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Jesus never claimed to be God, Cory D. Moss.

Jesus referred to himself using words of scripture reserved for God.

Jesus' original hearers accused him of blasphemy because they understood that he was identifying himself as God.

Jesus always confirmed the confessions of people who recognized him as God.

Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God.

Bart Airman, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, April 7, 2014.

The above quotation shows that Jesus calling himself God or considering himself God are two different questions.

If he called himself divine, there is every reason to believe he considered himself divine.

But it's not necessarily true that if he considered himself God, he would have explicitly called himself God.

At the same time, the only way to determine whether Jesus considered himself God is by looking at claims he made about himself.

Because those claims are most reliably recorded in the New Testament gospels,

we must look there for information about Jesus' self-perception.

Before doing so, two points are worth emphasizing.

The first is that a claim might exist without being obvious.

In other words, we should not assume that any assertion of divinity would take the plain form of,

Hi, my name is Jesus, I'm God.

In fact, as we'll see, there are good reasons to assume it would not take that form.

The second point is that before addressing what Jesus said,

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