When Jesus Said He Wasn't God's Equal
A carpenter from Galilee kept saying he was under God, not equal to him. The Church turned him into God anyway.
Picture it: you’re sitting in a crowd, listening to Jesus talk. He’s healing people, telling stories, flipping tables when priests get greedy. But every time he opens his mouth about himself, he says the same thing: “I’m not God. God is above me. I was sent. I obey.”
Fast forward two thousand years. You walk into a church and hear: “Jesus is God. Equal with the Father. Worship him as the Almighty.” Wait, what? How did a man who kept saying he wasn’t God end up shoved onto God’s throne?
That’s Christian history for you in under 100 words. The Jesus of the Gospels points up. The Church points at Jesus. Somewhere along the line, people stopped listening to what the man actually said.
Jesus Said the Father Was Greater
John 14:28 has Jesus saying: “The Father is greater than I.” That’s not deep philosophy. That’s plain. Someone else outranks him.
Preachers twist it and say, “He only meant while he was human.” If he really wanted people to know he was secretly God, he had all the chances in the world to say it. He didn’t.
Jesus Prayed Like He Wasn’t God
If Jesus was God, why was he always praying? Was he talking to himself? Did God get bored and decide to have conversations with his own echo?
Look at Matthew 26:39. In the garden before his arrest, Jesus says: “Not as I will, but as you will.” That’s a man admitting his will is not God’s will. That’s submission. Two different wills means two different beings.
Jesus Didn’t Know Everything
God is supposed to know it all. But Mark 13:32 has Jesus saying: “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the Son, but only the Father.”
If you don’t know the date of the end of the world, you’re not all-knowing. And if you’re not all-knowing, you’re not God. Simple as that.
Jesus Said He Was Sent
Over and over, Jesus called himself someone who was sent. John 17:3 nails it: “You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
He called someone else the only true God. He put himself second. That’s not equality, that’s hierarchy.
How the Church Upgraded Him
If Jesus didn’t claim divinity, why did Christians end up with the Trinity? Politics. By the fourth century, bishops were clashing and emperors wanted one clean doctrine to hold the empire together.
At the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, they fought over whether Jesus was the same as God or just similar. Fists flew. Voices shouted. In the end, they voted him into full Godhood. From then on, disagreeing was heresy.
That wasn’t Jesus speaking. That was churchmen rewriting him for power.
Jesus Called Himself a Prophet
Luke 13:33 shows Jesus saying: “No prophet can die outside Jerusalem.” He didn’t say “No God can die.” He said prophet.
Prophet means messenger. Human. Servant. The Church later inflated that into “God in the flesh.” That’s like calling the mail carrier the king because he delivers a royal letter.
The Holy Spirit Promotion
In the Gospels, the Spirit is God’s power, God’s breath, God’s helper. Nowhere does Jesus say the Spirit is a separate God. That came later, when church leaders decided their doctrine looked incomplete with just two. So they added the Spirit to the club and sold it as one God in three pieces.
What the Scholars Say
This isn’t just me talking. Plenty of top biblical scholars agree that Jesus never claimed equality with God.
Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian, points out that the Gospels show Jesus as a prophet and teacher who submitted to God. Ehrman stresses that Jesus’ own words — like “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) — leave no room for the idea that he was God’s equal. The divinity claim only hardened in later church councils, not in Jesus’ lifetime.
James D. G. Dunn, another leading scholar, argued in Christology in the Making that the earliest Christians saw Jesus as God’s chosen servant, not God himself. According to Dunn, the “high Christology” where Jesus is treated as fully divine didn’t appear until decades after his death, as church leaders reinterpreted him to fit their theology.
Larry Hurtado, who studied early Christian worship, admitted that while Jesus was honored in extraordinary ways, the Gospels still place him beneath the Father. Hurtado said the earliest texts show devotion to Jesus, but not the later doctrine of the Trinity.
Even Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar loyal to the church, conceded that verses like John 17:3 — where Jesus calls the Father “the only true God” — are hard to square with the idea of equality. Brown acknowledged the tension but chalked it up to the difference between Jesus’ words and later church teaching.
In short, the scholars line up with the plain reading: Jesus himself pointed upward to God, not inward to his own divinity.
Before You Go
This isn’t just about theology games. Billions of people today worship Jesus as God, not as the prophet he understood himself to be. That changes everything about prayer, salvation, and how Christians treat other faiths.
If Jesus was a prophet, built on non-Trinitarian Christianity, then Islam got it right. If he was God, then everyone else is wrong. The Trinity isn’t some harmless mystery — it’s a dividing line built on a teaching Jesus never gave.
Forget the Roman spin and just read the Gospels for yourself. Jesus prayed. He obeyed. He didn’t know everything. He said someone else was greater. He called himself a prophet. He pointed to God instead of himself.
That’s the raw Jesus. Under the weight of the Roman Empire, the Church layered titles and creeds over him until the man from Galilee disappeared.
Sources and Further Reading
First Council of Nicaea | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325
First Council of Nicaea | Wikipedia
First Council of Constantinople | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Constantinople-381
First Council of Constantinople | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Constantinople
Second Ecumenical Council | Saint John Church
Council of Nicaea | Bart Ehrman
First Council of Nicaea | Christian History Institute
https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/first-council-of-nicea
Theodosius I | Wikipedia
Holy Spirit in Christianity | Wikipedia
Trinitarianism in the Church Fathers | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitarianism_in_the_Church_Fathers
1. “The Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28)
This verse does not mean Jesus is not God. In context, Jesus is speaking during His incarnation, when He voluntarily humbled Himself. Philippians 2:6-8 says that though He was “in very nature God,” He “emptied Himself” and took the form of a servant. “Greater” refers to the Father’s position of authority while Jesus is on earth, not to a difference in divine nature. Elsewhere Jesus explicitly claims equality: John 10:30 says, “I and the Father are one,” and John 5:18 records that the Jews wanted to kill Him because He was “making Himself equal with God.”
2. “Jesus prayed, so He can’t be God.” (Matthew 26:39)
Prayer does not prove Jesus isn’t divine; it proves He is truly human. Christian theology teaches that Jesus has two natures — fully God and fully man. As man, He lived in perfect dependence on the Father and prayed as an example for us. Hebrews 5:7 says that “He offered up prayers and supplications.” Far from denying His divinity, this shows that He is the perfect Mediator between God and humanity (1 Timothy 2:5).
3. “Jesus didn’t know everything.” (Mark 13:32)
When Jesus says He does not know the day or hour of the end, this reflects His voluntary self-limitation during His earthly ministry (Philippians 2:7). He chose not to fully exercise His divine omniscience while on earth. After His resurrection, Peter affirms: “Lord, You know all things” (John 21:17), showing that Jesus’ knowledge was no longer hidden. This was a temporary limitation, not a denial of His divine nature.
4. “Jesus said He was sent, so He isn’t God.” (John 17:3)
Being “sent” does not mean Jesus is less than God; it simply describes His mission. In John 17:3 Jesus calls the Father “the only true God,” but in John 17:5 He immediately asks to be glorified with “the glory I had with You before the world existed.” No mere prophet or messenger could say that. Jesus is distinguishing persons (Father and Son) but not denying His shared divine essence.
5. “The Church invented Jesus’ divinity at Nicaea.”
This is historically false. Long before the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), Christians were already worshipping Jesus as God. Early writers like Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110 AD) repeatedly call Jesus “our God,” and Pliny the Younger (c. 112 AD) reports that Christians “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” Nicaea did not invent Christ’s divinity — it formally affirmed what the church had always believed in order to respond to false teachings like Arianism.
6. “Jesus called Himself a prophet.” (Luke 13:33)
Yes, Jesus is a prophet — but that is only one of His roles. He is also King and High Priest. Calling Himself a prophet does not mean He is merely human. In fact, Jesus also claims divine titles: in John 8:58 He says, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” directly using the divine name from Exodus 3:14. The crowd understood this as blasphemy, which is why they tried to stone Him — proving He was claiming divinity.
7. “The Holy Spirit was added later.”
The New Testament already presents the Holy Spirit as divine. In Acts 5:3-4, Peter says that lying to the Holy Spirit is lying to God. In Matthew 28:19 Jesus commands baptism “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” This shows that the Spirit shares the same divine name and authority. The doctrine of the Trinity was not invented later — it was developed to summarize what Scripture already taught from the beginning.
Each of these objections either ignores the context of the verses or overlooks the two natures of Christ — His true humanity and true divinity. The Bible consistently presents Jesus as fully God and fully man. Early Christians recognized this and worshipped Him long before any church council. Far from being a later invention, the doctrine of Christ’s divinity and the Trinity is deeply rooted in Scripture and the faith of the first believers.