Does Jesus Claim to Be God?

Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God? The question is sometimes framed as though Jesus Himself was ambiguous about His identity, or as though divine Christology was a later invention. This editorial examines the evidence from the texts themselves — what Jesus said, how His audience responded, and what the earliest sources record.

The context matters. Jesus was speaking to Jews — rigorous monotheists who understood what it meant to claim the divine name, to forgive sins, to accept worship, to assert authority over the Sabbath, and to place oneself at the right hand of God. Their responses to these claims — attempted stoning, accusations of blasphemy, condemnation to death — are recorded in the texts and provide evidence of how His words were understood.

The question is not whether Jesus used the precise English sentence "I am God." The question is whether He claimed divine identity in ways His Jewish audience would have understood. What follows examines the evidence — drawn from the Gospels, the epistles of Paul, and the testimony of the earliest Church Fathers.

The Gospel of John preserves several instances in which Jesus uses the phrase "I am" (Greek: ego eimi) in a way that unmistakably echoes the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. In Exodus 3:14, God identifies himself as "I AM THAT I AM" — the Septuagint renders this as ego eimi ho on. When Jesus uses ego eimi as an absolute, unpredicated statement, he is not simply making a grammatical remark. He is invoking the name of God.