Honest questions
Is Jesus God?
Christians say yes: fully God and fully human, one person. Jesus is rarely called God outright in the Gospels, but he does things only God does, forgives sins, receives worship and claims authority over the Sabbath, and the earliest churches prayed to him. The direct statements are there too, in John, Colossians and Titus.
What he claimed, and how
The claims are mostly indirect, which is part of why they were so provocative. He forgives sins committed against other people, and the objection raised on the spot is that only God can do that. He calls himself lord of the Sabbath, an institution God established. He accepts worship instead of refusing it, which both angels and apostles elsewhere refuse. He applies to himself the divine name from Exodus in a way that got stones picked up. These are not the moves of a teacher claiming only to speak for God.
The direct statements
John opens by saying the Word was God and then says the Word became flesh. Thomas, seeing the risen Jesus, addresses him as my Lord and my God, and is not corrected. Paul writes that the fullness of deity lives bodily in Christ, and Titus speaks of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Hebrews applies psalms about God directly to the Son. These are scattered rather than constant, which is what you would expect from writers whose first instinct was to guard the oneness of God.
Fully human, and not less so
The claim is not that a divine being wore a human body as clothing. Jesus grew, ate, got tired, wept, was tempted, did not know a date he was asked about, and died. The church has always insisted that giving up any of this is as serious an error as denying his divinity. One person, two natures, neither one diluting the other, is the formula Chalcedon arrived at in 451, and it was chosen mainly to rule out the easier answers rather than to explain the mechanism.
Objections worth taking seriously
Some argue the title Son of God need not imply divinity, since Israel and its kings carry it. Others argue the high claims developed over decades and were read back into the story. Both deserve better than a slogan in reply. The counter-evidence usually cited is that the earliest material we have, including a creed Paul says he received, already treats Jesus in terms reserved for God, and that Jewish monotheists did not casually start praying to a man. It is an argument worth having properly.
In the text
Where this comes from
Quoted from the World English Bible, which is public domain. Read the surrounding chapter in whatever translation you own.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
For in him all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily.
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