In the Gospels, this tension appears when Jesus responds to a man who addresses him as “Good Teacher” by saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18), and later, especially in John 10, identifies himself as “the good shepherd,” the very role that Israel’s Scriptures consistently reserve for God himself (for example Psalm 23 and Ezekiel 34). Read together within a Jewish framework, these passages are not contradictory but mutually illuminating. Jesus is not rejecting the category of goodness for himself; he is insisting that true goodness belongs properly to the one God and that any goodness found in him is grounded in his unique relationship with that God.
When Jesus then claims the title “good shepherd,” he is presenting himself as the one through whom God’s own shepherding of Israel is made present and active. His divinity is therefore not portrayed as an independent, self-contained identity competing with God’s, but as a perfect, living participation in God’s life and mission—derivative, relational, and shared. God remains the sole source of goodness, while Jesus is its fullest human embodiment because he is wholly united with the one God who sends him.
AI-worded
