Did Jesus ever say “worship me instead of God" ...

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... or "I am God"

Well, did he? I haven’t seen any quotes where Jesus told people to worship him instead of God. Are there any quotes in the NT where Jesus says to do this?

Worship Him instead of God? No.
That He was God? Yes.

"'I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.' At this they picked up stones to stone him." (John 8:58-59) "I say to you" corresponds to the Old Testament "thus says the Lord"; "I am" is a claim to the Divine Name and thus to divinity. The reaction of picking up stones was not a surprise.

Or again, Mark 14:61-64: "Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy.
"What do you think?”

(edit: switched from Matthew to Mark for clarity's sake.)

Last edited by Natty_Boh on 28 Feb 2011, 5:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes ... just not in the words that you would expect.

Do you know if the words in Hebrew were less common? The English translation are phrases everyone says thousands of time during their lifetime. That's not to throw out when it was said though. The timing of when He said this is helpful.


That version of the incident is a bit more clear. I remembered reading it as Jesus basically saying "you're the one that said that."


I wish it was more black and white; a clear declaration.

It's just one of many things I'm currently struggling to come to a conclusion on. Along with:

* I get the impression that we only have a small fragment of the story... the parts that some human pruned for our consumption. Also, the gospels were written many years after Jesus's death. I know how information can change when it's being distributed verbally, over decades of time. That's why I love the parables... the point is kind of safely locked inside.

* I struggle with the overwhelming influence of Paul. He has more words in the NT than anyone, including Jesus (at least if you only count quotes from Jesus one time each between the 4 gospels). He was a man, and thus fallible. His opinions and understanding of the gospels basically wrote "here's what you believe if you wanna call yourself Christian" and it stuck. That's a ton of influence, and it worries me.

Yoo Hoo! John 14:6

ruveyn

"I say to you" is as often translated "Amen (or "Truly"), I say to you" - not nearly so common in English. Either way, Christ's use of the phrase to introduce a discourse or point seems a deliberate callback to 'thus says the Lord'. "I am" was, in context and judging by reaction, a clear declaration. The crowd was ready to kill Jesus in the first instance; and in the second, it sealed His fate.

Paul and the other letter-writers had the thankless job of translating Gospel teachings into practical realities, fashioning a way of life that would propagate itself. The parables are good, but how do you live out the lesson they convey, and still live in this world - that was what they had to deal with.

Doesn't that passage seem to make Jesus a separate being from God? I mean, Jesus might as well as have said "the only way you can get to me is by going through me," otherwise. Which is either a tautology, silly or perhaps a bit of both. As in, the only way I can eat an apple is by eating an apple. Well, okay.

Did Jesus ever say “worship me instead of God"? Do not recall Jesus saying that. At the same time, in some English translations of the Bible, there is the definite idea that Jesus is God/that when Jesus Christ was asked whether he was God, Jesus Christ (in the New Testament of the Bible) answered that it is as you say. Also, one can look at the prayer Jesus invented - the Our Father - and in that prayer it seems like Jesus Christ had earthly brothers and earthly sisters (our father) and that in that prayer, God was one thing - the one and only God - and Jesus Christ was another thing, a son of God. It's common/it's seen from time to time in the Bible, that one passage contradicts another passage.

Wish I could remember the source that made this claim, but I've read that the destruction of the Temple actually allowed one brand of Christianity and one brand of Judaism to triumph over all other possible permutations of their respective faiths: Pauline, in the case of Christianity and Rabbinical in the case of Judaism.

There was a fairly numerous group in and around Jerusalem whom I guess you could describe as "Jewish Christians." We get at least an echo of what they possibly believed in James, e.g., James 2:14-22, which is certainly out of step with the tenor of the rest of the NT. (Indeed, it is so far out of step Martin Luther actually wanted to drop the book from the Bible.) They probably had their own missions and missionaries, else why would Paul himself have gone on and on about Jewish customs creeping into, IIRC, places like Corinth, etc. But when Jerusalem was destroyed the Romans took care of them, toot-sweet. And now I guess the best scholars can do is speculate what they might or might not have believed, how numerous they actually were, etc.

And once the Temple was destroyed what was the point of being a Sadducee? (That is, of course, if you were still alive post-Temple destruction, and I can't imagine too many were.) So the field was wide open for the Pharisees -- as the only other Jewish group with an intellectual tradition -- to codify into the two Talmuds (Jerusalem and Babylonian) a set of rules of behavior and intellectual rigor that could sustain them for two millenia as a stateless people.

The minor exception being Karaism in Judaism. These are Jews who reject the Talmud in its entirety, while accepting the tanakh (OT), but I think there are no more than 10,000 or so world-wide. (I don't think anyone has shown a direct lineal connection between them and the Sadducees, but who knows?) And AFAIK "Jewish-Christianity" went utterly extinct. As dead as Mithraism.

Anyway I agree that things certainly could have gone very differently. One very interesting "What if" question to ask is what would have happened if Julian the Apostate (the last "Pagan" Roman Emperor) had not died in battle. He had pledged to pay to rebuild the Temple and to leave the Jews in peace to do whatever they wanted insides its walls with no imperial interference. That he was doing this simply to embarrass Christians is ultimately neither here nor there. And had things gone to his plan, I can't even begin to figure the consequences on BOTH faiths. Would Pauline Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism even still exist? Have mutated in some strange ways we aren't even equipped to speculate on?

"Doesn't that passage seem to make Jesus a separate being from God? "

Do we not know, eh, the knots we get into trying to communicate the most basic concepts of our minds to people wo even when they use the same words speak a different language?

If we don't I do, long years of trying to speak to AM people with an FM transmitter.

The Trinity, eternity, the reality outside - the best the most sophisticated can do is rough approximation parables.

I do Linguistics, I could fix you ten interpretations that would not require two beings, none of them nearly adequate.

Think back o the last important communication failure you had,and give the guy a break.