Unique to the charge that Jesus makes himself God at the
Feast of Dedication is the implication that a human being cannot be God. In
answering his interlocutors, Jesus says that Scripture says that God says, “You
are gods,” a response that has embarrassed or discountenanced recent
commentators on John because of how Jesus seems to equivocate on the meaning of
god (θεος). It is as though he
predicates deity of human beings generally to evade the charge that he deifies
himself in a peculiar (and apparently) blasphemous way. “Jesus answered them,
‘It is not written in your law, “I said you are gods” [εγω ειπα θεοι εστε]? If [God] called (ειπεν) them to whom the word of God came gods—and
the Scripture cannot be broken—are you saying of him whom the Father
consecrated and sent into the world “you are speaking impiously,” because I
said, “I am God’s son”?” (10:34-36, my translation) Even the interpretation
that Jesus’s response works as an a fortiori argument—if god can
be predicated of humans, all the more so can son of god be predicated of
Jesus—leaves one with the impression that Jesus’s response is no more than a
rhetorical trick, if not a “rhetorical trap.” It is inescapable that the
question’s rhetoric is meant to establish a basic compatibility between human
beings and God, but it is often overlooked that the analogy depends on God’s
action in both cases. God is twice the subject of the speech-act whereby humans
are called gods, and humans are so called because God’s word came to them,
presumably another act of God. God’s action, moreover, is the basis of what
Jesus has to say about himself. So, if God makes humans out to be gods by
giving them the word of God, then God can make one human out to be God’s Son by
consecrating and sending him. As Thompson writes, “The christological scandal
of John is not that Jesus has made himself equal or one with God, but that God
has chosen to make himself one with Jesus.” The anthropological surprise, we
might add, is that God made humans out to be gods.
The fact that reflection on the sense in which humans are
like gods attended questions about selfhood among ancient Romans and Jews alike
suggest that Jesus’s response has more conceptual density than may otherwise be
presumed. What does Jesus think God predicates of human beings by calling us
god? Although early rabbinic interpretation understood this to indicate that
Israel became immortal in receiving the law at Sinai (until, that is, the
incident with the golden calf; cf. Ps 82:7), Jesus implies that these human
beings are gods because the word of God came to them. In this context, the
“word of God” seems to refer not to the law of Scripture as such (though Jesus
refers to both in the same sentence as the word of God), so much as to the
godlike way of thinking inscribed in them that affords wisdom, knowledge, and
right judgment to human beings. In Psalm 81 LXX (82 MT), God exercises right
judgment (διακρινει)
over those mortal gods who judge unjustly (κρινετε αδικιαν, 81:1-2). In their moral deliberation and
injustice, they are judged as neither knowing nor understanding (ουκ εγνωσαν ουδε συνηκαν, 81:5). That is, these gods are like
God in rendering judgment but are unlike God in that their judgment is
wrongful. By bringing the theme of judgment and godlikeness from Psalm 81 LXX
into connection with receiving the word of God, the law becomes a way into
moral deliberation, judging with right judgment. It is unsurprising, then, that
Nicodemus presumes the law judges people only by giving them a hearing (John 7:51;
cf. 7:24). And there is surely an irony intended by the implied author in
Pilate’s words about judging Jesus according to the law (κατα τον νομον υμων
κρινατε αυτον, 18:31). Given that the law in John’s Gospel is one of Jesus’s
witnesses and that which enables humans to exercise the godlike faculty
of judgment, to judge Jesus by the law would be to see him as one with God.
That is, in the Fourth Gospel, we are most like gods when, in exercising right
judgment about Jesus’s works, we make him out to be God’s Son. In trusting and knowing
this about Jesus, we also become like gods in having eternal life (17:3; cf.
10:28-29) (Wil Rogan, “Jesus’s Humanity and Ours: John’s Christology and
Ancient Views of the Self,” in John Among the New Testament Writers: Early
High Christology, ed. Christopher M. Blumhofer, Diane G. Chen, and Joel B.
Green [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024], 72-73)
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