Nearly halfway through John’s Gospel, Jesus tells those gathered within the temple on the Feast of the Dedication, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I even have said you might be “gods”’?” (10:34). In effect, Jesus says that Scripture says that God says, “You are gods.” What is Jesus on about?
It really is sort of surprising. After all, we read the Scriptures and learn that human beings usually are not gods—at the least, not within the sense that God is God. When the mighty Nebuchadnezzar failed to acknowledge the difference between human beings and God, he ate grass alongside the oxen until he learned as much (Dan. 4:1–37).
Yet, strange because it seems, Jesus saying “you might be gods” tells us something essential about what it means for us—and for Jesus—to be human.
Now recall that, shortly before this statement in John 10, Jesus had said, “I and the Father are one,” and that those that heard him recognized the statement as an offense to God punishable by stoning (vv. 30–31; Lev. 24:10–16).
Their concern was not unfounded. Jesus said this on the Feast of the Dedication, when Jews remembered how God delivered them from Antiochus IV, whose chosen name Epiphanes (meaning either “illustrious” or “manifest”) suggested he considered himself higher than he must have. So, stones in hand, those gathered around Jesus charged him: “You, a mere man, claim to be God” (v. 33).
Their accusation of blasphemy includes the critical concept that a human being can’t be God. And it’s this concept that makes Jesus bring up the time that God called human beings gods:
Is it not written in your law, “I said you might be gods?” If [God] called them to whom the word of God got here “gods”—and the Scripture can’t be broken—are you saying of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world “you might be disparaging the divine” because I said, “I’m God’s son”? (John 10:34–36, my translation)
Now to us, Jesus’ reply might at first seem to be a trick. It’s as if Jesus downplays his claim about being one with the Father by saying that each one human beings are, in some manner of speaking, gods! Jesus’ answer can be read not as a trick but as a profound theological claim: Humanity and divinity usually are not ultimately incompatible.
If we would like to know Jesus’ larger argument, we must take a look at the context of the biblical passage he quotes and interprets, which is Psalm 82. This complex psalm envisions God addressing a council of human judges (or deities, or divine kings—scholars today are divided of their interpretation, however the ancients understood this as addressing human beings).
In this psalm, these human judges don’t do justice to the poor and needy—a failure that reflects their fundamental lack of information and understanding (vv. 1–5). So God judges them and says, “You are gods; you might be all children of the Most High. But you’ll die like mere mortals and fall like every other ruler” (vv. 6–7, NLT).
These human judges are “gods” in that they will exercise judgment like God does. But whereas God’s judgment is just, smart, and impartial, their judgment is unjust and advantages the wicked. So, these humans won’t live eternally—as gods are alleged to—but will die as mortals.
Returning now to John’s Gospel, Jesus quotes this psalm inside his appeal to those gathered within the temple to guage rightly about his works. He tells them, “Believe the works, that it’s possible you’ll know and understand that the Father is in me, and I within the Father” (10:38). This echoes his earlier appeal to those troubled by his healing a paralyzed man on the Sabbath: “Stop judging by mere appearances, but as a substitute judge appropriately” (7:24). In this, Jesus affirms our godlike capability for exercising logic and asks us to guage how his works make the case for his oneness with the Father.
The capability that makes us most godlike can be the one which is alleged to make us know and trust that the Father is in Jesus and that Jesus is within the Father. This is one reason that Jesus reminds his hearers that God called them “gods” when asking them to guage with right judgment about his works.
To ensure, Jesus will not be saying we’re gods in the way in which that God is God. The word god in ancient Greek had more range than it does in English now. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle used the word god to speak about what human beings could make of ourselves after we live in one of the best possible way. To them, for a human to be like god was to approach immortality, happiness, goodness, and wisdom, amongst other things.
For John’s Gospel, we’re most godlike when, through trust in Jesus, we turn into God’s children and are available to have everlasting life (1:12). To put it one other way, we’re gods because we’re God’s.
Sometime after John’s Gospel was written, ancient Jewish interpreters read Psalm 82:6–7 as a story about God making humans immortal like gods, and humans losing their immortality through sin. So it was with Adam and Eve within the Garden of Eden, and so it was when God restored Israel’s immortality by giving them the Law at Sinai, just for them to lose it again after the incident with the golden calf.
Early Christians got here to see Psalm 82:6–7 as a story about how God adopted humanity when Jesus gave us “the correct to turn into children of God” (John 1:12). Having turn into once more “children of the Most High” (Ps. 82:6, NLT), we’ll now not die as mere mortals.
And what of Jesus’ humanity? When Jesus quotes Psalm 82, he’s establishing a basic compatibility between humanity and divinity. But Jesus can be distinctive amongst human beings on account of his oneness with the Father. This will not be due to what Jesus does of his own accord a lot because it is due to what the Father does in him.
In the identical breath that Jesus identifies himself as “God’s Son,” he refers to himself as “the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world” (10:36). This language of consecration, used because it is in the course of the Feast of the Dedication, is about how God sets Jesus apart for sacrifice, just as latest altars are set apart for sacrifice (Num. 7:1–11; 1 Kings 8:63–64). In an astonishing turn, then, Jesus is most distinctive in his oneness with the Father at just the purpose he’s in most solidarity with us, namely, in being mortal.
And this gets on the meaning of Jesus being directly human and divine. It will not be that Jesus is superhuman (much less a superhero or a superstar), but that when he lays down his life for us (and takes it up again), it’s God’s power at work in him (John 10:17–18).
This brings us full circle to what it means to be the form of humans that God calls “gods .” When we judge with right judgment about Jesus’ words and works, we see how they purify disciples for love, liberate the afflicted, and convey life to the world (5:1–9). As we ourselves are purified, liberated, and made alive by Jesus, we discover ourselves in a position to love our neighbors in the identical way that Jesus loved us. So, in discerning what Jesus is like, we higher imagine and embody what our lives with others can turn into.
Jesus’ image of the vine and branches in John’s Gospel gives us one other angle on the continuity between his humanity and ours. Jesus is the vine and his disciples are fruit-bearing branches of the vine (15:1–7). Just as a branch broken off of its vine loses its vitality and capability to bear fruit, Jesus tells his disciples, “aside from me you may do nothing” (v. 5). But the disciples usually are not broken, withered branches. They are branches that stay on the vine.
Because Jesus is alive now, we don’t have to turn into Jesus to be like him. The branches needn’t replace the vine. By God, our lives—our peculiarities, limitations, and all—might turn into receptive to Jesus’ power the way in which a fruit-bearing branch is receptive to the ability of its vine (vv. 1–8).
The fruit we bear with Jesus is the work of affection, and this work takes the form of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. This is what it means to be God’s children, what it means to have everlasting life, what it means to be addressed by God as “gods”: to be human like Jesus. In other words, Jesus’ humanity makes ours possible.
Wil Rogan is assistant professor of biblical studies at Carey Theological College in Vancouver.
Portions of this text are excerpted from Wil Rogan, “Jesus’s Humanity and Ours: John’s Christology and Ancient Views of Self,” in Early High Christology: John among the many New Testament Writers, ed. Joel B. Green, Diane G. Chen, and Christopher M. Blumhofer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2024), 63–74.
