Who Was the First to Say Jesus is God?

The first person to explicitly call Jesus “God” was someone who is better remembered for his doubt, not for his belief.  But he is the first person every quoted calling Jesus “God” – and we can learn from him.

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin. Photo by Tom Faletti, 6 June 2024.

Who was the first person who explicitly said Jesus is “God”?  The answer will surprise even many dedicated Christians.

Skeptics and people who are opposed to Christianity like to argue that Jesus’s divinity wasn’t worked out until the Church declared that Jesus was God at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325.  This is an unequivocal falsehood.  The leaders of the Church gathered there to agree on a uniform set of words to explain what the Church had already believed for centuries.  But the first record of a person saying Jesus is God was published more than 200 years earlier.

The earliest document that treats Jesus as divine and equal to God was written in AD 50.  In my article When Did Christians First Recognize the Divinity of Jesus?, I lay out the evidence that the first written document we have that indicates that Jesus is God is the oldest document in the New Testament: Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, written in AD 50.  And his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, written a few months later also treats Jesus as God.

At that time, none of the Gospels had been written yet, but they describe events that occurred almost 20 years before Paul wrote his first letter.  Do any of the Gospels report that someone called Jesus “God”?  The answer is yes, and the person who said it might surprise you.

Peter?  The centurion at the foot of the cross?  The disciples?

Many Christians might think that Peter was the first, when he declared Jesus to be the Messiah.  But in his time, there was no expectation that the Messiah would be God, so when Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Messiah” (Matt. 16:16; with similar statements in Mark 8:29 and Luke 9:20), we can’t assume he was declaring Jesus to be God.

Right after Jesus died, the centurion at the foot of the cross said, “Truly, this was the Son of God” (Matt. 27:54; with very similar words in Mark 15:39), but there is no way of knowing if he was making a clear declaration of Jesus’s divinity or just saying that Jesus had a special relationship with God.

If we go back to Peter’s statement in Matthew, we will see that there Peter does add that Jesus is “the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16).  It is possible that he meant that Jesus is divine – is literally God Himself – but that is not the language he used.  And if that is what he meant by “son of the Living God,” then there is an earlier claim.  Before Peter made his famous confession, the disciples called Jesus “the son of God” after he walked on water (Matt 14:33).  And, perhaps later, Martha declared that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” in John 11:27, before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.

But did they mean “God” when they said, “son of God”?  It is ambiguous.  In the Old Testament, Israel’s kings were sometimes referred to as the son of God (2 Sam. 7:14; Psalm 2:7).  Even Jesus notes that the term “son of God” sometimes refers to humans in the Old Testament.  And Martha’s reference to “the one coming into the world” has messianic but not necessarily divine overtones.  So we can’t be sure what the disciples, Peter, and Martha meant when they used that term.

Furthermore, throughout the history of Christianity, there have been people who claim to believe in Jesus and identify him as the Son of God but reject the idea that he is God – for example, followers of Arianism, Latter Day Saints/Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Opponents of Christianity also argue that the early Christians did not believe Jesus is God even though they called him the Son of God.

But there is a much clearer answer to the question.

Thomas is the first to say Jesus is God

The first person to unambiguously declare Jesus to be God was his disciple Thomas.  On the Sunday that was exactly one week after Jesus rose from the dead, the first Sunday after Easter approximately 1,992 years ago, Thomas became the first person to explicitly declare that Jesus is God.  (For the record, Jesus himself had already said it pretty explicitly in John 10:30, when he said, “I and the Father are one,” but we’re looking for the first person who affirmed this claim.)

Thomas’s revelation began when he missed Jesus’s first appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection.  Thomas was deeply dedicated to Jesus, so committed that when Jesus decided to return to Jerusalem for the last time, facing an almost certain death, Thomas said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16).  He was the kind of person who wanted the facts and who faced facts squarely.  He was not afraid to ask Jesus for more information when he was confused (John 14:5).  Perhaps he missed the first appearance of Jesus because he understood the facts of death and wanted to grieve in private.

When the disciples told Thomas that Jesus had appeared to them, he said he wouldn’t believe unless he was able to see for himself and touch the nail marks in Jesus’s hands and the wound in his side.  Thomas gets a bad rap for his doubts, forever earning the moniker “The Doubting Thomas.”  But the other disciples  – with the exception of John, according to John himself in John 20:8 – didn’t believe until they saw, so I think the label plastered on Thomas is a bit unfair.

A week later, on that first Sunday after Easter, Thomas is with the disciples when Jesus appears again.  Jesus graciously invites Thomas to probe his hands and side and urges him to believe.  Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

This is the first time anyone explicitly calls Jesus “God.”

It happened in roughly AD 33, almost 300 years before the First Council of Nicaea.  So the next time you hear a skeptic claim that Christians made up the idea that Jesus was God in 325, you can be sure they are rewriting history to suit their biases.  The earliest Christian documents, which make up the New Testament, show that they are wrong.

Even those who don’t believe the evidence in the Bible can’t change the bottom line

Skeptics might go a step further and claim that the early Church made up the story of Thomas.  But that doesn’t help their case as they try to deny that early followers of Jesus believed he was God.  Suppose it were true that Thomas did not call Jesus “God.”  The author of the Gospel claimed to be an eyewitness (John 19:35-37; 21:24-25) and would not have included Thomas’s story in his Gospel if he did not believe what Thomas professed.  But he did believe it: he also referred to Jesus as God in John 1:1.  He wrote his Gospel most likely in the AD 90s, and certainly no later than the early 100s.  So the evidence of belief in Jesus’s divinity still precedes the First Council of Nicaea by more than 200 years even if the story about Thomas were false.

Furthermore, other New Testament letters explicitly refer to Jesus as God, including in Hebrews 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1; 1 John 5:20; and, probably Romans 9:5.

And we have a papyrus (P66) dating to the late 100s or earlier that contains most of John’s Gospel, including the verse where Thomas calls Jesus “God.”  So we know that the belief in Jesus’s divinity was not invented by later clerics and retroactively inserted into the old texts.  It was there long before anyone dreamed of a council at Nicaea.

The bottom line is that from the beginning, Christians have believed that Jesus is God.  And the first person to say so was Thomas.

The doubter was the first to clearly articulate this truth.  The one who insisted on being real and facing facts finally put all the facts together, but not until after a time of uncertainty.

We, too, can check out the facts about Jesus.  He wants to show us who he is, if we are willing to come to him with a willingness to learn.  Thomas’s story can be especially meaningful to us, because it shows that anyone can come to understand who Jesus is – even so-called doubters and skeptics.

How does it affect your faith to know that the belief that Jesus is God goes all the way back to the early Christians?

How can you, like Thomas, say to Jesus: “my Lord and my God”?  And more importantly, what effect might it have on how you live?