Counterpoints: Bart Ehrman vs. Brant Pitre on Jesus as God in the Synoptic Gospels

 

Bart Ehrman: "If Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming himself to be a divine being sent from God...could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important?  And yet none of these earlier sources [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] says any such thing about him.  Did they (all of them!) just decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about Jesus?  Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical."1

Brant Pitre: "...if it were true that Jesus never speaks or acts as if he is divine in the Synoptic Gospels, that three of the earliest biographies of Jesus do not provide any evidence that he claimed to be divine, then a major historical argument could be made against the ancient Christian belief that Jesus thought he was God.  And this would quite understandably lead to doubts about whether the Gospel of John is historically accurate in portraying Jesus as claiming to be God.  

The problem is that the claim that Jesus is not depicted as God in the Synoptic Gospels is flat-out wrong.  The only way to hold such a claim is to completely ignore both the miracles of Jesus in which he acts as if he is the one God, as well as the sayings of Jesus in which he speaks as if he is the one God."2  

Courage and Godspeed,
Chad 

Footnote:
1. As quoted by Brant Pitre in The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ, p. 120.
2. Ibid., p. 121. 

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