Cold Case Christianity: Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God

Posted: 22 Dec 2017 01:53 AM PST

79As we approach Christmas in just a few days, I’ve been thinking about what separates Jesus from other great religious figures of history. Many faith traditions lay claim to famous religious leaders and founders, but Jesus is different.

Correct.  Most religious leaders don't have half the self-contradictory and absurd descriptions as are given to Jesus.  Blame the stupidity on Philo and the Council of Nicaea.

Jesus claimed to be more than a good teacher or leader. Jesus claimed to be God. Some deny this truth about Jesus’ teaching, but the New Testament leaves little room for doubt: Jesus claimed to be God and taught this truth to His followers.
 He Spoke As Though He Was God

He also spoke as if he wasn't god.

While all Biblical prophets of God made statements on God’s behalf, they were careful to preface their proclamations with “This is what the LORD Almighty says,” or “This is what the LORD says,”

No, it is not always possible to distinguish the prophet from God.  Remember the story of God telling the Israelites how to use the bathroom?

 12 "You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there,
 13 and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement.
 14 "Since the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He will turn away from you. (Deut. 23:12-14 NAU)

In describing God as "walking among you" and in teaching that God cannot see feces after it is buried in the ground, the author is ascribing limits to God that normally aren't admitted.  This is likely because God's presence among the Israelites constitutes nothing more than Moses' presence, in in that ancient context, such confusion of identities was accepted as something profound.

Otherwise, you'll have to explain how the omniscient all-seeing all-knowing creator of the universe can be prevented from seeing feces merely by burying it in the ground.  Stop pretending as if the only correct interpretation is the one that "makes sense".  You don't have the first fucking clue whether the author intended to "make sense" in the first place.  But you presume such anyway because you care more about impressing the Christians whom you mostly write for, than you do for the scholarly skeptics who continually refute your nonsense.

but Jesus never used such a preface. Instead, Jesus always prefaced his statements with, “Verily, verily, I say to you,” (KJV) or “I tell you the truth,” (NASB). Prophets spoke for God, but Jesus consistently spoke as God.

So then apparently it was a schizophrenic god who cried from the cross "why have you forsaken me"  Mark 15:34?  You will say Jesus only said that from his human nature not his divine nature.  But "nature" is not something that can be implicated or avoided.  If it is your "nature", then it is implicated in ALL that you say or do, it cannot be avoided.  So assuming for the sake of argument the logical absurdity that Jesus had "two natures", BOTH of them would be equally implicated in whatever he did, which would then mean you cannot allocate Jesus' cry of the Father's abandonment to just Jesus' human nature.   Therefore if Jesus said this, he also said it from his divine nature and not merely his human nature.

He Claimed the Title Used by God
Faithful Jews recognized the fact that God identified Himself to Moses as the great “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Yet Jesus (in referring to Himself) told the Jewish religious leaders that “before Abraham was born, I AM”. They immediately recognized that He was identifying Himself as God and were so angered by this ‘blasphemy’ that they “picked up stones to stone him.”

But Jesus' attempt to use Psalm 82 to justify his claim to deity in John 10 strongly suggests that he was only claiming to be god in the same sense that Psalm 82 says human judges of the OT were sometimes referred to as Elohim.  If Jesus was God by nature and not by mere association or label, he would hardly use the humans-are-also-called-gods argument of Psalm 82 to convince the Jews that his claim to be god was accurate.

 30 "I and the Father are one."
 31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him.
 32 Jesus answered them, "I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?"
 33 The Jews answered Him, "For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God."
 34 Jesus answered them, "Has it not been written in your Law, 'I SAID, YOU ARE GODS '?
 35 "If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken),
 36 do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God '?
 37 "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me;
 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father."   (Jn. 10:30-38 NAU)

It is Jesus' fault if I misunderstand his nature, since, allegedly as God, he could have made far more clear his relation to the Father, than he did with this controversial citation to Psalm 82.

God apparently loves us so much that whether we fry in hell forever depends on whether we can properly decipher his fortune cookie bullshit.

(Jesus also identified Himself as the great I AM in Mark 14:62, John 18:5-6, 8:24, and 8:28).

No, in Mark 14:62, Jesus is only saying "I am" in reply to the question "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One", which no more shows a claim to deity than if you say "I am" when somebody says "are you the owner of this car?":

 61 But He kept silent and did not answer. Again the high priest was questioning Him, and saying to Him, "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?"
 62 And Jesus said, "I am; and you shall see THE SON OF MAN SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF POWER, and COMING WITH THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN."
 (Mk. 14:61-62 NAU)

In John 18:5-6, there's a "he" following "am", in which case, Jesus is simply admitting to being a specifically named person:

 3 Judas then, having received the Roman cohort and officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.
 4 So Jesus, knowing all the things that were coming upon Him, went forth and said to them, "Whom do you seek?"
 5 They answered Him, "Jesus the Nazarene." He said to them, "I am He." And Judas also, who was betraying Him, was standing with them.
 6 So when He said to them, "I am He," they drew back and fell to the ground.
 7 Therefore He again asked them, "Whom do you seek?" And they said, "Jesus the Nazarene."
 8 Jesus answered, "I told you that I am He; so if you seek Me, let these go their way,"
 9 to fulfill the word which He spoke, "Of those whom You have given Me I lost not one."
 (Jn. 18:3-9 NAU)

In John 8:24 and 28, is the same, except for Jesus saying "I do nothing on my own initiative", a thing God the Father would never say:

 23 And He was saying to them, "You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.
 24 "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins."
 25 So they were saying to Him, "Who are You?" Jesus said to them, "What have I been saying to you from the beginning?
 26 "I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these I speak to the world."
 27 They did not realize that He had been speaking to them about the Father.
 28 So Jesus said, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.
 29 "And He who sent Me is with Me; He has not left Me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him." (Jn. 8:23-29 NAU)

You will say that the "I do nothing on my own initiative" was spoken solely from his human nature, but as I argued above, "nature" is not something that can be selectively implicated.  Whatever your nature is, is necessarily implicated in ALL that any person says and does.  So if Jesus had two natures (an absurd supposition on its own anyway), BOTH natures would be equally implicated in what he said or did, in which case it was also his divine nature implicated too, when he said he didn't do anything on his own initiative.

He Claimed the Home of God
Every time Jesus was asked about where he came from, He told His listeners that He came not from Bethlehem or Nazareth but from the same realm where God abides.

Which could just as easily be claimed by Enoch, Elijah or angels.

Jesus claimed to come “from above”. He repeatedly said that He was “not of this world” (John 8:23-24) and even told Pilate that he was a King whose Kingdom “is from another place” (John 18:36-37).

Apparently Jesus toned down his kingship claims when on trial.  Nothing in the Synoptics teaches that Jesus is anything less than the earthly King for his followers.  So when he says at trial "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36), he is clearly trying to pawn off on the Roman authorities (i.e., he was answering Pilate there) an interpretation of his purpose that would show no threat to the Romans.   Quite a dumbing down from his extroverted in-your-face claims to the contrary in Matthew 4:17.  Matthew 11:12 implies Jesus' kingdom was presently on the earth.

He Claimed Equality With God
Jesus said that God’s angels were His angels and that God’s Kingdom was His Kingdom (Matthew 13:41). Jesus even said that the judgment typically understood to be reserved for God was actually Jesus’ judgment to make (Luke 12:8-9). Jesus told His followers that when they saw Him, they saw God; if they knew Him, they knew God, and if they loved Him, they were loving God (John 14:6-9 and John 14:23).

He Saw No Distinction Between Himself and God
Finally, Jesus simply and plainly told His followers that there was no distinction between Himself and God the Father. When talking about the manner in which saints are selected for Salvation, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:29). He did not mean that they were ‘one’ in purpose or power, but that they were one in identity. His hearers understood what He was saying and picked up stones again to stone him “for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God” (John 10:33).

Once again, you obviously don't give one holy fuck about answering skeptics, you write solely to make money helping other Christians feel better after the fact.  John was written last, all scholars acknowledge that in John there is a greater theological reflection going on than can be seen in the Synoptics, in which case you don't really know whether John is quoting Jesus in the way newspapers quote politicians, or if John is putting in Jesus' mouth a reworked version of what Jesus originally said.

Yet you run around acting as if the gospel of John was the equal of video tape despite many of your own conservative scholar brothers refusing to go that far.  Your blindly trusting proof-texting guarantees you intend to market to a gullible audience.

Like I said, you don't write to refute skeptics.  You write for the same reason most Christian con artists write, to use the Jesus-scandal to make money off of his gullible followers.