Religious Blind Spots (Revised using ChatGPT)
Both modern Christianity and Islam may have a blind spot when it comes to understanding Jesus’ identity. This does not mean that either religion has ignored the question. Both have developed detailed and sophisticated answers. The issue is that religious traditions inherit ways of interpreting Scripture and history. Once a particular framework becomes established, it can become difficult to step back and ask what earlier people may have meant before that framework existed.
Christianity
Modern Christianity generally teaches that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. The Son is understood to be fully divine while still being distinct from the Father.
Because of this, statements in which Jesus says that the Father is greater than he is, that he can do nothing on his own, that the Father sent him, or that the Father is his God are usually understood through later theological ideas. These include the Incarnation, the distinction between Jesus’ divine and human natures, eternal sonship, and the Trinity.
That framework may be internally coherent. But it can make it harder to ask an earlier historical question:
What did expressions such as “Son of God,” “sent by God,” “one with the Father,” and “given authority” mean in their original Jewish setting, before the theological language of Nicaea existed?
The phrase “Son of God” did not automatically mean that someone was God's biological offspring or that the person possessed exactly the same divine essence as God. Jewish Scripture uses the language of sonship in several different ways.
For example, Psalm 2 connects sonship with God's fully approved and anointed king (Christ, Messiah), his enthronement, and the authority God gives him. Psalm 82 describes subordinate beings as “gods” and “sons of the Most High,” while still placing them under the authority of the Most High.
These passages do not tell us exactly who Jesus was. However, they show that biblical language could describe an exalted or specially appointed figure without necessarily answering the later question of whether that figure shared God's divine essence.
This makes Jesus' use of Psalm 82 in John 10 especially interesting. Jesus is accused of making himself God. In response, he points to Scripture in which subordinate figures are called “gods” and “sons of the Most High.” He then describes himself as the one whom the Father sanctified and sent.
This suggests that the discussion was more complicated than simply asking whether someone was either “human” or “God.” Ideas such as God's representatives, delegated authority, and exalted sonship need to be considered before applying later categories about the nature or essence of God.
Islam
Islam has a corresponding blind spot.
Islam firmly rejects the idea that God is Jesus or that Jesus is God's literal biological offspring. At the same time, the Qur'an gives Jesus an exceptionally high status. He is the Messiah, a prophet and messenger, specially chosen and purified by God, a recipient of divine signs, and someone closely associated with God's Word and Spirit.
So Islam does not simply present Jesus as an ordinary human teacher.
However, Islamic theology does not generally attempt to reconstruct the full history of what the expression “Son of God” meant within its original Jewish and early Christian settings. The Qur'an's rejection of walad—the idea of God having offspring or a child—addresses a theological claim in its own context. But that does not necessarily settle every historical meaning that the expression “Son of God” could have had.
In the Bible, sonship can refer to kingship, being chosen by God, covenant, representation, obedience, divine commissioning, or a special relationship with God.
The Qur'anic concept of walad, by contrast, concerns divine offspring and claims that would compromise God's absolute uniqueness.
These ideas can certainly be compared. But they should not automatically be treated as identical.
The historical question is therefore worth asking:
Does the Qur'anic rejection of divine offspring address the entire biblical range of “sonship,” or is it responding to particular claims about Jesus' divine status?
The Missing Middle Category
A deeper problem in modern discussions is that they often present only two possibilities:
Jesus was merely human, or Jesus was God in the fully developed Nicene sense.
But Jewish and early Christian thought included other categories as well.
It spoke about God's agents, heavenly beings, divine Wisdom, God's Word and Spirit, exalted kings, messianic figures, and other representatives who could exercise authority received from God without simply being identical with the Most High.
The existence of these categories does not prove that Jesus belonged to any particular one of them.
It does, however, mean that the historical question cannot be answered properly by assuming that “human” and “God” were the only categories available to Jesus and his earliest followers.
From Early Christology to Nicaea
It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Council of Nicaea invented belief in Jesus' divinity. Claims about Jesus' extraordinary status appear much earlier.
The earliest Christians were already dealing with a difficult question:
How could Jesus be confessed as Lord, placed above ordinary humanity, associated with God's work, and worshipped, while Christianity still remained committed to Jewish belief in one God?
Nicaea did not create this problem. Rather, it attempted to give the problem a precise theological and philosophical answer.
At the same time, it would also be misleading to simply project the Nicene answer back into the first century.
The word homoousios, meaning that the Son is of the same essence or substance as the Father, belongs to a later stage of theological development. First-century writings can express a very high view of Jesus without already presenting the complete philosophical system that fourth-century Christianity eventually developed.
John's Gospel illustrates this tension particularly well.
On one hand, Jesus speaks about his dependence on the Father. He says that the Son can do nothing independently, that the Father sent him, that the Father is greater than he is, and he refers to the Father as “my God.”
On the other hand, John also contains some of the New Testament's strongest statements about Jesus' exalted status. The Gospel begins by describing the Logos as existing “in the beginning,” and Jesus speaks about sharing glory with the Father before creation.
Neither side of this evidence should simply be ignored.
Both need to be taken seriously and explained.
Function and Ontology
One important distinction is between functional or relational unityand ontological identity.
Two people can be completely united in purpose and action without being the same person or the same being.
John's Gospel uses the language of “oneness” not only for the Father and Son but also when Jesus prays for his followers to be united. This does not mean that the relationship between the Father and Son is identical to the relationship among believers. But it does show that the idea of “oneness” can have a relational or participatory meaning.
This distinction can also be understood through experience. Someone might experience and understand the Father and Son as distinct, with the Father being God alone, while also experiencing them as completely united in their actions and purposes. In a similar way, people can become genuinely united with God's people without becoming identical either to God or to the community.
The Historical Question
The issue, then, is not simply that Christianity has one answer and Islam has another.
Both traditions can inherit established answers to questions that were originally expressed using a much more complex vocabulary.
The historical question should come first:
What did Jesus and the earliest Christian communities actually mean by sonship, Messiahship, Lordship, divine agency, authority, heavenly status, and unity with God?
Only after investigating those questions can we responsibly evaluate the theological conclusions that developed later.
Several historical interpretations are possible:
- Jesus is a uniquely appointed human Messiah.
- Jesus is an extraordinarily exalted or pre-existent agent who remains subordinate to the one supreme God.
- Did Jesus participate in the unique identity of Israel's God in a way that provided the foundation for later Trinitarian theology?
- Different New Testament authors may have expressed these ideas with different degrees of intensity, with later Christianity bringing them together into a more precise metaphysical system.
The deepest blind spot, therefore, may not simply be a failure to notice apparent contradictions.
It may be the tendency of mature religious traditions to inherit conclusions that make it harder to see how the underlying ideas developed in the first place.
John says that his Gospel was written so that readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ and, through that belief, have life in his name.
Whatever questions we may have about later theological developments, we still need that central purpose of John's Gospel to be fulfilled.
Stephen D Green and ChatGPT, September 2026
See AI critique of this final version here:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a9c237d-95f8-83ed-9e01-770c50e8747c
