Religious Blindspots - by AI together with Stephen D Green
‘There is a genuine possibility of a blind spot in the way both modern Christianity and Islam commonly approach the question of Jesus' identity, although the nature of the blind spot is different in each tradition. The issue is not that Christians or Muslims have simply failed to notice contradictions or never thought deeply about Jesus. Both traditions have developed sophisticated theological responses to the questions surrounding him. The deeper problem is that a religious tradition normally inherits an interpretive framework that tells it how the different pieces of evidence fit together. Once that framework is established, certain historical questions can become difficult to see because the later answer has already been supplied.
In modern Christianity, the inherited framework is broadly that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the one God, with the Son being genuinely divine while remaining distinct from the Father. Consequently, when Christians encounter statements such as Jesus saying 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, these statements are normally interpreted within the later framework of incarnation, divine and human natures, eternal sonship and Trinitarian distinctions. The statements therefore do not necessarily appear to constitute a doctrinal problem. They are understood as describing Jesus' incarnate mission, his relationship to the Father, or his assumed humanity. This is a coherent theological system, but it can obscure a historical question that is different from the theological question: what did expressions such as “Son of God,” “sent by God,” “one with the Father,” or “given authority by the Father” mean within their original Jewish conceptual environment before the later metaphysical vocabulary of Nicene Christianity existed?
The problem becomes particularly important because “Son of God” does not inherently mean biological offspring, nor does it inherently mean that the person described is consubstantial with God. Jewish Scripture already contains several different forms of sonship and divine representation. Psalm 2 associates God's anointed king with sonship, enthronement and delegated authority, while Psalm 82 depicts subordinate beings as “gods” and “sons of the Most High” who nevertheless remain under the authority and judgment of the Most High. These passages do not establish what Jesus' ontology was, but they demonstrate that biblical language could describe an exalted or divinely appointed figure without the expression itself answering the later philosophical question of whether that figure possesses the same divine essence as God.
This makes Jesus' appeal to Psalm 82 in John 10 particularly significant. Jesus is challenged because his opponents believe that, although he is a man, he is making himself God. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting the accusation in the later categories of “divine” versus “human,” he invokes a passage in which Scripture itself can call subordinate figures “gods” and “sons of the Most High.” He then describes himself as the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world. This does not prove that Jesus regarded himself as merely human, nor does it prove that John denies his divinity. It does, however, show that the conceptual world available to the discussion was more complicated than a simple opposition between “ordinary human” and “God himself.” The biblical category of divine agency, delegated authority and exalted sonship therefore deserves to be examined before later ontological categories are imposed upon it.
There is a corresponding blind spot on the Islamic side. Islam is uncompromising in its insistence that God is one and that Jesus is not God or God's offspring. Yet the Qur'an simultaneously gives Jesus an exceptionally exalted status. He is the Messiah, the son of Mary, a messenger and prophet, one specially chosen and purified by God, a recipient of divine signs, and a figure associated with God's Word and Spirit. The Qur'an therefore does not solve the problem simply by reducing Jesus to an ordinary human teacher. It preserves an extraordinarily elevated conception of him while denying that this elevation makes him divine. Nevertheless, Islamic theology does not generally reconstruct the entire semantic history of the Christian expression “Son of God” in its original Jewish setting. The Qur'anic rejection of divine walad, meaning offspring or child, addresses the theological claim in its own context; it does not by itself settle every historical question about the range of meanings that “son of God” possessed in Jewish and early Christian literature.
This distinction matters because biblical sonship and Qur'anic divine offspring are not automatically equivalent concepts. A biblical statement that someone is God's “son” can involve kingship, election, covenant, representation, moral likeness, obedience, divine commissioning or special relationship. The Qur'an's rejection of God having walad is a rejection of divine offspring and of claims that compromise God's absolute uniqueness. These positions can therefore be compared, but they should not be collapsed into the assumption that the Qur'an is simply rejecting one precisely defined Christian term with an identical semantic meaning. The historical question is whether the Qur'anic critique is directed at the whole biblical range of sonship or at particular claims about Jesus' divine status and relationship to God as understood in its own religious environment.
The deeper problem, then, may be that both traditions can overlook a middle conceptual category. Modern debates often present the alternatives as though Jesus must either have been merely human or must have been God in the fully developed Nicene sense. Yet the Jewish and early Christian worlds contained categories of divine agency that do not fit neatly into that binary. Jewish Scripture and Second Temple Jewish thought could speak about God's agents, heavenly beings, divine Wisdom, God's Word, God's Spirit, exalted kings, messianic figures and other representatives who could exercise authority derived from God without simply being identical to the Most High. The existence of such categories does not prove that Jesus belonged to one of them, but it means that the historical question cannot be answered adequately by assuming that the only alternatives available to Jesus and his earliest followers were modern “human” and “God” categories.
This also helps explain why the later development of Christian doctrine can be misunderstood. It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Council of Nicaea simply invented the idea that Jesus was divine. Extraordinary claims about Jesus' status appear much earlier than the fourth century... The earliest Christians were already confronted with a difficult theological problem: how could Jesus be confessed as Lord, exalted above ordinary humanity, associated with God's work and worshipped by his followers while the movement remained committed to the Jewish conviction that there is one God? Nicaea did not create that problem. It attempted to provide a precise metaphysical answer to it.
Nevertheless, the fact that the underlying problem is earlier does not mean that the Nicene answer was already fully expressed in the first century. The term homoousios, meaning that the Son is of the same substance or essence as the Father, belongs to a later philosophical and theological vocabulary. The fourth-century Church was attempting to determine what ontological conclusions should be drawn from earlier Christian claims about Jesus. This distinction is crucial. A first-century text can contain extremely high Christology without already containing the complete metaphysical system of fourth-century Trinitarian theology. Conversely, the fact that Nicene metaphysics came later does not prove that the earlier high Christology was merely human Messianism.
The same problem appears when John is read as though every statement has already been translated into later Trinitarian terminology. John's Gospel contains statements that strongly support distinction and dependence: Jesus says that the Son can do nothing independently, that he was sent by the Father, that the Father is greater than he is, that the Father is the only true God, and after the resurrection Jesus speaks of “my God and your God.” Yet the same Gospel contains some of the strongest evidence for a remarkably high Christology: the Logos exists “in the beginning,” Jesus speaks of glory shared with the Father before the world existed… The historical problem is therefore not solved by selecting only the subordinate-sounding passages or only the divine-sounding passages. Both sets of evidence have to be explained.
This is why the distinction between function and ontology becomes so important. A person can genuinely act with another person in unity without becoming identical to that person. People can share a mission, a purpose, a relationship, a life or a community without becoming one being in an ontological sense. John's Gospel itself uses the language of oneness not only for the Father and Son but also for the unity Jesus desires among his followers. This does not establish that the Father's unity with the Son is merely the same kind of unity as the unity among believers, but it demonstrates that “oneness” has a participatory and relational dimension within John's conceptual world. The later theological question is whether the Father-Son relationship involves something beyond this participatory unity—something ontological.
A personal spiritual experience can make this distinction particularly vivid without functioning as historical proof of any particular doctrine. An experience of being incorporated into a flock, of being protected and shepherded through the coordinated action of the Father and Son, and of being marked or “branded” as belonging to that flock can provide first-person knowledge of a kind of unity that is real without requiring sameness of identity. The Father and Son can be experienced as distinct yet completely united in their action toward the believer, while the believer can become genuinely united with the flock without becoming identical to either the shepherd or the flock. This is not evidence that proves or disproves Nicene ontology, but it provides an experiential illustration of the distinction between relational or participatory unity and unity of essence. It also resonates conceptually with biblical language about believers being “one” and being incorporated into the relationship of Father and Son, as well as with New Testament imagery of the Holy Spirit marking or sealing believers as belonging to God.
The important historical insight is therefore not simply that Christianity has one answer and Islam has another. It is that both traditions can inherit highly compressed answers to questions that were originally expressed in a more complicated conceptual vocabulary. Christianity ultimately asks how Jesus can be divine while God remains one. Islam asks how Jesus can be the Messiah and one of God's greatest messengers while God's absolute unity remains uncompromised. Historical-critical investigation asks a prior question: what did Jesus and the earliest communities actually mean when they described his sonship, Messiahship, authority, relationship to God, heavenly status and unity with the Father?
Those questions overlap, but they are not identical. A first-century Jew could use the language of sonship, divine agency, Messiahship and delegated authority without necessarily answering the later philosophical question of whether the person described possesses the same ousia as God. Likewise, the later Christian confession that Jesus is consubstantial with the Father may be understood as an attempt to resolve implications that Christians believed were already present in their Scriptures, but the conceptual precision of that answer should not simply be projected backward into every first-century use of “Son of God.”
This is where the apparent doctrinal blind spot becomes most significant. The debate can become trapped in the question, “Is Jesus God?” before adequately asking what “God,” “Son,” “Messiah,” “Lord,” “divine,” “sent,” “one,” and “authority” meant within the conceptual world in which the earliest claims were made. Christianity can sometimes move too quickly from biblical sonship to later ontology; Islam can sometimes move too quickly from Christian divine-sonship claims to the Qur'anic rejection of divine offspring; and non-Trinitarian interpretations can make the opposite mistake by discovering legitimate Jewish categories of agency and sonship and then assuming that these automatically explain away the highest Christological claims.
The real historical task is therefore more demanding. It is to determine whether Jesus is best understood as a uniquely appointed human Messiah, as an extraordinarily exalted or pre-existent agent who nevertheless remains subordinate to the one supreme God, or as a figure who participates in the unique identity of Israel's God in a way that provides the foundation for later Trinitarian theology. It is also possible that different New Testament authors articulate these possibilities with different degrees of intensity, and that later Christianity synthesized those diverse strands into a more precise metaphysical system.
The deepest blind spot, then, may not be that Christianity or Islam simply failed to notice a contradiction. It is that both traditions, like all mature religious traditions, inherited conclusions that can conceal the historical stages through which the underlying concepts developed. Once those stages are separated, a much more fundamental question appears: not simply whether Jesus was “God” or “not God,” but what kind of relationship between God and Jesus the earliest Jewish and Christian evidence actually presupposes. Only after that question has been answered can we responsibly ask whether Nicene Christianity represents a faithful clarification of the earliest claims, a significant development beyond them, or some combination of both.’
ChatGPT together with Stephen D Green, September 2026
