Did Jesus say he was God?

Around 112 a Roman governor investigating Christians reported to his emperor that they met before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ "as to a god". Pliny had no reason to flatter them and had been executing them.

Paul is earlier still, and quotes what is widely, though not universally, read as a hymn already in circulation: Christ "existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped", who emptied himself, and to whom God gave "the name which is above every name". If that is a quotation, the belief is older than the letter.

Mark, which most scholars take to be the earliest Gospel, keeps his identity almost secret until the trial. Asked directly by the high priest whether he is "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed", he answers "I am", and adds that they will see "the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of the sky".

What that claims is argued over. Coming with the clouds is from Daniel, where the figure is "one like a son of man", and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the phrase means a human being, so it does not simply mean divine. Sitting at the right hand is from Psalm 110. The high priest tears his clothes at the whole answer and calls it blasphemy, and Mark does not say which part he heard that way.

John has Jesus saying things the other three do not. "I and the Father are one." And, of Abraham, "before Abraham came into existence, I AM", which echoes the name God gives Moses in Exodus, and the crowd picks up stones.

John also opens with a prologue identifying him with the Word, which "was God". None of it is in Mark, Matthew or Luke. It is plainer than anything in them, and still read more than one way: accused of making himself God, John’s Jesus answers from scripture, "I said, you are gods", and calls himself the Son of God.

The positions here are genuinely opposed. One holds that John, written last and by a community that had decades to reflect, is presenting the meaning of Jesus rather than transcribing him, and that the plainest claims are the least likely to be the earliest.

The other holds that John preserves material the others did not use. The chapter cited for it is about incidents scattered across the other three that cohere in John.

Both have to account for the same awkward fact: the explicit statements appear in the one Gospel usually dated furthest from the events.

The people who began worshipping Jesus were Jews who worshipped one God, and for whom giving that worship to a man would have been blasphemy. That they did it anyway, quickly, is the fact every account has to explain.

Some read it as a rapid development under the pressure of what they believed had happened at Easter. Others read it as the working out of something Jesus had already said or implied. The second needs the words to be his; the first does not.

He taught in Aramaic. Every saying in the Gospels reaches us in Greek, written by people who were not taking notes, for communities that already worshipped him. There is no layer underneath that anyone can get to.

So a reconstruction of his self-understanding is a reconstruction, and the confident ones in both directions are doing more with the evidence than it supports.

Nicene Christianity holds that Jesus is God incarnate, fully God and fully human. The wording was fought over for more than a century and fixed at Nicaea in 325 and then at Chalcedon in 451, whose definition confesses him as truly God and truly man, acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. That is a fact about the wording rather than about when the belief began.

For its own definition, Chalcedon appeals not to one saying but to the prophets, to what "the Lord Jesus Christ has taught us" and to the creed of the fathers.

The Oriental Orthodox churches did not receive Chalcedon, and the split has lasted fifteen centuries. The Church of the East is also divided from Rome, and in 1994 the two churches were still working towards "full communion to be restored between their Churches". Their disagreement is about how the divine and human in Christ are to be described, not about whether he is divine, which is why modern common declarations between those churches and Rome have been able to say the confession is one and the vocabulary was two.

So a sentence beginning "Christianity holds" is doing more work than it looks. On this question almost every church holds the substance, and tens of millions of Christians do not use the words Chalcedon settled on.

The demand for a sentence in which he says it outright, and that can be shown to be his own words, is a modern instinct, and it is worth noticing that it is one. A first-century Jewish teacher announcing "I am God" would have been heard as blasphemy or as madness rather than as revelation, and those are the two things John has his hearers say.

What the texts show instead is someone forgiving sins, reinterpreting the law on his own authority, and accepting worship. Whether that adds up to the claim is precisely what has been argued about for two thousand years.