In none of the four Gospels does Jesus speak the bare sentence “I am God.” Christians still confess that he claimed to be God, and that confession does not rest on wishful reading. In the earliest Gospel, Jesus does things his Jewish audience believed only God could do. He also describes his future in language that Israel’s Scriptures reserve for God’s own throne. The people who heard him most clearly were his opponents, and they called it blasphemy.
Dr. Mikel Del Rosario, a professor of Bible and theology at the Moody Bible Institute, puts the issue in one sentence: “We shouldn’t confuse the existence of a claim with the directness of a claim.” This article tests that sentence against the text itself, scene by scene.
Why Does the Missing Sentence Seem to Matter So Much?
The question does not come only from outside the church. Del Rosario recalls a regular churchgoer who took his Bible off the table, looked through it and told him that according to this book, Jesus never claimed to be God. He also cites a 2022 study by Lifeway Research and Ligonier Ministries in which, by his account, 43 percent of people who identified as evangelicals agreed that Jesus is a great teacher but not God.
The skeptical version of the question is sharper. John’s Gospel contains statements that sound like divine claims. Jesus says, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). In both scenes the crowd reaches for stones, and in John 10:33 they give their reason: “for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.” Del Rosario notes that some skeptical scholars set the Gospels against one another at this point. If Jesus really talked that way, why is there no hint of it in the earlier Gospels?
That is a fair question, and the way to answer it is to read Mark, which, as Del Rosario observes, most scholars believe was written first. If a divine claim is already present there, it is not a late addition invented by John’s community.
There is also an assumption hiding inside the demand for a direct quote. Del Rosario points out that a flat declaration might be how a twenty-first-century American would claim to be God. It is not how Jesus revealed his identity in his context. He illustrates the difference with marriage. He could tell you directly that he is married. He could mention his twenty-sixth wedding anniversary, which is an implicit claim. Or he could simply wear a ring. In his words, Jesus does the same kind of thing: “He’s speaking like God, he’s acting like God.”
A wedding ring signals something because of social custom. Jesus’s actions signaled deity for a deeper reason: Israel’s Scriptures had already said who does certain things. To hear what Jesus claimed, you have to hear those Scriptures the way his audience did.
What Happened in the Crowded House in Capernaum?
Mark 2:1–12 is a short, tightly built scene. Jesus is teaching in a house in Capernaum. Four men cannot get their paralyzed friend through the crowd, so they open the roof and lower him down. Everyone expects a healing. Instead, Mark records this:
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” (Mark 2:5)
Read on its own, that sentence could be heard more modestly. The verb is passive. A reader might suppose Jesus is announcing what God has done, the way a prophet might declare God’s mercy. That is a real possibility in the grammar of verse 5, and an honest reading should admit it.
The scribes in the room did not hear it that way. Mark lets us into their reasoning:
“Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7)
Their objection is theological. Forgiving sins belongs to God, and this man is doing it.
Jesus then removes the ambiguity himself. He does not soften his words or explain that he was only reporting God’s verdict. He says, “But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10), and he tells the paralyzed man to get up, take his bed and go home. The man does. The authority now belongs to the Son of man, on earth, in that room. The healing is offered as public evidence for a claim nobody could see: that the sins were actually forgiven, by him.
Del Rosario stresses how unusual this was. “No prophet ever said that. No priest ever said that,” he says, adding that there is no evidence of Greco-Roman miracle workers even claiming to forgive sins. That historical comparison is his assertion, and readers can weigh it. The text, though, makes the scribes’ view plain. They believed forgiveness was God’s prerogative, and Jesus did not dispute their premise. He disputed their conclusion about him.
Why Forgiveness Is the Right Test Case
Del Rosario explains the weight of forgiveness with an everyday example. If he wrongs you, he can ask you to forgive him. He cannot ask you to forgive something he did to his son. In his words, “there’s no such thing as third party forgiveness in the Jewish tradition.” Only the offended person can release the debt. Since all sin is finally an offense against God, the one who forgives sins as such is God.
Notice what that means for Mark 2. Nothing in the passage suggests the paralyzed man had wronged Jesus. Jesus forgives him anyway, as though every sin the man had committed had been committed against him. That is either outrageous presumption or a claim to stand where God stands. The scribes saw only those two options, and Mark agrees with them about the options.
Del Rosario also connects the scene to Psalm 103:
“Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases.” (Psalm 103:2–3)
The psalm names forgiveness and healing together as the works of the LORD. In Mark 2, Jesus does both, in that order. Del Rosario observes that the order matters: “He prioritizes the man’s spiritual state before physical healing.” A reader who knows the psalm sees God’s own works happening through this man.
Why Would Jesus Speak Indirectly at All?
If Jesus believed he was divine, why not say so plainly? Del Rosario offers a theological reason. He suggests that Jesus “didn’t want to be confused with being a rival deity to God the Father.” Jesus was not claiming to be the same person as the Father. He was revealing, gradually and implicitly, a unity with the Father that also includes real distinction.
That is an interpretive proposal about Jesus’s purpose, not something the Gospels state. It does fit what the Gospels show. At Jesus’s baptism in Mark 1:10–11, the Spirit descends and the Father’s voice speaks from heaven. The three are present together and are clearly not each other. Del Rosario points out where a common misunderstanding goes wrong. Some people reason that because Jesus never claimed to be God the Father, he never claimed to be God. But historic Christian doctrine has never said Jesus was the Father. It teaches one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Read that way, the indirectness is not a weakness in the evidence. A blunt statement to a monotheistic Jewish audience could easily have been heard as a claim to be a second god beside the God of Israel. Acting with God’s authority while praying to the Father, as Jesus does throughout the Gospels, tells a more precise story.
What Did Jesus Claim Before the High Priest?
Del Rosario pairs this early scene in Mark with the end of Jesus’s ministry. In Mark 14, Jesus stands before the high priest and the council. Witnesses are brought in, but “their witness agreed not together” (Mark 14:56). So the high priest asks directly:
“Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14:61–62)
Jesus does not stop at yes. The second half of his answer joins two passages his judges knew well. The first is Psalm 110:1: “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Del Rosario notes that this was a coronation psalm for a Davidic king that later came to point toward the ultimate king, the Messiah. The second is Daniel 7:13–14, a night vision in which “one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven” to the Ancient of days. The vision continues:
“And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him.” (Daniel 7:14)
The combination is what turns a royal claim into something more. A Davidic king ruled from a throne in Jerusalem. Jesus speaks of a seat beside God in heaven, at the right hand of “power,” a reverent way of naming God himself, and of arriving on the clouds, the way the Psalms picture the LORD traveling (Psalm 104:3 speaks of God making the clouds his chariot). To the council, that is not a claim to an earthly office. It is a claim to share the place from which God rules and to receive the everlasting service of every nation, which Del Rosario reads as worship.
Del Rosario draws out the irony. The council thought of themselves as God’s representatives on earth, and Jesus claims that he will judge them. If only God forgives sins, as the scribes said in Mark 2, then only God judges sins too. His summary is direct: “He is on the creator side of the creator creature divide.”
The council’s response confirms how they heard it:
“Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.” (Mark 14:63–64)
Could He Have Meant Something Smaller?
The strongest objection deserves a careful answer. In Hebrew idiom, the phrase “son of man” can simply mean a human being. God addresses the prophet Ezekiel that way repeatedly, as in Ezekiel 2:1: “Son of man, stand upon thy feet.” So the title by itself does not prove a divine claim, and a careful reader should not pretend that it does.
The claim comes from context. In Mark 14, Jesus is not using the phrase as a plain word for a man. He points to the specific figure of Daniel 7 and seats that figure at God’s right hand. The council did not condemn him for using a common Hebrew expression. They condemned him for what he said he would do and where he said he would sit.
Does the Rest of Mark Fit This Reading?
Del Rosario traces the same pattern across Mark’s opening chapters, through Jesus’s authority over nature, demons, disease and death. When Jesus stills the storm, the disciples ask, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41). Their question has an answer in their own hymnbook. The Psalms describe the LORD as the one who rules the wind and the waves, just as Psalm 103 names him as the one who forgives and heals. Each time Mark shows Jesus doing one of these works, he is showing Jesus doing what the Psalms credit to the LORD.
The raising of Jairus’s daughter makes the point by contrast. Del Rosario notes that when Elijah raised the dead, he prayed to God, as 1 Kings 17 records. Jesus does not pray. He takes the girl’s hand and says, “Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise” (Mark 5:41). A prophet asks God to act. Jesus acts.
Is This Just Christian Belief Read Back Into the Story?
The readings above settle the literary question. The earliest Gospel contains the divine claim at its beginning and at its climax, so the claim cannot be dismissed as a late invention found only in John.
The historical question needs a more careful answer. Del Rosario’s method looks at how Jesus’s enemies understood him, because historians value testimony from people who were not trying to make a movement look good. There is a real limit here. The scribes and the high priest did not write these accounts. Mark, a follower of Jesus, reports their reactions. What the hostile reactions show is the coherence of the earliest portrait: Jesus’s opponents treat his words as divine claims, and the death sentence follows from that. The scenes alone do not prove that every detail happened as Mark tells it. That case depends on the broader reliability of the Gospels.
It also depends on what happened next. The claim before the high priest was a claim about the future: you will see me seated at God’s right hand. Del Rosario points to Peter’s sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2. Peter cites Joel’s promise that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, then proclaims the risen and exalted Jesus as that Lord. As Del Rosario puts it, “the resurrection is the vindication of Jesus’ divine claim.” The council judged Jesus’s words before the high priest to be blasphemy. If Jesus rose, the verdict on those words was reversed, and the man who forgave sins in Capernaum was telling the truth about who he was.