Is Jesus son of God?

Benjamin Franklin does not fit the membership criteria for any Christian denomination, given his views of Bible, Jesus, and God.  He was born a Christian, with a Christian upbringing and never explicitly disavowed Christianity.  However, as a critical thinker, Benjamin Franklin wrote on Jesus of Nazararth:

... and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity;

At the core of Christian dogma is the need to accept divinity of Jesus. From early days of Christianity, there was a recognition that this dogma is non-negotiable and hence was incorporated into the Nicene creed.  As demonstrated through the Nicene creed, Christians have pushed hard to provide a historical basis for its believers to accept this dogma.  The logic of the tie between dogma and history is in the form of miracles performed by Jesus, including the miracle of dying and coming back to life. Rest of the miracles merely set a back drop to this ultimate miracle of coming back to life.  Why is this miracle so crucial for Christians?  The core logic of the tie between dogma and history goes as follows:

No human can come back to life after death.  Jesus died on the cross and came back to life. He had to be God's son as he called himself.

However, the issue is not settled. Tie between history and dogma is not a foregone conclusion.

Non-traditionalist and distinguished Jesus researcher E.P. Sanders explains:

“A lot of Christians, and possibly even more non-Christians, think that central to Christianity is the view that Jesus could perform miracles because he was more than a mere human being…. Like other ancient people, Jews believed in miracles but did not think that the ability to perform them proved exalted status…. Historically, it is an error to think that Christians must believe that Jesus was superhuman, and also an error to think that in Jesus’ own day his miracles were taken as proving partial or full divinity.” 

Indeed, Jewish religious authorities never doubted that Jesus did miracles; rather, they accused him of doing them in the power of Satan (Matthew 12.22-24, Mark 3.22).

Jesus was a healer.  Jesus supposedly healed not as a practitioner of medical science but rather as a miracle worker. The Gospels are full of reports about his miraculous activities. Indeed, almost one third of Mark’s Gospel is devoted to Jesus’ miracles. The first half of John’s Gospel contains seven miracles known as “signs” that range from Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana to raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. According to one estimate (counting repeated passages only once), the four Gospels include 17 healings, six exorcisms, and eight nature miracles.

Miracles are not seen as proof but to boost one's faith.

Says John in the bible (John 20:30-31):

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.

But do they really help thinking minds boost their faith?

1. Everyone has seen all sorts of "faith healers" who can "heal" the sick. And we all know that this sort of "healing" is quackery. If it were true, then we would not need doctors, hospitals or prescription medicines.
2. Turning water into wine... Doesn't that sound like something that any worthwhile magician could do? There is no reason why a normal person would accept a magic trick as proof that someone is God. 
3. None of the  miracles performed by Jesus left behind any evidence. Nothing that we can see, nor anything that can be scientifically tested today. Not one of Jesus' miracles left any tangible evidence for scientists to study.

It is as simple as that. If someone claimed to be God today, you would never believe it if the evidence consisted of faith healing and magic tricks. Never. Yet billions of people claim that Jesus' faith healing and magic tricks prove that he is God. 

Let's imagine that Jesus truly is God. What might he have done to prove it? He could have started by taking one of his most famous quotes from the Bible and acting on it. In Matthew 17:20 Jesus says quite clearly:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

To prove that he is God, Jesus would have moved a mountain. Especially since it is so easy. And Jesus would have written something down to explain himself. Here's what the first page of Jesus' book might have looked like:

But there are parts of the bible that strongly suggest that Jesus was not a deity.

Jesus’ miracles merely attest to God empowering him. The Apostle Peter preached his first sermon to thousands of Jews gathered at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. He said, “Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know …” (Acts 2.22). And Peter later preached to the house of Cornelius, saying, “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him, with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good, and healing all who were oppressed by the devil; for God was with Him”

These are some of the strongest statements in the Bible indicating that Jesus was not God but that he was empowered by God. And notice in these two statements how Peter clearly distinguishes Jesus and God, which further signifies Jesus is not God.

Jesus could not heal indiscriminately, which also indicates he was not God. Instead, his power to heal depended to some degree on the faith of the beneficiary, which in turn was undoubtedly determined by whether God would heal or not through Jesus.

For instance, one Sabbath day Jesus taught in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. Mark says, “He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief” (Mark 6.5-6).

Sometimes, Jesus healed people and told them that “your faith has made you well” (Matthew 9.22/Mark 5.34/Luke 8.48; Mark 10.52/Luke 18.42).

If Jesus was God, he could have healed anytime he wanted. But he always depended on God’s Spirit to heal through him (Acts 2.22; 10.38). So, Jesus’ power to heal was not intrinsic to himself but derived from God, which indicates he was not God.

Once, Jesus taught in an overcrowded house. Four friends of a paralytic man carried him on his bed and let him down through the thatched, sod roof of a house. Luke says of Jesus, “the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing” on this man (Luke 5.17). It was due to Jesus “seeing their faith” (v. 20), that is, the faith of the man and his friends. So, this account suggests that the power to heal was not always present in Jesus.

Matthew’s account of this incident relates that Jesus’ authority to heal was not intrinsic to him, but derived from God (the Father). He says that “when the multitudes saw this, they were filled with awe, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9.8). So, Matthew reveals that they did not believe Jesus was God on account of this healing, but that God had given him the authority to heal. These people glorified God because they rightly perceived he ultimately had caused it to happen.

A similar situation arose when Jesus cast a legion of demons out of a man. Jesus then commanded him, “Return to your house and describe what great things God has done for you” (Luke 8.39). But Luke says he “went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him.” Does this mean Jesus was God? Euthymius Zigabenus is surely right in explaining, “Christ modestly attributed the work to the Father; but the healed man continued gratefully to attribute it to Christ.”

You do not need to go back 2000 years for miracles.  You can get an opportunity to witness miracles in our times too!  Hoa and where, you ask?  Watch followers nodding in amazement with tears rolling down their faces in faith-healing crusades.

Can we take claims of miracles as literal truths?  Do Jesus’ miracles signify his divinity? Can we reason from miracle-worker to divine Son?   These are all important questions but the last two are far more important.

Let us look at the first question anyway.  Can we take claims of miracles as literal truths? 

In times of the bible, people needed a way to distinguish true prophets from false ones. This was the purpose of miracles. If men could do works that could be performed only by the power of God, people would know God was working in those men and they would believe the message preached.  But are miracles a reliable test for knowing a true prophet, a messiah, or the one son of God?

For starters, Jesus was not the only one in his day with a reputation for doing strange and powerful things, as we see from the NT itself (Mt 12:27; Lk 10:17; Acts 19:13) and from elsewhere.1 And though some traced Jesus’ powers to God, others pointed to Satan (Mk 3:22; Mt 9:34; 12:24 and pars.). To complicate things further, a standard critique of Christianity, at least since the 2nd century, maybe earlier, is that Jesus was a magician.2 What was perfectly clear to the crowds was that Jesus could do things others could not. What was less clear was the source of his power and, correspondingly, the significance of his acts. But do the crowds in modern-day faith-healing sessions not know perfectly clearly that the person on stage is doing what others could not?

No one disputes the fundamentally historical agenda of Plutarch even though his biography of Alexander the Great includes legendary material. . . about flocks of ravens guiding Alexander day and night across the desert (§ 27). Likewise, Suetonius’ account of Augustus includes the part about his mother being impregnated by a serpent in Apollo’s Temple (§ 95).

How can we know that the raising of Lazarus or the stilling of the storm wasn’t simply made up, or substantially expanded from a less-miraculous original? Could a Gospel tapestry be woven mostly of historical threads but also include strands of fiction, myth, and poetic license? If one were to allow embellishment to stand alongside historical fact, can one still speak of the Gospels’ reliability in literally describing miracles by Jesus? 

Christians often argue that miracles of Jesus are evidence of his divinity.  If miracles of Jesus confirm his deity, why is not this argument ever advanced in the New Testament?  And why does Peter, in his Pentecost sermon, point to Jesus’ miracles as signs of God’s attestation and approval (Acts 2:22ff.), as if to distinguish Jesus from God, rather than identify him with God?

Some Christians argue that it isn’t so much the miracles which make Jesus God, but the divine claims of Jesus which the miracles serve to validate. Jesus made certain statements that no other true prophet before him ever did, and then performed supernatural miracles to back up the truthfulness and validity of those claims.  These Christians are not saying: Jesus performd miracles, therefore he must be divine.  They are saying: Jesus is divine, therefore he is able to perform miracles.  Unfortunately, this argument simply begs the question by asking you to believe in the bible as truth in order to validate claims drawn from it.