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Historical Jesus & Christian Origins

How Did Jewish Monotheists Come to Worship Jesus?

September 11, 2026

Did Jesus claim to be God?

The question sounds as if it should have a yes-or-no answer. Instead, it opens one of the most interesting problems in early Christian history.

One popular answer says that Jesus walked through Galilee openly teaching the doctrine later defined at Nicaea: one divine essence shared by the Father and the Son. Another says Jesus was only a human teacher until Emperor Constantine and fourth-century bishops turned him into God.

The New Testament does not fit either story.

Mark, usually regarded as the earliest canonical Gospel, never has Jesus announce that he is God in later creedal language. When a man calls him “Good Teacher,” Jesus answers, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Mark gives Jesus remarkable authority, but also shows him praying in anguish and crying to God from the cross.

Then we turn to Paul, whose letters predate Mark. By the 50s CE, Jesus already receives the language of cosmic rule and devotion. Philippians says that God exalted Jesus and gave him “the name that is above every name,” so that every knee would bow before him. In 1 Corinthians 8:6, Paul speaks of one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist.

So the harder question is not whether devotion to Jesus appeared early. It did. The harder question is how Jewish followers of Jesus could give him such status while continuing to understand themselves as worshipers of Israel’s God.

The answer may lie in categories that were natural to ancient Jewish thought but unfamiliar to many modern readers: graded divinity, authorized agency, and the divine Name.

The problem with a two-box model

Modern discussions often sort the ancient world into two boxes. God belongs in one. Every created thing belongs in the other. If Jesus receives divine honor, he must have been moved wholesale into the God box.

Richard Bauckham’s influential “divine identity” model works along these lines. He argues that early Jews distinguished the unique identity of Israel’s God from everything else, and that early Christians included Jesus within that identity.

Biblical scholar Daniel McClellan challenges this account in his 2017 article “Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology.” He argues that the model imports later ideas about creation and modern Western ideas about bounded individual identity into Second Temple Jewish texts. Bauckham’s account remains influential, so McClellan’s criticism should be read as one side of a real scholarly debate, not as the last word.

McClellan’s alternative begins with prototype theory, a framework associated with psychologist Eleanor Rosch. We do not always organize ordinary categories by rigid definitions. We often organize them around the clearest example.

A robin is a typical North American bird. A penguin is still a bird, but it sits farther from the prototype because it does not fly. The category has a center and a less tidy edge.

McClellan argues that ancient Jewish language about deity worked in a similar way. YHWH, the God of Israel, occupied the incomparable center. Yet biblical words such as elohim could also refer to subordinate heavenly beings and, in unusual settings, human or deceased figures. Psalm 82 depicts God presiding among other elohim. Exodus 7:1 calls Moses elohim to Pharaoh. First Samuel 28:13 uses the term when the medium at Endor sees Samuel.

None of those figures becomes equal to YHWH. The point is that ancient Jewish texts could use divine language without making every member of the category identical in rank, nature, or authority.

That makes the ancient map less like two sealed boxes and more like a kingdom. The king remains supreme, while authorized representatives can exercise real power on the king’s behalf.

How divine agency could be shared

The ancient ideas of personhood were not always as self-contained as modern Western ones. Anthropologist Robert A. Di Vito describes ancient Semitic personhood as “partible and permeable.” A person’s ability to act could extend through an envoy, representative, sacred object, or image.

We still understand a limited version of this. An ambassador can speak in the name of a government. Rejecting the ambassador’s authorized message can amount to rejecting the government that sent her. The ambassador does not become the government, but its authority is present in her official action.

Ancient divine agency could carry far more weight. In Jewish scripture, the divine Name was not merely a label. It could represent God’s presence and authority.

Exodus 23 provides the basic pattern. God promises to send a messenger before Israel and warns the people:

“Beware of Him and obey His voice; do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon your transgressions; for My name is in Him.”

The messenger exercises an authority associated with God because God’s Name is in him. Encountering the authorized messenger means encountering the authority of the One who sent him.

Later Jewish writings develop related ideas. The Apocalypse of Abraham connects the angel Yahoel with the divine Name. The later text known as 3 Enoch gives Metatron the title “lesser YHWH” and depicts angels bowing before him. These writings come from different periods and cannot simply be projected backward into the minds of Jesus’s first followers. They do show that Jewish traditions could imagine exalted intermediaries bearing divine authority without replacing the supreme God.

Reading Philippians through the divine Name

This background gives Philippians 2:9–11 a sharper outline:

“Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.”

The sequence matters. God exalts Jesus. God gives him the supreme Name. The resulting homage to Jesus brings glory to God the Father.

The passage also draws on Isaiah 45:23, where every knee bows to YHWH. In the Greek Scriptures used by early Christians, Kyrios, or “Lord,” commonly represents the divine name YHWH. When Philippians declares Jesus Christ to be Kyrios, it applies the language of Israel’s God to Jesus while still distinguishing Jesus from the God who exalts him.

McClellan interprets this as Name theology. Jesus bears the chief vehicle of God’s agency and therefore acts as God’s authorized presence. On this account, the earliest Christians did not need the later vocabulary of divine substance before they could offer Jesus extraordinary devotion. Their Jewish scriptural world already supplied categories for God’s rule and presence to operate through an exalted agent.

The same pattern appears elsewhere in the New Testament. Hebrews says the Son inherited a name superior to the angels. John 17 portrays the Father giving Jesus the divine Name. Different New Testament writers develop Christology in different ways, but the Name is part of the earliest Christian effort to explain who Jesus had become for them.

What cognitive science adds

Cognitive science does not prove a theological claim about Jesus. It offers a way to understand how people form and refine religious concepts.

McClellan uses a common distinction between intuitive and reflective thinking. Intuitive thought is quick and culturally natural. Reflective thought is deliberate and systematic. A religious community may recognize a figure’s sacred authority before it can explain that recognition in a formal philosophical system.

The earliest Christians proclaimed that Jesus had been raised, exalted, and given God’s Name. Those claims made sense within Jewish patterns of agency, heavenly enthronement, and scriptural fulfillment. The claim that the risen Jesus possessed God’s authority could be understood and practiced before Christians had settled the later metaphysical question of how Father and Son share divinity.

This is an interpretive model, not a report of what every first-century Christian consciously thought. Prototype theory and dual-process cognition are modern analytical tools. They help us see why devotion to Jesus need not have felt like a simple abandonment of Jewish monotheism, but they do not allow us to inspect an ancient believer’s mind.

What Nicaea did, and did not, do

As Christianity expanded through the Greco-Roman world, its thinkers faced questions framed in philosophical language. Was the Son created or eternal? What kind of being was he? How could the Father and Son both be divine?

Christian writers in the second through fourth centuries increasingly answered with terms such as ousia, meaning essence or substance. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE used homoousios to say that the Son was of the same substance as the Father.

Nicaea therefore did not invent devotion to a divine Jesus. Paul’s letters alone make that chronology impossible. The council gave a contested philosophical definition to a conviction that Christians had expressed for centuries.

McClellan interprets the change as a translation from an intuitive Jewish framework of Name and agency into a reflective Greek framework of substance. Confessional theologians may describe Nicaea as a faithful clarification of apostolic belief rather than a cultural translation. The historical evidence supports a more modest point on which both descriptions can meet: the vocabulary became more technical, while the devotion it attempted to explain was much older.

A more durable answer

So, did Jesus claim to be God?

Mark does not present Jesus making the direct Nicene-style claim many modern Christians expect. That does not mean his followers waited until the fourth century to treat him as divine. The earliest surviving Christian writings already place Jesus within the language, devotion, and scriptural claims associated with Israel’s God.

The route from Jesus of Nazareth to the Nicene Creed was neither a straight line nor a late imperial fabrication. The first Christians drew on Jewish ideas of divine agency and the divine Name to describe what they believed God had done through Jesus. Later Christians translated those convictions into the philosophical language of their own disputes.

Historical development does not settle whether Christian claims about Jesus are true. It does give us a better question than the usual all-or-nothing argument. Instead of asking whether the first disciples could recite a fourth-century creed, we can ask what they meant when they called Jesus Lord, bowed in his name, and still confessed one God.

Sources and Further Reading

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