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Jesus and Salvation Series (Part 10)

Welcome to the Summer 2006 study for the Koinonia Class of Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado. We’re looking at the issue of Jesus and Salvation, using the book “Is Jesus The Only Savior” [James R. Edwards, Is Jesus The Only Savior? (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: 2005)]. We encourage each person to buy a copy and follow along.

Most Christians assume that the person named Jesus of Nazareth who is portrayed in the New Testament was accurately portrayed. That is, the Jesus of the New Testament is the same as the “real” Jesus of history.

However, the scholars of the various “Quests for the Historical Jesus” over the past 200 years (including those of The Jesus Seminar) see it differently. For them, the Jesus of the Gospels is, for the most part, an invention of the early church. Their argument: as a Jew, Jesus would not have equated himself with God.

Nor would the earliest church (which was almost totally Jewish) have equated Jesus with God. They were fiercely monotheistic. It was only as the church spread into Gentile cultures, and needed to accommodate its message to those people, did they come up with the idea of Jesus being divine. Presumably this was to make him more acceptable to devotees of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

Therefore, the hypothesis goes, anything in the Gospels that appears to confer deity upon Jesus was a projection of the church back into the Gospels. It didn’t originate with Jesus.

This hypothesis of the Quest scholars is based on the assumptions of the philosophy of Naturalism. If you start with the assumption (or pre-condition) that we live in a “closed system” (where no miracles or divine interventions are possible), then not only your conclusions, but also your research, will be pre-determined. “Jesus couldn’t have come from God, so he didn’t; and our research demonstrates that the Jesus of the New Testament was invented by the church,” they seem to say.

The idea of “equating Jesus with God” is called apotheosis: “to make someone godlike”. Would the church have tried to apotheosize Jesus in order to appeal to the Gentiles? Edwards says “No”, and extensively develops his argument. I can only list his main points.

1. Rather than making the Gospels attractive to Gentiles, the apotheosis of Jesus as God’s Son and savior was a very big problem for some non-Christian philosophers of the second and third centuries.


2. It is “wildly improbable” that early Jewish Christians (including Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles”) would have compromised their own monotheism and proclaimed Jesus as Son of God just to appeal to Gentiles. Indeed the best explanation of their message that Jesus is the Son of God is that it came from Jesus himself, attested to by his bodily resurrection.

Everybody agrees that there was a period of oral transmission of the life and teachings of Jesus before they were written down. How can we know that the Gospels accurately depict what Jesus did and said, instead of being “freely invented stories and sayings that reflected the needs and experiences of the early church”?

Edwards gives five points, three of which he calls “quality controls”, which argue for the faithfulness of the church in reproducing what they received from Jesus, rather than what they said about Jesus. Again I can only list them. This is very helpful material, and I encourage you to read the entire chapter yourself.

1. “Eyewitnesses were still alive when the tradition was being formed.”


2. The “methodology of rabbinic teaching” would have ensured accurate memory and transmission of Jesus’ teachings.


3. The “embarrassing material” in the Gospels is not what one would expect if the church was just making up stories about Jesus and his disciples (e.g. Jesus’ rebuke of Peter in Mark 8:33 “Get behind me, Satan.”).


4. The content of Jesus’ teaching is not the same content as in the rest of the New Testament. If the church had projected its image of Jesus back onto the Gospels, you would expect to see the same language filling the rest of the New Testament (“Son of Man”, “Kingdom of God”, etc.). But there is little of that except in the Gospels themselves.


5. The “Gentile question” was a major concern of the early church. “Could Gentiles be saved without first becoming Jews?” But you see nothing about this in the Gospels. That is incredible if the early church was projecting its ideas back onto Jesus.

Most of these arguments have been made elsewhere for years, but Edwards does a great job of pulling them together in a readable and understandable format—and therefore a strong argument for the reliability of the Gospels for credible information about Jesus.

Next we will look at the question, “Did Jesus consider himself to be God?”