“Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). The scribes in Mark 2 ask this in their hearts as they watch Jesus tell a paralyzed man that his sins are forgiven. They are not his followers, and they want no part of his movement. Yet in the earliest Gospel, they are the first to put into words the claim modern skeptics say Jesus never made.
Scripture does present Jesus as God, and it presents the one God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No single sentence settles this. The texts work the way a first-century Jewish story would work. Jesus says and does what only Israel’s God may say and do. His enemies react as though they heard exactly that. His first followers then speak of him in words their Scriptures reserved for the Lord alone. The later creeds gave this pattern a name. They did not invent it.
The doubt is also inside the church. Dr. Mikel Del Rosario, a professor of Bible and theology at Moody Bible Institute, describes a regular churchgoer who took a Bible off the table, looked through it, and told him that according to this book Jesus never claimed to be God. He cites a 2022 study by Lifeway Research and Ligonier Ministries. As he reports it, 43 percent of people who identified as evangelicals agreed that Jesus was a great teacher but not God. A list of verses will not answer that. What helps is reading the passages in order, in context, and letting each one make its own point before drawing conclusions.