Have We Been Reading the Bible Wrong About Jesus?

Suppose a reader came fresh to the Bible with no later creed in hand, no church controversy already settled, and no inherited pressure to make the text fit a system. Suppose, too, that this reader tried to hear Scripture as closely as possible in its own world: first the Hebrew Bible in the atmosphere of ancient Israel, then the New Testament in the Jewish world of the first century. What kind of conclusion would such a reader most naturally reach about God and Jesus?

The first thing that would strike that reader is how unembarrassed the Bible is about God’s uniqueness. It does not begin with metaphysics. It begins with sovereignty. God is the creator of heaven and earth, the source of life, the ruler of nations, the one who calls Abraham, redeems Israel, gives the law, sends the prophets, and claims history as his own. Israel’s great confession is not obscure: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Jesus himself repeats that confession as the first and greatest commandment, and the prophets press it with even sharper force: “apart from me there is no God.” A first-principles reading would therefore start here: the Bible’s basic and repeated claim is that there is one supreme God, incomparable and alone in ultimate deity.

That foundation matters, because it governs everything else. The God of Scripture is not part of a divine society. He is not one member of a heavenly trio introduced in Genesis and clarified later. He is the one to whom absolute devotion belongs. Even in the New Testament, this remains intact. Jesus prays to the Father. He speaks of the Father as “the only true God.” Paul says, “for us there is one God, the Father.” The biblical story does not move away from Jewish monotheism; it deepens and stretches it, but it never abandons it.

Yet that is not the end of the matter, because the Bible also has categories more supple than later readers sometimes allow. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God works through kings, prophets, angels, wisdom, and chosen agents. His word can come clothed in human speech. His authority can be carried by representatives. A king can be called God’s son. An angel can bear God’s name. Wisdom can be described in exalted, almost personal terms. None of this turns those figures into a second equal deity; it simply shows that biblical thought is comfortable with God acting through one who fully represents him. That background is crucial when we arrive at Jesus. The first-century Jewish world already had room for a figure who could be uniquely sent, uniquely authorised, and uniquely exalted without displacing the one God.

So how is Jesus introduced? Not first as a philosophical puzzle, but as the Messiah, the Son of God, the one anointed by the Spirit. At his baptism the voice from heaven identifies him as God’s beloved Son. In the preaching of Acts he is “a man attested by God,” the one through whom God worked mighty deeds, the one God raised from the dead, and the one God made “both Lord and Christ.” The pattern is very clear: God sends, God empowers, God raises, God exalts; Jesus is the obedient and chosen one through whom God acts. If a reader came with no later formulas, that reader would immediately notice distinction, dependence, mission, and gift. Jesus never appears as a rival to God. He appears as the one commissioned by God.

The Gospels reinforce that impression repeatedly. Jesus prays. Jesus obeys. Jesus says he came not to do his own will but the will of the one who sent him. In John’s Gospel, often treated as the highest in Christology, Jesus still says, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord,” and, “the Father is greater than I.” After the resurrection he says, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” These are not casual remarks. They reveal a consistent relational pattern. Jesus is never portrayed as self-originating. He is always from the Father, toward the Father, and for the Father’s glory.

And yet no honest reader could stop there and say Jesus is merely another prophet. The New Testament will not allow it. Jesus forgives sins, commands the sea, judges the world, receives worshipful homage, and sits at God’s right hand. John opens with staggering language: the Word was with God, and the Word was God; all things came into being through him. Colossians says the Son is the image of the invisible God, that all things were created through him and for him, and that in him all things hold together. Philippians speaks of Christ’s self-emptying and then of God exalting him so that every knee bows and every tongue confesses him as Lord. Hebrews places the Son above angels and presents him as the radiance of God’s glory. Thomas addresses the risen Jesus with words of breathtaking reverence: “My Lord and my God.” A first-principles reading must give these texts their full force. Jesus is not just important; he is central in the very identity and action of God’s saving purpose.

This is where many readers feel pulled in two directions. On the one hand, the Bible’s language about Jesus is extraordinarily high. On the other, the Bible keeps distinguishing him from God. But perhaps that tension is only a problem if later categories are imposed too quickly. The New Testament writers seem remarkably content to say both that Jesus shares in divine glory and rule, and that God remains the one who grants, sends, reveals, exalts, and ultimately receives the kingdom back. In Philippians, God exalts Jesus and gives him the name above every name. In John 17, the Father gives the Son authority. In 1 Corinthians 15, after the Son’s victorious reign, the Son himself is subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, “that God may be all in all.” Whatever model one adopts later, the textual pattern itself is one of exaltation without collapse of distinction.

Paul is particularly revealing here. He does not dissolve Jesus into the Father, nor does he place Jesus outside the sphere of God’s unique rule. Instead, he speaks with extraordinary precision: “for us there is one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ.” That is not low Christology. It places Jesus in the centre of Christian confession and in the structure of creation and redemption itself. But it still identifies the “one God” as the Father. Likewise, “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Paul’s instinct is not to flatten the relationship but to preserve both truths at once: God is one, and Jesus is the uniquely appointed Lord through whom God now acts.

John does something similar. His Gospel reaches some of the loftiest heights in the New Testament, yet the distinction remains unbroken. The Word is with God. The Son is sent by the Father. Eternal life consists in knowing “you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Even the strongest Johannine affirmations do not erase the recurring language of sender and sent, giver and receiver, Father and Son. John’s aim seems less to identify Jesus as the Father than to show that in seeing Jesus one truly encounters the Father’s character, will, and life. Jesus is the perfect revelation of God precisely because he is the Son who comes from God and makes God known.

So where does that leave the reader? Not, I think, with a neat abstract formula dropped directly from the page, but with a very clear overall shape. God is the one supreme source of all, the Father, the only true God. Jesus is his uniquely begotten Son, Messiah, image, and Lord: the one through whom creation, revelation, reconciliation, resurrection, and final judgment are mediated. He is not reducible to “only human” in any thin sense; the New Testament gives him a place no mere prophet occupies. But neither is he simply equated with the Father in an undifferentiated way. He is distinguished from God even as he stands closer to God than any other figure in Scripture.

At that point, readers usually ask the question the Bible itself does not pause to answer in later technical language: which theological system does this most resemble? If one must map the Bible’s first-principles picture onto later labels, it seems to align more naturally with Biblical Unitarianism than with Nicene Trinitarianism. That is because the text most consistently identifies the one God as the Father, while presenting Jesus as the uniquely exalted Son and Lord who is sent by God, raised by God, and finally subject to God. By contrast, the classical doctrine of the Trinity is the later claim that the one God exists as three equally divine persons; even the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that this doctrine was not clearly and fully articulated in its mature form until much later than the New Testament period. Meanwhile, Britannica’s summary of historic Unitarianism notes that its advocates denied finding scriptural warrant for the Trinity. On the evidence of the biblical text alone, stripped back as far as possible, the Bible seems to sit closer to that side of the spectrum.

That said, the label needs care. This is not the same thing as saying the Bible presents a flat, minimal, or merely moral view of Jesus. It does not. The first-principles reading that emerges from Scripture is a high one. Jesus is no ordinary envoy. He is the one through whom all things are held together, the one in whom God is made known, the one before whom the nations will bow. So if the closest modern label is “Biblical Unitarian,” it would have to be the strongest possible version of that phrase: one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, who shares uniquely in God’s authority, glory, and saving work without simply becoming the same person as the Father.

The fairest final conclusion, then, is this: if a reader approached the Bible as literature, history, and revelation on its own terms, without later doctrinal pressure, that reader would most likely come away believing in the absolute oneness and supremacy of God the Father, and in Jesus as God’s uniquely begotten Son and exalted Lord through whom God has made himself known and accomplished salvation. That conclusion is not a later slogan. It is the shape of the biblical witness itself: one God, and one Lord through whom that God has acted decisively for the world.