“Jesus is NOT God. I’m a Christian, I love Jesus, I just don’t buy that Trinity stuff.”
If you’ve spent any time in the comments section of YouTube or TikTok, you’ve seen some version of that line. In fact, when I post anything about the deity of Christ, my most heated pushback doesn’t come from atheists. It comes from people who call themselves Christians and insist Jesus is something less than God. My most heated pushback doesn’t come from atheists. It comes from people who call themselves Christians and insist Jesus is something less than God. Share on X
They’ll say things like:
- “Jesus never claimed to be God.”
- “The idea that Jesus is God was invented at Nicaea.”
- “The Bible calls Jesus a servant, a man, and less than the Father—so he can’t be God.”
So, let’s treat that claim – “Jesus is NOT God” – like a case file. If this were a cold case, how would we test it?
First, we’d ask: What did the earliest Christians believe?
If the deity of Jesus is a late doctrinal mutation, you’d expect the earliest Christian leaders to talk about Him like a great man, a prophet, maybe a created heavenly being—but not God Himself. That’s not what we find.
Take Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the apostle John. Writing just a few decades after John’s Gospel, he casually refers to “Jesus Christ our God” and says, “Our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary.” He doesn’t pause to explain it, debate it, or apologize for it. He treats it as already‑settled Christian vocabulary.
Later writers like Irenaeus speak the same way, insisting that the One born of a virgin is “God and not merely man”—while also fighting early heresies that tried to attack either His deity or His humanity. The creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Chalcedonian, Athanasian) don’t invent this belief; they defend it against distortions. Councils form because heresies show up, not because nobody believed in the deity of Christ until the 300s.
The New Testament “chain of custody” demonstrates that the earliest believers recognized the deity of Jesus and passed it on, teacher to student, through the centuries.
Second, we’d ask: What does the Bible actually say? People who deny Jesus’ deity love “subordination verses” like these:
- “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).
- “The head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3).
- “The Son can do nothing of His own accord” (John 5:19).
- “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46).
Pulled out of context, those verses sound like slam‑dunks. But in a courtroom you never let the jury see one line without the surrounding testimony.
The same John who records “The Father is greater than I” also opens his Gospel by calling Jesus “the Word” who was with God and was God, through whom all things were made. The same Paul who writes “the head of Christ is God” also says Jesus is “in very nature God” (Philippians 2), the Creator and sustainer of all things (Colossians 1), and our “great God and Savior” (Titus 2:13).
So what’s going on here? These “problem” verses aren’t about Jesus’ nature at all. They’re about His role.
In Philippians 2, Paul tells us that although Jesus existed in the form of God, He voluntarily “emptied Himself”, taking “the form of a servant” and becoming obedient to death on a cross. That’s not a denial of deity; it’s a description of humble submission within the Godhead. Paul is describing different roles, not different natures.
The same is true when Jesus calls Himself a servant, a man, or prays to the Father. The New Testament insists on two truths at once:
- Jesus is fully God.
- Jesus is fully man.
If Scripture never showed us His real humanity – His weariness, His agony, His obedience, His “not knowing” in His human experience – people would reject His humanity and treat Him as a kind of super‑angel in human costume. If it never showed us His real deity – His authority over nature, sin, death, demons, and worship – it would be easy to reduce Him to moral teacher.
Instead, we get both.
Third, we’d ask: What happens if the “Jesus is NOT God” claim is true?
- Worshiping Him is idolatry. Yet the New Testament not only allows but commands worship of Jesus and never rebukes it.
- The cross becomes cosmic child abuse. God would be punishing a creature to save other creatures. But if God Himself in the person of the Son bears our sin, the cross becomes self‑sacrifice, not abuse.
- Jesus can’t perfectly reveal God. At best He’s one more prophet, not “the exact imprint of His nature” or “the image of the invisible God.”
- The gospel collapses. A finite creature cannot bear the infinite moral weight of the world’s sin or guarantee our eternal security.
So, when someone says, “I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe Jesus is God,” they aren’t just denying or modifying a minor doctrine. They’re gutting the Gospel.
In the end, the “Jesus is NOT God” claim fails the historical test, the biblical test, and the logical test. It doesn’t fit the earliest sources, the full sweep of Scripture, or the structure of the gospel itself.
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For more information about the reliability of the New Testament gospels and the case for Christianity, please read Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels. This book teaches readers ten principles of cold-case investigations and applies these strategies to investigate the claims of the gospel authors. The book is accompanied by an eight-session Cold-Case Christianity DVD Set (and Participant’s Guide) to help individuals or small groups examine the evidence and make the case.
