Around the year 112, a Roman governor named Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan about a troublesome new group in his province. Among the few things he had learned about them: they met before dawn on a fixed day and sang a hymn to Christ as to a god. Pliny was no believer, and he was describing people barely eighty years after the crucifixion. The question on this page is the one his letter raises. Did those early Christians get it right? Here is what the New Testament says, what the church has believed, and where people disagree.
What Christians believe
The historic Christian answer is that Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The Trinity is the belief that there is one God who exists eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christians do not believe in three gods. They believe in one God, known in three persons who share one divine nature.
They also believe Jesus was truly human. He was born, grew tired, felt hunger and sorrow, and died. So he is not a god pretending to be a man, nor a man who became divine. He is God who took on humanity, fully both.
That is a mystery, and Christians say so openly. Nobody claims to have fully explained it. But they believe it is the best reading of what Jesus said and did, and of what his first followers understood.
What the New Testament points to
The Gospel of John opens with a poem about the Word, God's own self-expression, present with God at the beginning, sharing God's identity, and then becoming a human being John 1:1. Thomas, the disciple who refused to believe without evidence, meets the risen Jesus and addresses him as both Lord and God, and Jesus does not correct him John 20:24. Paul describes Jesus as having shared the very nature of God before taking the form of a servant, in Philippians 2:5, and tells the Colossians that everything God is dwells in Christ, in a real body Colossians 2:9. The letter to the Hebrews uses the Greek word charaktēr, the mark a seal presses into wax, to describe how the Son bears God's nature Hebrews 1:1.
These writers were Jews, or taught by Jews, who prayed daily that the Lord is one Deuteronomy 6:4. That they spoke of a man they had eaten with in these terms, within a few decades of his death, is one of the most striking facts in the history of religion.
What Jesus himself said and did
In the Gospels, Jesus does things that only God was thought to do. He forgives sins, and the religious teachers around him immediately object that only God can do that, in Mark 2:1. He calms a storm with a word, and his disciples wonder who he must be Mark 4:35; in Matthew's account of another night on the lake, they end up worshiping him Matthew 14:32. He says that he and the Father are one, in John 10:22, and his listeners understand him to be making a claim about his identity. He claims to have existed before Abraham, using the words “I am” in a way that recalls the name God gave Moses at the burning bush Exodus 3:14, and his listeners pick up stones John 8:48. At his trial the high priest asks whether he is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus says yes and speaks of the Son of Man seated at God's right hand, and the court calls it blasphemy Mark 14:60.
When Philip asks to be shown the Father, Jesus answers that seeing him is seeing the Father John 14:8.
How the church put it into words
As the church spread, people asked how to describe all this carefully. In the year 325, church leaders gathered at the Council of Nicaea and affirmed that the Son is fully God, homoousios, of the same being as the Father. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon added that Jesus is one person in two natures, divine and human, neither blended together nor pulled apart. Most Christian traditions today, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, hold to these statements.
The councils did not invent the belief. They were putting into careful words what Christians had been singing and praying since the first century, as Pliny's letter shows.
Where people disagree
Not everyone agrees, and it is fair to say so. Judaism and Islam hold to strict monotheism and do not see Jesus as God, though Islam honors him as a prophet and Judaism holds a very different understanding of the Messiah. Some groups that use the name Christian, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarians, see Jesus as a created or exalted being, or as a great human teacher, and not as fully God. Latter-day Saints hold a different understanding of the Godhead. Oneness Pentecostals, on the other hand, affirm that Jesus is fully God but reject the doctrine of the Trinity.
Among those who accept the historic view, there are also different ways of explaining the details, especially how the divine and human natures relate. Faithful Christians hold these discussions with humility and care.
Some ask whether Jesus ever said “I am God” in those exact words. He did not use the phrase. But Christians point to his actions and his wider claims as the reason the early church came to understand him this way.
Why it matters
If Jesus is only a human teacher, his death is a tragedy and his example is a model. If he is God among us, his death is God entering our suffering and dealing with our sin, and his resurrection is God’s victory over death. That is why Christians consider this question so central.
You do not need to understand everything before you start. Many people begin by simply reading the Gospels, asking honest questions and seeing where it leads. If you want to keep going, a good next step is asking why God would become human at all.
