There are fundamentally three distinct explanations for the similarities and relationship between Jesus and the Father. The first is that Jesus himself believed and taught that he learned the Father’s ways and was granted the Father’s wisdom and authority through the Father’s loving impartation. The second is the idea that the Son inherits the Father’s nature in essence or being, passed down much like natural inheritance from father to son. The third is that the Son shares the Father’s very essence by nature, not merely inheriting it but being divine in the same ontological way. Among these, the first explanation stands out as the one most clearly supported by Jesus’ own teachings recorded in the Gospels, Revelation, and by Paul’s writings, who notably refrained from explicitly calling Jesus God in a metaphysical sense and instead called him Lord. Hebrews offers some ambiguity, but trinitarianism, especially after 350 AD, tends to combine all three views, with a heavy emphasis on the second and third, which risks contradicting the first.
When Jews of Jesus’ time accused him of making himself equal with God, this can be more naturally understood within the first framework—as Jesus assuming the highest possible status granted by God the Father, akin to a king granting the crown prince the fullest authority just short of the throne itself. Paul clarifies this in his letters, such as in 1 Corinthians 15:27–28, where he explains that while all things are subjected to the Son, the Father himself remains un-subjected, much like Pharaoh made Joseph vizier over Egypt but retained supreme authority himself. This reflects a Jewish worldview of hierarchical authority and relational sonship rather than the Greek metaphysical notions of equality in essence that developed later.
The third explanation—that Jesus shares the Father’s divine nature ontologically—introduces a fundamental tension with Jesus’ own words, such as “the Father is greater than I” and his dependence on the Father in all things. If Jesus were God by nature in the same way the Father is, many of these statements would be either meaningless or contradictory. Similarly, the idea that the Son inherits divine nature presupposes that it was not eternally possessed but granted or received, which again aligns better with the first explanation of functional authority and relational sonship.
The very necessity of Jesus and Paul repeatedly clarifying their distinctness from the Father and Jesus’ dependence suggests that the first explanation is the original belief they held and taught. If the Son were truly equal by nature or essence, such clarifications would be moot. It is quite plausible that the early Church’s first understanding—relational, functional sonship with exalted authority granted by the Father—was not fully grasped or was overlooked by the Council of Nicaea and subsequent theologians. Immersed in Hellenistic philosophy, the bishops at Nicaea interpreted Scripture through a Greek metaphysical lens, emphasizing ontology and essence over relational function and obedience. This led to the development of the doctrine of consubstantiality, homoousios, and the ontological Trinity, which redefined Jesus’ relationship to the Father in ways that departed from the Jewish worldview underlying Jesus’ and Paul’s original teachings.
The Greek philosophical framework prioritized “what something is” over “how something functions or relates,” encouraging an understanding of God as an eternal, unchanging essence, rather than a dynamic, relational being. As a result, the biblical portrayal of the Father as sovereign and the Son as obedient and exalted agent became overshadowed by a metaphysical system of co-equal persons sharing one divine essence. This shift, while aiming for doctrinal unity, may have obscured the original and simpler relational truths about Jesus’ sonship and dependence.
Paul himself was deeply critical of worldly wisdom, which he saw as foolishness compared to God’s wisdom. He called for the destruction of “arguments and lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5) and emphasized that the wisdom of God is revealed in Christ crucified—a stumbling block to human reasoning and philosophy. The sophisticated Greek philosophical systems that later shaped Christian doctrine could be seen as an example of the “worldly wisdom” Paul sought to dismantle, replacing God’s revealed truth with human intellectual constructs.
Paul’s mission was precisely to tear down false human wisdom and reveal God’s truth, even when it ran counter to prevailing cultural and intellectual norms. He preached a Christology that emphasized obedience, dependence, and the paradox of divine power shown through weakness, not metaphysical equality or shared essence. This tension between God’s revealed wisdom and human philosophy remains a crucial dynamic in Christian theology and challenges believers to discern carefully between the two.
In sum, the repeated clarifications by Jesus and Paul regarding the Son’s subordination and dependence on the Father, the Jewish context of relational sonship, and the biblical analogy of Pharaoh and Joseph all point to an original understanding of Jesus as exalted agent but not equal by nature. The later Hellenistic reinterpretations—while formative for orthodox Trinitarian doctrine—likely overlooked or transformed this foundational belief. Recognizing this helps to recover a fuller appreciation of the biblical witness and Paul’s call to replace human wisdom with the profound truth of God revealed in Christ.
