Chapter 6. John 20:28 – “My Lord and my God!”

In the previous chapter we saw that Brian J. Wright, a Bible scholar and a trinitarian, concludes that John 20:28 is the only verse in the New Testa­ment that, with full certainty, refers explicitly to Jesus as theos (“God”), with a handful of other verses that can be “assumed” to have “a similar degree of certain­ty”.

It is one thing for Wright to establish the textual certainty of John 20:28 (this is actually a non-issue in NT scholarship) but quite another to demonstrate that the verse itself actually speaks of Jesus as theos.

The following is John 20:28 in its full context, with the key verse v.28 shown in boldface. Five words are underlined for later discussion.

Does this passage — which culminates in Thomas’s exclamation, “My Lord and my God!” — teach the deity of Jesus? Most trin­itarian commentaries take this for granted without any analysis. Yet there are six weighty points — all based on Script­ure — that they ought to take into consider­ation for an understanding of John 20:28.

The trinitarian claim that John 20:28 establishes Jesus as God is weak­ened, even nullified, by the fact that the Father is “the only true God” (John 17:3). In using the word “only,” Jesus is excluding himself as “true God”.

We cannot isolate John 17:3 and 20:28 from each other because John 17 and John 20 are separated by only two chapters. Moreover, the two verses, 17:3 and 20:28, come from the same gospel (of John), and hence are rooted in the same Johan­nine con­cept of God. As a result, the trinitarian interpretation of John 20:28 (that Jesus is God) would create a genuine conflict with John 17:3 (that Jesus is not true God). We cannot wave away the contra­diction by saying that the two verses carry two differ­ent meanings of “God” (an argument that might be plausible if one of the verses had come from John and the other from a different writer like Paul or Peter).

Moreover, this contradiction between John 17:3 and 20:28 (which exists only in trinitarian­ism) would make Jesus the perpetrator of the contradiction. For it is Jesus who in John 17:3 declares that his Father is the only true God, but also Jesus who in John 20:28 accepts Thomas’s ascript­ion of deity, at least accord­ing to trinitarians.

Jesus’ declaration in John 17:3 that the Father is the only true God is affirmed by 1Corinthians 8:6 which says, “there is one God, the Father”. Note that Paul does not say, “There is one God: Father, Son, and Spirit”.

In Ephesians 4:6, Paul establishes the exclus­ive deity of the Father when he speaks of “one God and Father of all”. Paul is saying that there is only one God, and that this God happens to be the Father of all. There­fore anyone who is not the “Father of all” can­not be God. But Jesus Christ is not the Father (not even in trinitar­ian­ism), much less the Father of all, which means that Jesus is not God. In fact, 1John 5:18 says that we are “born of God” and that Jesus was “born of God” — in the same sentence!

Notice the five underlined words in the Bible passage quoted above: believe, disbelieve, believe, believed, believed. The first was uttered by Thomas, the other four by Jesus.

What exactly did Thomas refuse to believe? Earlier on, he told the other disciples that he refuses to “believe” unless he sees and touches the wounds of Jesus. This was his response to the claim, “We have seen the [risen] Lord,” which he dismissed as fanta­sy. Thomas refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, so he demanded the physical evidence that he could see and touch.

Eight days later, Jesus appeared to Thomas and presented the very evidence that he had demanded: the wounds that he could see and touch. Jesus then said to him, “Do not disbelieve but believe”. Thomas then ex­claimed the memorable words, “My Lord and my God!” It is striking that Jesus then straight­away pulls the conver­sation back to the issue of unbelief: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” Jesus has not shown any explicit interest in his alleged deity.

When I was a trinitarian, I paid close attention to Jesus’ re­buke of Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

After much thinking, I realized even as a trinitarian that John 20:28-29 was not being explicit enough, for it had left unanswered a crucial question: When Jesus rebuked Thomas for his unbelief, what kind of unbelief was he referring to? Unbelief in regard to his deity? Or unbelief in regard to his resur­rection?

Even as a trinitarian, I could not rule out the latter because the whole account is about Thomas’s refusal to believe that Jesus had come back to life. In fact Jesus addressed the issue by inviting Thomas to touch his wounds: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

Note the two words I highlighted in boldface: The word “believe” is the reversal of “disbelieve,” that is, Thomas now believes what he had previously disbelieved, namely, the resurrection of Jesus! That is a clear answer to my question.

Yet in my study of John 20:28 as a trinitarian, the clear answer to my question was already standing right in front of me! In John 20:28, I only had to turn one page in my Bible to go to the next book: Acts of the Apostles. In a real sense, John 20:28 is prefatory to the book of Acts. Chronolo­gically they are separated by a short span of time, the few weeks from the resurrection to the ascension. The import­ance of John 20:28, to­gether with the pivotal placement of John’s gospel just before Acts in the canon, means that John 20:28 sets the pattern for the aposto­lic preaching of Jesus in Acts.

This leads us to the crucial question: In the book of Acts, did the apos­tles preach Jesus as God or Jesus as the risen Lord? I think we already know the answer: they preached Jesus as the risen Lord.

Even trinitarians admit that in the book of Acts, Jesus never calls himself theos (God), and that the apostles proclaimed Jesus as the risen Lord rather than a divine Lord. That is the clear answer to my question!

Let’s get this clear: In the book of Acts, Jesus is never called theos by the apostles or by Jesus himself, a solid fact that is not disputed in New Testa­ment scholar­ship. This is even admitted by the trinit­arian Brian J. Wright in a statement we have already quoted:

In the book of Acts, the apostles never proclaimed Jesus as God. On the contrary, they consistently proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead. At Pentecost, Peter told the multitudes that “God raised him up” (Acts 2:24) and that “God raised up this Jesus” (v.32). In the next chapter, Peter said, “You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead” (3:15); and “God raised up his servant” (v.26). Through­out the sermon, Peter was accompanied by John, the very person who recorded Thomas’s exclamation in John 20:28!

If it is really true that John 20:28 teaches the deity of Jesus, why didn’t the apostles preach it once in the book of Acts? And who do we follow as the pattern for our gospel message, the apostles of Jesus Christ or trinitarian scholars?

There are many academic papers on the apostolic preaching of the risen Jesus in the book of Acts (e.g., The Resurrect­ion in the Acts of the Apostles, I. Howard Marshall), but I cannot find a single academic paper on the preaching of Jesus’ deity in Acts!

Jesus’ rebuke of Thomas — “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” — is illuminated by Romans 10:9 which says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” In the Bible, saving faith is not about believing that Jesus is God but believing that God raised Jesus from the dead, by which Jesus was made “Lord” in an exalted sense (Acts 2:36).

Summary of Point 3: The trinitarian claim that John 20:28 equates Jesus with God does not align with the aposto­lic preach­ing of the risen Jesus in the book of Acts, and is therefore false.

In my two decades as a trinitarian, I was troubled by the fact that the Bible would never explicitly say that Jesus is God. Verses such as John 20:28 come tantalizingly close, but why doesn’t the Bible “seal the deal”? Why not add a few more words to make it explicit and unassailable and incontrovertible? In my trinitarian days, I would sometimes wonder if the Bible even cares about the deity of Jesus.

So why doesn’t Jesus verbally confirm Thomas’s declar­ation with some­thing like, “Yes, Thomas, you are right, I am your Lord and your God”. That state­ment alone would be enough to con­vince me of Jesus’ deity, even today.

The indirectness of Jesus’ alleged deity in John 20:28 ought to be contrasted with the explicit affirmation of Yahweh’s deity in Exod­us 20:2: “I am Yahweh your God”. That’s it! That’s 100% explicit! In one clear statement, we get the equat­ion, Yahweh = God. This equation is not a solitary one-off statement, but something that is repeated several hundred times in the Bible in various forms, all explicit:

• “Yahweh God” (11 times in Genesis 2 alone)
• “Yahweh, God of heaven and God of earth” (Gen.24:3,7)
• “Yahweh your God” (17 times in Exodus alone)
• “Yahweh, God of Israel” (Ex.5:1; 32:27; 34:23)
• “I am Yahweh your God” (Ex.6:7; 16:12; 20:2)
• “Yahweh our God” (Ex.8:6,22,23)
• “Yahweh, Yahweh, God of compassion” (Ex.34:6)

Here I quoted only from Genesis and Exodus. With repeated use of the BibleWorks program, I estimate that the Bible has over 400 instances of the explicit equa­tion Yahweh = God in its various forms. By con­trast, the equation Jesus = God does not occur even once in the Bible.

If “Yahweh God” could occur 11 times in Genesis 2 alone (that is, 11 times in 25 verses), why don’t we ever see “Jesus God” even once in the Bible (that is, zero times in 31,102 verses)? Why don’t we ever see phrases such as: “Jesus, God of Abraham” or “Jesus, God of heaven and earth” or “Jesus your God” or “Jesus, God of Israel” or “I am Jesus your God” or “Jesus, Jesus, God of compass­ion” (despite the fact that com­passion is integral to Jesus’ nature)?

The total absence of Jesus = God in the Bible has compelled some to argue that Jesus is God by the indirect equation Jesus = Yahweh = God. There are many pro­blems with this, but I will state only three.

Firstly, whereas the equation Yahweh = God occurs hundreds of times in the Bible, the equation Jesus = God or Jesus = Yahweh occurs not even once, which would be in­expli­cable if Jesus is God.

Secondly, the Bible never speaks of God and Yahweh as two distinct persons, yet it would often make a sharp dis­tinction of per­sons between God and Christ as seen in verses such as 1Tim.5:21 (“in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus”) and most strikingly 1Cor.11:3 (“the head of Christ is God”). See also 1Cor.8:6.

Thirdly, Yahweh declares His exclusive deity in Isaiah 45:5, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other, besides me there is no God,” which aligns exactly with the fact that the Father is “the only true God” (John 17:3). Hence Yahweh is the Father, not the Son.

The total absence of the equation Jesus = God in the Bible ought to be taken for deep reflection by trinitarians. Searching for Jesus’ deity in the Bible is like trying to squeeze water from a stone in the desert. The Bible — the living word of God — is not giving trinitarians the very thing they desire most. The Bible’s total silence on Jesus’ deity is the very reason for Brian J. Wright’s colossal efforts to search the Bible for refer­ences to Jesus as theos, only for Wright to conclude that John 20:28 is the only verse in the New Testa­ment that, with full cer­tainty, refers to Jesus as theos (“God”).

Yet not even John 20:28 has an explicit reference to Jesus as God. At best we have a plausible implication from Thomas, but even that could be nothing more than an exclamat­ion of surprise at the sight of the risen Lord. In fact, many trinitarian comment­aries use the exact word “exclam­ation” to describe Thomas’s utterance of shock — “My Lord and my God!” — at the sight of the risen Lord. The ambiguity of this verse for Jesus’ deity troubled me in the summer of 1983 when I was teaching Adult Sunday School in Ottawa, Canada, as a trin­itar­ian.

It seems that trinit­ar­ians have forgotten the meaning of the word “explicit”. An explicit statement from Jesus would be something like, “Yes, Thomas, I am your Lord and your God”.

To drive home the plain meaning of “explicit,” let me ask a simple question: Why is the deity of the Father not debated by Christians? Because the Bible states it explicit­ly again and again: “peace from God our Father” (Rom.1:7); “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom.15:6); “there is one God, the Father” (1Cor.8:6); and so on. But where do you find a statement such as “there is one God, Jesus Christ”? There is not a single explicit state­ment in the whole Bible of the deity of Christ, not even in John 20:28.

It is crucial for us to demand from trinita­rians full explicitness for John 20:28 for the simple reason that, accord­ing to Wright, this verse stands alone in the Bible in calling Jesus theos with full certainty. Yet Wright wants to use this sole exception (which is not even explicit) to overthrow the entire weight of evid­ence in the rest of the Bible! We must bear in mind that Wright himself admits that “Jesus never uses the term θεός for him­self” (p.230) — an all-encompass­ing fact that reaches to John 20:28-29.

I recently came upon a book with an intriguing title, Was Jesus God? (Oxford University Press), in which Richard Swinburne, an eminent Christian philosopher-theologian at Oxford and a trinitar­ian, searches the Bible and church doctrine for evidence that Jesus is God. The fact that such a provoca­tive title, Was Jesus God?, could even be conceived by a trinitarian scholar shows that the Bible may have little evidence, perhaps zero evidence, for the deity of Jesus.

Swinburne gives deep and philosophical reflections on the church and her beliefs, but offers no explicit proof from the Bible that Jesus is God. He finds mainly faint and indirect evidence such as that God raised Jesus from the dead. In fact Swinburne finds more evidence for Jesus’ deity in the historic faith of the church than in the Bible.

In the final chapter titled “Final Conclusion,” Swinburne displays cautious uncer­tainty when he says that “it is very probable that Jesus was God”. What? Only “very probable”? As a responsible scholar, he refrains from expressing a level of certainty that is unwarranted by the biblical data. Two pages later he admits that some NT passages “deny this doctrine” of “the divinity of Jesus”. On the next page he says, “It is undisputed that Jesus did not teach this doctrine” of the Trinity. This is quite a concession from a learned trinitarian.

Another committed trinitarian, Robertson McQuilkin, in his careful work, Understanding and Applying the Bible, gives sound advice that is urgently needed in the evangelical world today. In chapter 16 of his book, in the section titled, “Base the Doctrine Solely on the Bible,” McQuilkin, an evangelical, cautions the reader not to base doc­trine on inference but on explicit Bible teach­ing. He immediately goes on to give one and only one example of such an inference: “In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is such an inference. But the way in which the three ultimately relate is not revealed in Scripture, and thus our theories for relating them should be held tentatively.”

Most of you in this conference would have read Sir Anthony F. Buzzard’s Jesus Was Not a Trinit­arian: A Call to Return to the Creed of Jesus. Chapter 4 of this book, “The Titanic Struggle of Scholars to Find the Triune God in the Bible,” contains some eye-opening admissions by prominent trinitarians who struggle to account for the paucity of bibli­cal references to Jesus as God.

Since the Bible does not explicitly say that Jesus is God, trinitar­ian­ism is ultimately a doctrinal edifice that is built on arguments from silence; weak inferences; invalid parallels; the conflation of per­sons; the misrendering of Greek prep­osit­ions; the last-resort appeal to mystery and to tradition; the reversal of bibli­cal terms (e.g., changing the bibli­cal “Son of God” into the unbiblical “God the Son”); and the use of highly philo­so­phi­cal con­cepts (e.g., homoousios, an origin­ally Gnostic term that trin­itarians have adopted for depersonal­izing God into an essence).

John 20:28 has a complication that is known in NT scho­larship. In the Greek text of John 20:28, Thomas does not merely say “God” (theos) but “the God” (ho theos), with the article ho. This crucial fact does not come out in English translations of the Bible.

The presence of the article “the” in John 20:28 makes the title “the God” too strong to apply to Jesus because it would undermine the trinitarian assertion that Jesus shares a divine essence with the Father. We must bear in mind that trinitarians, in arguing for Jesus’ deity in John 1:1, stress that “God” in “the Word was God” has no article.[1]

The problem runs even deeper because if Jesus is “the God,” this would rule out the Father as God, as admitted by some prominent trinitarians.[2]

The trinitarian claim that John 20:28 equates Jesus with theos is problematic because that would make Jesus “the God” and not just “God,” and would lead to one of two possibilities, both of which are detest­able to trinitar­ians.

One possibil­ity is that Jesus is “the God” to the exclu­sion of the Father as God (a blas­phemous statement even to trinitar­ians). The other possibility — to safe­guard the Father’s deity — is that Jesus = the Father; but this would be the error of modalism or Sabellianism.[3]

What trinitarians seek for Jesus in John 20:28 is not “the God” but “God” (a distinction that is vital to the trinitarian interpretation of John 1:1). Some ancient manuscript copyists realized that John 20:28 poses a problem for trinitar­ianism, so they “solved” it by deleting the arti­cle “the” from “the God” in this verse but also in other verses with similar Christolo­gi­cal difficulties.

Bart D. Ehrman is one of the world’s leading NT textual experts, and this is acknowledged even by those, including myself, who might not agree with his pessimism over the state of the New Testament manuscripts.[4] In his important work, The Orthodox Corrupt­ion of Scripture,[5] Ehrman explains how some early copy­ists simply deleted the problematic word “the” from “the God” (ho theos) in John 20:28:

Ehrman gives other examples of ancient manuscripts being altered in order to make Jesus God, but we won’t go further into this topic except briefly in this footnote. [6]

Despite the immense problems with the trinitarian interpret­a­tion of John 20:28, most trinitarians will not surrender the belief that Jesus is called “God” in John 20:28. That being the case, we ought to widen our examination to include the crucial question of whether Jesus is actually worshipped as God in the New Testa­ment. If it is really true that Jesus is called “God” in John 20:28, we would expect Jesus to be worshipped again and again in the New Testament: in the gospels, in Acts, in Paul’s letters, in John’s letters, in Revelat­ion. Again and again and again.

But as we shall see, the clear answer from the biblical data is, “No, Jesus is not worshipped in the New Testament. On the contrary, he teaches us to worship the Father.” This leads us to the next chapter.