Why would they attempt to kill Jesus for making such a statement? We get the plain answer later, when they again tried to stone Jesus. He simply “is.” And in case we think that we’re reading into the text something that Jesus didn’t really mean to say, John’s gospel adds the following: “At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds” (John 8:59). He existed long before Abraham was born because he is the eternal, everlasting God who has no beginning or end. In essence, Jesus is telling his listeners that he is the One who spoke to Moses. One scholar explains, “The name should thus be understood as referring to being the creator and sustainer of all that exists and thus the Lord of both creation and history, all that is and all that is happening.” 1 This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:13–14). When God first appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush, Moses asked him, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.
Because many of us are unfamiliar with the Jewish Scriptures (what many call the Old Testament), we miss the original shock-value of Jesus’s reply: “Before Abraham was born, I am!” But Jesus’s audience knew exactly what he was saying.īut Jesus’s audience knew exactly what he was saying. Jesus was not even fifty years old, and yet he claimed to know the thoughts of one who lived over two millennia before he was born. Since Abraham lived about 2,000 years before Christ, Jesus astonished his audience when he stated that Abraham anticipated his coming. The Lord promised Abraham the land and told him that his descendants would be as impossible to count as the stars in the heavens. According to their holy Scriptures, God told Abraham to leave his country as well as his father and mother to travel to the land now called Israel. The Jewish people view their ancestor Abraham as the patriarch of their religion. But many today who believe that Jesus was merely a great teacher or a wonderful moral example are surprised to learn that Christ never made such claims.
Jefferson knew that Jesus claimed to be God. (By evangelists, he meant the gospel accounts.) He told Adams that he would “select… the very words only of Jesus,” adding that these words were “fragments of the most sublime edifice of morality which had ever been exhibited to man”-high praise for Jesus indeed! Yet Jefferson refused to admit that Jesus could be God.
“We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams. If Jesus’s claim is true, it changes everything.
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