New Testament have invented this wonderful teaching themselves? Also much of the teaching is about morality - including honesty - could some of the world's best teaching on honesty be itself a lie? If the writers were inventing the material, why should they make the first witnesses of the resurrection women (Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-11, Luke 24:1-12, John 20:1-18), women’s testimonies were not acceptable as evidence in court at that time, why should the writers in affect nullify their most convincing argument, unless they were merely telling the truth?

Q: Is there any external evidence to support the Bible?
A: - Tactitus, Pliny (Romans) and Josephus (Jew) all briefly mention Jesus in their writings. Important officials like Herod, Pilate and Gallio (Acts 18:12) are mentioned in inscriptions and writings. Inscriptions found in the Jerusalem Temple shed light on Acts 21, for they read ‘No foreigner may pass the barrier and enclosure surrounding the temple. Anyone who is caught doing so will be himself to blame for his resulting death’. Excavations have revealed places like the pool of Siloam (John 9:7)...etc. None of this amounts to proof, but it is useful evidence.

Can the Bible be trusted as an historical source in light of the above?

IS JESUS GOD?

No - He is either a liar or a madman, it would be best to ignore what he says.

Yes - God has come to earth on human form, the most amazing event in history. Finding out why he came, and what he has to say must be the most important thing for any person to do. ‘What is God like’ is one of the question men have always asked, well it is no longer a philosophical question - if God has come to earth as Jesus, then it is now merely a question of research. If you’ve got this far, then you probably have come to the conclusion that the resurrection is true, in which case you don’t only have to read about Jesus, he’s actually alive so you can meet him!

Two ways to live - the choice we all face
My Testimony
Why I am a Christian