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Bible Dictionaries
Claims (of Christ)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or CLAIMS (OF CHRIST).—In any attempt to arrive at the truth with regard to the person of Christ, it is with the self-consciousness of Jesus and His witness regarding Himself that we must begin. To answer the question, ‘What think ye of Christ?’ we need above all to know what Christ thought of Himself. It was the men who knew Jesus only in an external fashion that took Him to be John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets (Matthew 16:14). It was one who had come into the closest contact with the mind of the Master, and had learned to judge Him, not by outward signs merely, but by His implicit and explicit claims, that broke into the great confession, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matthew 16:16). Hence it becomes a matter of the highest importance to consider the testimony of the Gospels as to our Lord’s personal claims.
1. The fundamental claim of Jesus was a claim to moral authority. And this authority was asserted in two ways. (a) He claimed the authority of a master, an authority over the will and the life, to which obedience was the only natural response. It was by this most probably that the earliest disciples were first impressed. ‘Follow me,’ Jesus said to men (Matthew 4:19; Matthew 4:21 || Matthew 8:22; Matthew 9:9 || Matthew 19:21 ||, John 1:43); and they either rose up straightway and followed Him (Matthew 4:20; Matthew 4:22 || Matthew 9:9 ||), or if they failed to do so, ‘went away sorrowful,’ feeling in their inmost hearts that they had made ‘the grand refusal’ (Matthew 19:22 ||). (b) But, further, He claimed authority as a teacher. If His immediate followers were first impressed by His claim to be obeyed, it was the authority of His teaching that first struck the multitude and filled them with astonishment (Matthew 7:28-29). It was not only that He constantly placed Himself in opposition to their acknowledged instructors, those scribes who sat in Moses’ seat, and set His simple ‘Verily I say unto you’ against all the traditional learning of the synagogue. He did much more than this. He claimed the right either to abrogate altogether or to reinterpret in His own way laws which were regarded as clothed with Divine sanctions—the law of retaliation (Matthew 5:38 ff.), the law of divorce (Matthew 5:31 f.), and even the thrice-holy law of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1 ff., Matthew 12:10 ff. ||, Luke 13:14, John 7:23). See art. Authority of Christ.
2. But moral authority, like all other forms of authority, must rest upon a power that lies behind. What right has Jesus to speak thus? men would ask; What right to call upon us to leave our homes, our friends, our all, to follow Him? What right to bid us accept His teaching as a perfect revelation of the will of God, and His interpretation of the Law as its true fulfilling? Moral authority quickly disappears when there is no moral power at the back of it. But our Lord’s claim to authority rested upon an underlying claim to holiness—a claim which His hearers and disciples were in a position to verify for themselves. There is nothing which gives a man such sway over the consciences of other men as the possession of true holiness; while there is nothing more certain to be found out than the lack of this quality in one who professes to have it. It was the holiness of Christ’s character that made His words fall with such convincing weight upon the hearts of men and women. It was His holiness that gave Him the right to command, and made them willing to obey. According to the Fourth Gospel, it was the Baptist’s testimony, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ (John 1:36), that brought the first pair of disciples to Jesus. They came to see if this testimony was true (cf. John 1:37 ff.), and what they saw bound them to Jesus for ever. Publicans and sinners drew near to Him (Matthew 9:10, Luke 15:1), not, as His enemies insinuated (Matthew 11:19 ||), because He was a sinner like themselves, but because they saw in Him One who, with all His human sympathy, was so high above sin that He could stretch out a saving hand to those who were its slaves (Matthew 9:12 ||, Luke 7:36-50; Luke 19:2-10). And this holiness, which others saw and felt in Him, Jesus claimed, and that in the most absolute fashion. He claimed to be without sin. He claimed this not only when He said to His foes, ‘Which of you convicteth me of sin?’ (John 8:46), but by the attitude of His whole life to the facts of moral evil. He claimed it by calling Himself the Physician of the sinful (Matthew 9:12 ||), by assuming the power to forgive sins (Matthew 9:6 ||, Luke 7:47 f.), by never making confession of sin in His own prayers, though enjoining it upon His disciples (Matthew 6:12 ||), by never even joining with His disciples in common prayers, of which confession would necessarily form an element (on this point see Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, p. 22 ff.; Expos. Times, xi. [1900] 352 ff.). See, further, artt. Holiness, Sinlessness.
3. A very important aspect of Christ’s claims is their point of connexion with the national hope regarding the Messiah (which see). There can hardly be any doubt that from the very beginning of His public ministry the Messianic consciousness was fully awake in the heart of Jesus. We see the presence of this consciousness in the Temptation narratives (Matthew 4:1-11 ||), in the sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth (Luke 4:17 ff.), in the claim of the preacher on the Mount that He came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). At a later stage He welcomes and blesses Peter’s express declaration, ‘Thou art the Christ’ (Matthew 16:16 f.), and, finally, He accepts the homage of the multitude as the Son of David (wh. see), who came in the name of the Lord (Matthew 21:9 ||), and dies upon the cross for claiming to be the King of the Jews (Matthew 27:11, cf. Matthew 27:37). And if until the end of His ministry He did not call Himself or allow Himself to be called the Messiah (Matthew 16:20), this was clearly because the false ideals of the Jews regarding the Messianic kingdom made it impossible for Him to do so without creating all kinds of misunderstandings, and so precipitating the inevitable crisis before His work on earth was accomplished. But by His constant use of the title ‘Son of Man’ (wh. see), Jesus was giving all along, as Beyschlag says (NT Theology, i. 63), ‘a veiled indication of His Messianic calling’; for hardly any one now doubts that He used this title with precise reference to the well-known passage in the 7th chapter of Daniel (Daniel 7:13 ff.), and that by so describing Himself He was claiming to bring in personally and establish upon earth that very kingdom of God which formed the constant theme of His preaching (see Matthew 26:64).
4. But if Christ’s use of the title ‘Son of Man’ shows how He claimed to fulfil the Messianic idea, His further claim to be the Son of God (wh. see) shows that He filled this idea with an altogether new content, which formed no part of the Messianic expectation of the Jews. No doubt in popular usage the title ‘Son of God,’ through the influence especially of Psalms 2:7, had become an official name for the Messiah (Matthew 8:29, Mark 14:61, John 1:49). But Christ’s claim to be the Son of God evidently meant much more than this. In asserting His Divine Sonship He was not merely affirming His right to an external title of honour, but was giving expression to a consciousness of relationship to God the Father which was absolutely unique, and in which the very essence of His Messiahship consisted. It is true that in the Synoptics He does not expressly designate Himself the Son of God, as He does in the Fourth Gospel (John 5:25; John 9:35 [var. lect.] John 10:36; John 11:4); but at all events He repeatedly calls God His Father, and refers to Himself as ‘the Son’ when speaking of God, and that in a sense manifestly distinct from the general idea of God’s universal Fatherhood (e.g. Matthew 11:27; Matthew 12:50; Matthew 18:10). In the Fourth Gospel, quite apart from those passages in which Christ assumes the title ‘Son of God,’ the sense of this unique relation to God as bearing upon His saving relationship to men meets us everywhere, but especially in the farewell discourse and the intercessory prayer which followed (John 14-17). But in the Synoptics also this Divine consciousness appears repeatedly (e.g. Luke 2:49, Matthew 7:21; Matthew 10:32; Matthew 16:17; Matthew 22:2 f., Mark 12:6), and it finds full expression in that great saying, ‘All things have been delivered unto me of my Father; and no one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him’ (Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22), which serves in St. Matthew’s account as the ground of the Saviour’s universal invitation and of His promise of rest for the soul (Luke 10:28 ff.). See Preaching Christ, 5 (c).
5. In connexion with His eschatological teaching, and forming its central and most essential feature, is the claim made by Christ to be the final and universal Judge of men. Not only did He declare the fact of His own Return, an astonishing declaration in itself, but He affirmed as the purpose of His Second Coming the Judgment of the world. This claim to be the arbiter of human destinies is distinctly announced again and again (Matthew 7:22-23; Matthew 16:27, Mark 8:38). It is further implied in the parables of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) and the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30), and is set forth in detail in that solemn picture of the Last Judgment by which these parables are immediately followed (Matthew 25:31-46). The testimony of the Synoptics with regard to this claim of our Lord is supported by the testimony of the Fourth Gospel to the same effect (John 5:27 ff., cf. John 5:22), and is confirmed by the fact that throughout the rest of the NT the office of the final Judge is constantly assigned to Jesus (Acts 10:42; Acts 17:31, Romans 2:16; Romans 14:10, 2 Corinthians 5:10, 2 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 4:8; 1 Peter 4:5, James 5:8-9), an office, be it noted, which was never ascribed to the Messiah either in the OT revelation or in the popular Jewish belief (see Salmond, Christian Doct. of Immortality, p. 318). This is in some respects the most stupendous of Christ’s claims. It was a great thing for Jesus of Nazareth to assume the titles and functions of the Hope of Israel, to declare Himself to be the Fulfiller of the Law and the Expected of the Prophets. But it was something greater still to claim that with His Return there would arrive the grand consummation of the world’s history (Matthew 25:31), that before Him all nations should be gathered (Matthew 25:32) and all hearts laid bare (Matthew 25:35-36; Matthew 25:42-43), that the principle of the Judgment should be the attitude of men to Himself as He is spiritually present in the world (Matthew 25:40; Matthew 25:45), and that of this attitude Christ Himself should be the Supreme Judge (Matthew 25:32-33). See art. Judgment.
6. That the doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence is specifically taught in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel, is apparent to every reader (John 1:1 ff., John 1:10; John 1:14; John 1:18). But it is not less plain that, according to the author, this doctrine was not simply a solution forced upon the Christian mind by a consideration of Christ’s other claims and of His whole history, but was the unfolding of an affirmation made by Christ’s own lips (John 6:2, John 8:58, John 17:5; John 17:24). In spite of all that has been said by writers like Beyschlag (op. cit. i. 254) and Wendt (Teaching of Jesus, ii. 169), the theory of an ideal pre-existence is quite inadequate as an explanation of such language. Only by maintaining that John’s picture of Jesus and presentation of His words is no record of historical fact, but a theologically determined construction of his own, can we escape from the conclusion that, as Jesus claimed to be in an absolutely unique sense the Son of the Father, so also He claimed to be the personal object of the Father’s love and the sharer of His glory before the world was. See art. Pre-Existence.
Literature.—Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible, artt. ‘Son of Man,’ ‘Son of God’; Denney, Studies in Theology, ch. ii.; Forrest, Christ of History and of Experience, Lect. ii.; Beyschlag, NT Theol. i. 56–79, 236–266; Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, ii. 122–183; Weiss, Bib. Theol. of NT, i. 73–92; Stalker, Christology of Jesus; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 69–81; Salmond, Christian Doct. of Immortality, 313–325; Robbins, A Christian Apologetic (1902), 59–87; Forrest, Authority of Christ (1906).
J. C. Lambert.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Claims (of Christ)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/c/claims-of-christ.html. 1906-1918.
