10 Top Objections to Jesus as God and Messiah, Answered
The strongest versions of the hardest questions, taken seriously and answered carefully.
Nearly every objection raised today against Jesus's deity and messiahship has a long history. Some come from Jewish counter-missionary scholarship going back centuries. Others come from modern critical scholarship, skeptical of the New Testament's reliability. Both deserve serious engagement, not dismissal. This piece works through ten of the strongest versions of these objections, in each case stating the objection plainly before answering it.
- Jesus's enemies, not only HIS followers, understood HIM to be claiming deity, which is why blasphemy was the charge that led to HIS death (Matthew 26:63–66).
- High Christology is not a 4th-century invention. Pre-Pauline material, including the Philippians 2 hymn, is dated by scholars, including skeptical ones, to within a decade or two of the crucifixion.
- The genealogies and the Jeconiah objection are resolved by the same detail: Matthew traces Joseph's legal line, Luke traces Mary's biological line, and the virgin birth removes Jesus from Jeconiah's cursed bloodline entirely.
- Jesus's prayer, temptation, and stated ignorance of "that day" are addressed by HIS full humanity, not treated as a problem for HIS full deity.
- The Hebrew word for "one" in the Shema is used elsewhere of compound unity, and the Hebrew Bible itself contains plural and multi-personal language about God.
- Unfulfilled Messianic prophecies are explained by the New Testament's own two-stage framework: a first coming to suffer, a second coming to reign.
"Jesus Never Explicitly Said, 'I Am God.'"
It is true that no Gospel records the precise English sentence "I am God" on Jesus's lips. But this objection asks for a specific grammatical formula rather than examining the actual claims Jesus made, and those claims are dramatic enough that HIS own enemies understood them as claims to deity.
In John 8:58, Jesus tells a hostile crowd, "before Abraham was, I am," using the same divine self-designation God uses of HIMSELF in Exodus 3:14. The crowd's response was to pick up stones. In John 10:30–33, after Jesus says "I and the Father are one," the crowd again moves to stone HIM, stating plainly: "for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God." In Mark 2:5–7, Jesus forgives sins outright, prompting the scribes to ask, "who can forgive sins but God alone?" At HIS trial, when the high priest demands to know if HE is "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed," Jesus answers "I am," and alludes to Daniel 7 and Psalm 110, both of which the court recognized as a direct claim to divine authority, and condemned HIM for blasphemy on that basis (Matthew 26:63–66).1
Historians generally give extra weight to claims attested by hostile witnesses. Jesus's own executioners, not HIS followers, are the ones recorded as understanding and acting on HIS divine claims.
"The Trinity Was Invented at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD."
Nicaea settled a vocabulary dispute between two already-existing views, it did not invent the idea that Jesus was divine. The council was called specifically to address Arius, a priest teaching that Jesus was a created being, not eternally divine. The council's decision, that the Son is homoousios, of the same essence as the Father, was a defense of what was already the majority, historic position against a newer minority view, not a new doctrine imposed from nowhere.2
Evidence of high Christology predates Nicaea by two centuries. Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor with no Christian sympathies, reports around 112 AD that Christians met before dawn and "sang a hymn to Christ as to a god."3 Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107 AD on his way to martyrdom, repeatedly calls Jesus "our God" in letters never disputed as authentic.4 Even Bart Ehrman, a scholar not inclined to defend traditional Christian claims, acknowledges that the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6–11 was likely already circulating in the 40s CE, within a decade of the crucifixion, and already presents Christ as pre-existent and "equal with God."5
"Jesus Didn't Fulfill the Messianic Prophecies."
This objection usually points out that the Messiah was expected to bring worldwide peace, rebuild the Temple, and gather Israel, none of which happened in Jesus's lifetime. The objection is accurate about what did not happen. It assumes, however, that all Messianic prophecy must be fulfilled in a single appearance, an assumption the New Testament itself does not share.
Peter describes the Hebrew prophets as having searched to understand "the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories" (1 Peter 1:10–11), a two-stage pattern of suffering first, glory after. On this reading, Isaiah 53's suffering servant and Isaiah 9 and Daniel 7's reigning king are not competing prophecies requiring different candidates. They are two comings of the same figure, separated in time: the first to atone, the second to reign in the way the objection describes.
This two-stage framework is itself a theological claim drawn from reading the New Testament's own self-understanding back into the prophets. It is not something a reader of Isaiah alone, without reference to Jesus, would necessarily arrive at independently. The fairest statement is that it is a coherent and internally consistent reading, not an obvious or uncontested one.
"Isaiah 7:14 Doesn't Predict a Virgin Birth."
The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14, almah, means "young woman of marriageable age," not specifically "virgin." The more precise Hebrew word for virgin, betulah, appears elsewhere in Isaiah, and its absence here is a real textual observation, not an invention of modern skeptics.6
What complicates a simple dismissal is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made by Jewish scholars roughly two centuries before Jesus, with no Christian influence whatsoever. Those translators rendered almah in this verse with parthenos, the standard Greek word specifically for "virgin," not simply "young woman."7 This shows that a pre-Christian Jewish understanding of this passage already carried virginal connotations, before Matthew ever cited it.
Almah alone does not require virginity, and Isaiah could have used betulah if that had been his only point.
Pre-Christian Jewish translators, working centuries before Matthew, independently rendered the term with a Greek word that does specifically mean virgin.
"Matthew's and Luke's Genealogies of Jesus Contradict Each Other."
Matthew 1 and Luke 3 give genuinely different lists of ancestors between David and Joseph, and this has been noticed since antiquity, not just by modern critics. The standard harmonization, recorded as early as the 3rd-century historian Julius Africanus, is that the two Gospels are tracing two different lines.8 Matthew traces the legal, royal line through Solomon, establishing Jesus's right to David's throne through Joseph. Luke traces a biological line through David's other son, Nathan, down to Mary, establishing Jesus's actual bloodline descent from David.
This is not a modern apologetic invention stitched together to resolve an embarrassing contradiction after the fact. It is the oldest recorded explanation for the discrepancy, offered by a historian writing generations before the New Testament canon was formally closed.
"Jesus Descended from the Cursed King Jeconiah."
Jeremiah 22:30 records a severe curse on King Jeconiah: "none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David." Matthew's genealogy places Jeconiah directly in Jesus's line through Joseph. If Jesus's throne-right depends on being Joseph's biological son, this is a genuine legal problem.
"Write this man down as childless... for none of his offspring shall succeed." Jeremiah 22:30
The virgin birth is precisely what resolves this. Jesus is Joseph's legal son, adopted into the royal line and its throne-right, but not Joseph's biological offspring in the sense Jeremiah's curse addresses. Luke's genealogy, tracing Mary's biological line through David's son Nathan, never passes through Jeconiah at all. Jesus inherits the legal claim to David's throne through Joseph without carrying Jeconiah's blood, and carries David's blood through Mary without the legal curse attached. The two genealogies, read together rather than as competitors, solve the very problem this objection raises.9
"If Jesus Is God, He Couldn't Pray, Be Tempted, or Not Know the Day."
Jesus prays to the Father (John 17), is described as tempted (Matthew 4:1–11), and states plainly that HE does not know the day or hour of HIS own return, a knowledge reserved to "the Father only" (Mark 13:32). These texts are real, and a shallow view of the incarnation struggles to account for them.
Historic Christian theology addresses this through the doctrine of the hypostatic union: one person, Jesus, possessing two complete natures, fully divine and fully human, without either nature being diminished. Prayer, temptation, hunger, tiredness, and limited human knowledge belong to Christ's genuine human experience. Paul describes Christ as having voluntarily "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:7), language historically understood as a veiling of the independent exercise of certain divine prerogatives during the incarnation, not an actual loss of divine nature.10
"The Shema Says God Is One. The Trinity Is Really Tritheism."
"Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4) is the bedrock of Jewish and Christian monotheism alike, and any Christian claim that conflicts with it should be rejected outright. The question is whether Trinitarian theology actually does conflict with it.
The Hebrew word for "one" here, echad, is used elsewhere of compound unity, not only mathematical singularity: man and wife become "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24), and evening and morning together make "one day" (Genesis 1:5). The Hebrew Bible itself contains plural and multi-personal language applied to the one God: "let us make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26), the LORD sending "me" alongside "the Spirit of the Lord GOD" in Isaiah 48:16, and Psalm 110:1's striking line, "The LORD said to my Lord," which Jesus Himself points to as evidence that the expected Messiah is more than David's descendant (Matthew 22:41–45).11 Trinitarian theology claims one God in three persons, not three gods, which is a different claim than tritheism, whatever one makes of its coherence.
"Paul Invented the Divine Jesus. The Real Jesus Was Just a Rabbi."
On this view, a Jewish teacher's simple message was transformed, by Paul, into a Hellenistic savior-god decades after the fact, far from Jesus's own Jewish, Palestinian context. The timeline does not support this. 1 Corinthians 16:22 preserves a one-word Aramaic prayer, Maranatha, "our Lord, come," addressed to Jesus and used in early Jewish-Christian worship, a prayer in the language of Jesus's own followers, not a later Greek-speaking community.12
Scholars Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham have each independently argued that worship of Jesus as sharing in the divine identity emerged remarkably early, within the first few years after the crucifixion, inside the Jewish monotheistic community in Jerusalem itself, not as a later Gentile accretion onto a simpler original message.13 Paul's own letters describe him persecuting this already-existing belief before his conversion (Galatians 1:13, Philippians 3:6), meaning the belief he later promoted predates his own involvement with the movement entirely.
"The Resurrection Accounts Contradict Each Other and Copy Pagan Myths."
The four Gospel resurrection accounts differ on details: how many women went to the tomb, how many angels they saw, the exact sequence of appearances. Even though the details are different (as how eye witness accounts should be), these differing details affirm the fact of Christ's resurrection. However, these differences are real and have been discussed since the early church.
On the "copycat" claim, that the resurrection was borrowed from dying-and-rising gods like Osiris or Dionysus, the comparative evidence is considerably weaker than popular treatments suggest. Even Tryggve Mettinger, a scholar who defends the existence of a dying-and-rising god pattern in the ancient Near East, acknowledges that the clearest supposed parallels to Jesus either postdate Christianity or differ fundamentally in structure, since pagan dying-and-rising gods are typically tied to seasonal, repeating vegetation cycles, not a one-time historical event tied to a specific dated execution under a named Roman official.14
On timing, the resurrection proclamation is not a late legend. The creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, "Christ died... was buried... was raised... appeared," is widely dated, including by non-evangelical scholars, to within a few years of the crucifixion itself, too early for the kind of gradual legendary development the copycat theory requires.
A Closing Word
None of the above is offered as a mathematical proof that forces agreement. Each objection here represents a real line of scholarship or tradition, held by thoughtful people, and the responses given represent the strongest form of the historic Christian answer, not an attempt to make the objections sound weaker than they are. Readers are encouraged to follow the endnotes to primary sources rather than take any single summary, including this one, as the final word.
— The Christian Case
- John 8:58–59; John 10:30–33; Mark 2:5–7; Matthew 26:63–66.
- On Nicaea as a response to Arius rather than an invention, see standard patristic histories, e.g. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (HarperOne, revised ed. 1978).
- Pliny the Younger, Letters, Book 10, Letter 96, to Emperor Trajan, c. 112 AD.
- Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians, Prologue and 18:2; Epistle to the Romans, Prologue, c. 107 AD.
- Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014), discussing the Philippians 2:6–11 hymn as likely pre-Pauline and dated as early as the 40s CE.
- Betulah appears in Isaiah 23:12, 37:22, 47:1, and 62:5, showing the author's familiarity with the term.
- Septuagint, Isaiah 7:14, rendering ha'almah as parthenos; quoted directly in Matthew 1:23.
- Julius Africanus, as preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book 1, Chapter 7.
- Jeremiah 22:30; Matthew 1:1–16; Luke 3:23–38.
- Philippians 2:5–8; Mark 13:32; John 17; Matthew 4:1–11, read through the historic doctrine of the hypostatic union (Chalcedonian Definition, 451 AD).
- Deuteronomy 6:4; Genesis 2:24; Genesis 1:5, 26; Isaiah 48:16; Psalm 110:1; Matthew 22:41–45.
- 1 Corinthians 16:22, preserving the Aramaic Maranatha.
- Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Eerdmans, 2008).
- Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: "Dying and Rising Gods" in the Ancient Near East (Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001); 1 Corinthians 15:3–7.
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