Who is Jesus?

Question 3001.

The identity of Jesus is, I think, the one question none of us gets to avoid indefinitely. Jesus put it to His own disciples at Caesarea Philippi, and He still puts it to every person who hears about Him: “But who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15).

People have offered plenty of answers over the centuries: a good teacher, a moral example, a tragic revolutionary, a comforting myth. Scripture offers something far more staggering. Jesus is God Himself, come in human flesh to rescue a fallen world, and I want to walk through why that claim is not an overreach but the plain teaching of the text.

The eternal Son behind the identity of Jesus

Jesus did not begin to exist in a Bethlehem stable. John opens his Gospel by reaching back before creation itself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3).

The Word, John tells us in verse 14, became flesh and dwelt among us. That is Jesus. Before time began, before a single star was hung in place, Jesus existed eternally as the second Person of the Trinity, sharing fully in the divine nature with the Father and the Spirit. Any account of the identity of Jesus that starts the clock at Bethlehem has already gone wrong before the first sentence is finished.

The incarnation and the identity of Jesus

At a point in history, this eternal Son took to Himself a genuine human nature. Paul describes it plainly: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). He was not an angel wearing a costume, nor a divine spirit simply appearing human. He grew, hungered, wept, and slept, because He had become truly one of us while remaining truly God.

This is the heart of what we mean by the incarnation, and it is why the manger scenes we know so well are far stranger, and far more wonderful, than sentimental Christmas cards suggest. The infinite entered the finite without ceasing to be infinite.

What Jesus said about His own identity

Jesus did not leave His identity to inference alone. He told a group of religious leaders, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), deliberately echoing the divine name God gave Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14). His hearers understood exactly what He meant and picked up stones. He claimed the authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-10), accepted worship without correcting anyone (Matthew 28:9), and said plainly, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

None of that is the language of a good teacher trying to stay humble. It is the language of someone who knows exactly who He is and is not embarrassed to say so.

Fully God, fully man, in the identity of Jesus

Thomas gives us perhaps the cleanest confession in the Gospels when he finally sees the risen Christ and says simply, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Jesus does not correct him. He commends the faith that made the confession possible. Colossians 2:9 puts the same truth in doctrinal form: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”

At the very same time, Hebrews insists on His full humanity, telling us He was made like His brothers in every respect, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:17). One Person, two natures, neither diminished by the other. That union has a name, the hypostatic union, and I have written about it separately because it deserves its own careful treatment, alongside a closer look at whether Jesus is God in the fullest sense.

Why this matters more than any other question you will ask

If Jesus is less than fully God, His death cannot pay an infinite debt, and His promises rest on nothing more than good intentions. If Jesus is less than fully human, He has not actually taken our place, and the cross becomes theatre rather than substitution. The identity of Jesus is the hinge on which the entire gospel swings.

That is why I keep returning to this question with people who are wrestling honestly with faith. Get this right, and everything else in Christianity begins to make sense. Get it wrong, and no amount of moral effort or religious activity will put things right.

How the whole of Scripture points toward Him

From the first promise in Eden that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15), through the prophets who longed for a coming King, to the final vision of Revelation where every knee bows, the entire Bible is building toward one Person. Jesus told two disciples on the Emmaus road that Moses and all the Prophets spoke of Him (Luke 24:27), and I find that claim gets bolder and more obviously true the more of Scripture you actually read.

You are not looking at a late addition grafted onto an unrelated story. You are looking at the point of the whole story.

What false answers about the identity of Jesus miss

It is worth being specific about why the popular alternatives fail. Calling Jesus simply a good teacher ignores that good teachers do not routinely claim divine authority to forgive sins or accept worship without correction. Calling Him a moral example ignores that His own moral teaching depends entirely on His unique authority to teach it, an authority He grounds in who He is rather than in cleverness or charisma. Calling Him a comforting myth ignores the specific, checkable historical claims the Gospels make, claims early enemies of the faith never bothered to refute by producing a body.

C.S. Lewis’s well known observation still holds up: a man who said the things Jesus said was not left with the option of being simply a great human teacher. He is either exactly who He claimed to be, or something considerably worse than a teacher, a liar or a lunatic. The identity of Jesus does not leave room for a comfortable middle position, however much popular culture would prefer one.

Why the identity of Jesus demands a personal response

I have sat with people at every stage of working this question through, from confident unbelief to settled faith, and I have noticed something consistent. The identity of Jesus is never simply information to be filed away. It always presses toward a decision, because Jesus Himself framed it that way. He did not ask His disciples for an essay on comparative religion. He asked, directly and personally, who they thought He was.

That directness has not softened with the centuries. Whatever else you take from this series of questions, do not let the identity of Jesus become simply an interesting theological puzzle. It is the question your own eternity turns on, and Jesus is patient, but He is not neutral about wanting an answer from you.

How the Old Testament prepared the way for the identity of Jesus

It is worth seeing that the identity of Jesus did not arrive as a surprise dropped into an unsuspecting world. The Old Testament had been preparing the ground for centuries, describing a coming figure who would be both David’s descendant and David’s Lord (Psalm 110:1), both a suffering servant bearing the sins of many (Isaiah 53:4-6) and a ruler whose kingdom would never end (Isaiah 9:6-7). No single Old Testament expectation, taken alone, obviously predicted someone who was fully divine and fully human at once. Taken together, the pattern points unmistakably in that direction.

This is one reason I find the identity of Jesus so compelling as a matter of simple historical pattern recognition, quite apart from any prior commitment to faith. A carpenter from an unremarkable village manages, entirely without coordinating His own life story in advance, to fulfil an intricate web of centuries old expectations that no impostor could have engineered even with considerable effort. That is not proof by itself, but it is exactly the kind of evidence a fair minded reader should weigh carefully before dismissing the claim. It is also why I find the whole New Testament so consistent on this single point, regardless of which author or decade you happen to be reading.

So, now what?

So, now what? Jesus is still asking the question He asked Peter, and it still requires an answer from you personally, not a borrowed one from your upbringing or your culture. Who do you say that He is?

If your honest answer right now is uncertainty rather than confession, that is a good place to keep reading from. Look at what He said, look at what He did, and let the evidence lead you rather than deciding the conclusion in advance. This whole series exists to help you do exactly that, one question at a time.

“Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!””

John 20:28, ESV