The writings of the New Testament assume that Jesus is God. This is explicitly confirmed by Jesus (Joh. 1, 1; Mt. 16, 15 – 19; Joh. 20, 28 – 29), but also becomes indirectly clear when Jesus puts His word above that of Moses (“But I say unto you” in Mt. 5 – 7) and when Jesus can forgive sins against God (Lk. 7, 48). And Pliny, who was Roman governor in 111 – 114, reports to his emperor Trajan that the Christians even then worship Jesus as God.
The Jews at the time of Jesus were monotheists. They believed that there is only one God who created and sustains the entire universe, who is high above all powers and authorities, who is the Lord of history and to whom every human being is accountable. This belief in one God is separated by a deep gulf from the religiosity of Greco-Roman culture, which worshipped many gods. These gods, while more powerful than humans, were under the rule of fate and could even lose their immortality if they swore by the Styx, the river of the realm of the dead, committing perjury. In ancient times, therefore, people could be elevated to gods, such as the Roman emperors after their deaths, and there were a number of demigods. Jews therefore felt toweringly superior to ancient religiosity and never dreamed of taking anything important from that religion.
For a Jew it was the greatest sin to worship a man as a god. In Acts 12:32-34 it is reported that King Herod was struck by an angel of God and then died eaten by worms because he did not immediately reject the worship as God offered to him by Gentiles and instead gave glory to God. And when Barnabas and Paul healed a lame man in Lystra and were then worshipped as gods by the crowd (what an opportunity this would have been for their mission!), they rejected this with all the signs of horror and could only with difficulty convince the crowd that they were also only men (Acts 14:8 – 18). There is only one way for a Jew to acknowledge Jesus as God: a direct revelation of God. (Mt. 16, 17)
Therefore, the belief that Jesus is God is not a result of the reflection of the Church of Jesus, which exalted a mere man and great teacher to God, but the starting point of every Christian theology. The attempt to gain a correct description of the life of Jesus by removing everything supernatural and the claim to divinity is thus doomed to failure from the outset because, contrary to what many theologians believed, it is historically untenable.
The subsections of the section The Bible seen by a historian are: Miracles, Divinity of Jesus Christ, Being shaken by God, lying was no longer possible, The gospels present an accurate picture of Jesus, The letter to the Ephesians, inner unity of the writers of the New Testament
The part history has the section The Bible seen by a historian
The main part world has the parts science and history.
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