Chapter 21 — Could Jesus Be One of the Gods?
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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One of the cleverest arguments against the full deity of Christ goes something like this: "We're not saying Jesus is just a man. We're saying he's divine, a god, a mighty heavenly being. Just not the almighty God."
This position tries to stake out a middle ground. Jesus is more than human but less than God, a divine being, maybe the greatest one, without being identical to the Father. He can even be called "a god" (lowercase g) without that meaning he's THE God.
Jehovah's Witnesses hold this position most explicitly. Their New World Translation renders John 1:1 as "the Word was a god," deliberately inserting the indefinite article to make Christ a lesser divine being. Versions of the same argument also show up in Unitarian theology and LDS thought.
Chapter 21 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics takes this position apart. The case against it is worth walking through.
The Problem with "A God"
Polytheism was everywhere in the ancient world. The gods of Greece and Rome were a category of being: powerful, immortal, often immoral, arranged in hierarchies. You could talk about "the gods" as a group, some greater than others.
The God of Israel stood completely apart from this. From the very beginning, Israel's faith wasn't a belief in a very powerful god among many. It was a belief in one God, categorically different from everything else. "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3), not because the others were real and merely less important, but because there are no other real gods. "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (Isa. 44:6).
The Jewish world Jesus came into, and the world the New Testament was written in, held this view firmly. For Jews, the category of "a god" (a lesser divine being in a hierarchy of divine beings) simply didn't exist. There was God (YHWH), and then there was everything else, creation. That binary is the framework everything else has to fit into.
So when the New Testament speaks of Christ in divine terms, it really only has two options. Either it's fitting him into the category of the one God of Israel, or it's committing a form of polytheism that would have been utterly abhorrent to the Jewish authors who wrote it.
The Jehovah's Witness Translation
The Watchtower's rendering "the Word was a god" requires both a grammatical sleight of hand and a theological category that didn't exist in first-century Jewish monotheism. Greek grammar doesn't support the indefinite article translation. Greek has no indefinite article, and the anarthrous (articleless) use of theos in John 1:1c doesn't call for "a god." Greek scholars are nearly unanimous on this point.
But there's a bigger problem. What kind of being is "a god" in the context of Jewish monotheism? There's no such category. You're either YHWH or you're a creature. The Watchtower's "a god" wouldn't have sounded to a first-century Jew like a modest claim about Christ. It would have sounded like an introduction of paganism into Jewish monotheism.
The Unitarian Angle
Unitarians sometimes argue that Moses was called "god" (Exod. 4:16; 7:1), the Davidic king was called "God" in Psalm 45:6, and the judges of Israel were called "gods" in Psalm 82:6. Doesn't this show that "God" can apply to human representatives without implying divinity?
Yes, these passages use divine language for human figures, but always in ways that make clear the metaphorical or representational nature of the usage. The Psalms give kings or judges divine titles as God's deputies, his representatives. No one in ancient Israel thought Moses was actually God.
The New Testament's use of divine language for Jesus is different in kind, not just degree. Jesus doesn't receive divine titles as a human representative. He receives them as the eternal Son who shares the divine nature, who created all things, who is worshiped by angels, who bears the divine name YHWH, who will judge all humanity.
The Only Viable Options
If you accept Jewish monotheism as the framework, and the New Testament clearly does, there are really only two options for understanding Jesus: he's God in the full sense, sharing the divine identity of YHWH, or he's a creature. "A god" in a middle category isn't an option the Bible's worldview allows.
And the New Testament, as we've been seeing throughout this series, places Jesus firmly on the God side of that line. Not as a second God, not as a lesser God, but as the eternal divine Son who fully shares in the divine identity of the one God of Israel.
The case for this isn't a few isolated proof texts. It's the entire pattern of worship, prayer, names, attributes, deeds, and seat that the New Testament consistently attributes to Jesus, and to no angel, no prophet, no human being, no creature of any kind.
There is one God. And Jesus is his name, among others.
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