Jesus: God or Just a Really Good Guy?

In Dan Brown’s best-selling The DaVinci Code, the main character, Robert Langdon, gets schooled by Professor Teabing on the most carefully guarded secret in history; that Jesus wasn’t really God. Rather, Jesus’ divinity was established by vote in 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicaea. With a revelatory tone, he states:

“until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.” (p. 253) 

In recent years, skeptics still rely on variations of this argument to deny the divinity of Jesus. The claim that it was a later invention of Christians written back onto the historical Jesus still has a vocal following. This argument often rests on the claim that Jesus himself never really claimed that he was God. 

In this episode, Scott and Shawn put this claim to the test, not only by looking at what Jesus said about himself in the gospels, but also by looking at the religious and historical context into which Jesus was born, namely Judaism. While the case for the accuracy of the New Testament gospels can and has been made, Scott and Shawn dive into the Old Testament to show that the fact of Jesus’ divinity as Messiah was something God pointed to before any of the gospels were ever penned.