I, Jesus: An Autobiography

by Chuck Missler

Thallus as having previously attempted to explain away the darkness that occurred at the point of Jesus’ crucifixion: On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun. Africanus was educated enough to realize why the “explanation” offered by Thallus was “without reason”: solar eclipses cannot occur during full moon, because at that time of the lunar cycle’s full moon, the earth is located directly between the sun and the moon. As a result, solar eclipses cannot, by definition, occur during a full moon. Whatever the cause was of the darkness mentioned by Thallus, it wasn’t caused by a solar eclipse.

A discerning reader will observe that, while Tacitus was not a Christian believer, his writings tend to authenticate that Jesus lived in Judea, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and had followers who were persecuted for their faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, also known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claims that Jesus is the same person known to us in the Bible as the archangel Michael.

C. S. Lewis summarized that choice in one of his more famous statements, which he originally penned as part of his classic apologetic work Mere Christianity: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In Part One of our study, we’ll demonstrate that Jesus made no less than 32 separate and astounding claims concerning himself, claims that in the cultural and theological economy of monotheistic Israel were nothing less than blasphemy.

In Part Two, we’ll conclude our analysis by undertaking a survey about what the rest of the New Testament says about Jesus in light of the astonishing claims that he made about himself. We’ll show how New Testament writers, all of whom claimed to have known the man personally and to have spoken to him, concluded from their knowledge of him that when they were speaking to Jesus, they were speaking to the same omnipotent, eternal, omniscient, and holy Being whom their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob addressed as God and before whom they bowed in worship.

Once he took upon himself human flesh, the God of Israel would forever be “Emmanuel,” or, as the Hebrew name means, “God with us” in human form.

Jesus was extraordinarily reluctant to refer to himself with first person pronouns when talking about his claimed divine attributes.

Jesus is claiming to be the God who appeared to Israel as the Angel of the Lord, before whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bowed in worship.

Jesus must possess the quality of omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at once.

Jesus is claiming nothing less than that he has the ability and authority to fashion the life circumstances of each individual who places their trust in him to extract the maximum benefit from their burdens.