WHY DIDN'T THE JEWS SAY THAT JESUS CLAIMED TO BE GOD? (JOHN 19:7)

Instead, they only said that he claimed to be the Son of God when they described to Pilate what their charge against him was. A friend of mine used this fact to prove that Jesus never did claim to be God. But, of course, even if this objection were true, there are many more passages that do prove that point. And the fact is that this verse by no means disproves the contention that Jesus said he was God.

In the first place, in saying what they did to Pilate, they are are either referring back to an occasion like that in John 5:17-18, which directly follows the account of Jesus performing a healing on the sabbath. Jesus says on that occasion, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” John then explains, “For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.” One can certainly try to discount the Jew's interpretation of Jesus' words at this point if one wishes, but it is not nearly as easy to accuse John the narrator of misunderstanding.

An equally likely reference in John 19:7 is to the Jewish “trial” that had just taken place. John does not describe that occasion in any detail, but we can go to the Synoptic Gospels to fill in that void. Mark 14:53-65 states that the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” and Jesus answers, “I am.”

First, we need to discuss the import of Jesus calling himself “the Son of God” as it would have been understood in those days by the Jews. Evans and Van Voorst say, “Most offensive to the [later] rabbis was the Gospel claim that Jesus was God and Son of Man (cf. Mk 14:61-66; Jn 19:7).” These authors also quote from several early rabbinical sources which proclaim that God has no son.

Ryrie says in his discussion of the term 'Son of God,' “Our Lord used this designation of Himself (thought rarely, John 10:30), and He acknowledged its truthfulness when it was used by others of Him (Matt. 26:63-64). Ryrie then quotes from Buswell, who states, “Though the phrase...can mean 'offspring of,' it also carried the meaning 'of the order of'...Thus, for Christ to say, I am the Son of God was understood by His contemporaries as identifying Himself as God, equal with the Father, in an unqualified sense.” (Buswell) Since I really don't know who Buswell is, and am reluctant to accept all that Ryrie says without better evidence being presented, I went to a more reliable source.

In George Eldon Ladd's excellent book A Theology of the New Testament, he discusses the phrase 'Son of God' in a 13-page detailed analysis of the phrase as it appears throughout the NT. His reasoned conclusion is: “The most important messianic phrase in the study of self-disclosure of Jesus is the Son of God. In the history of theological thought, this expression connotes the essential deity of Jesus Christ."

But let us get back to the original question asked by my friend: "Why in the world did the Jews tell Pilate that Jesus had claimed to be the Son of God instead of saying that he claimed to be God Himself?" In the first place, neither one of these accusations would have amounted to a hill of beans to Pilate since he was only concerned with political charges and not with abstruse issues related to the Jewish law. Next, as Gerald Borchert (PhD Princeton Theological Seminary) explains: “The Jews refused to accept the fact that Jesus claimed to have a direct relationship with God, and therefore they interpreted his statements as though he made himself the Son of God...But it clearly reflects the Jewish concern with Jesus not only working on the Sabbath but more pointedly of being 'equal with God' (John 5:18).”

The Jewish leadership at the time had a great aversion to even use the name of God in any context. And so they would resort to euphemistic statements unless they couldn't help it. This explains why Matthew, for example, in writing to a mainly Jewish audience almost always uses the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” in place of the “Kingdom of God” found in the other gospel accounts. Note that when the Sanhedrin is questioning Jesus, they ask whether he is “Son of the Blessed One.” In other words, they refuse to even use the word "God," but resort to a euphemism instead.

Another example is even closer to the situation at hand here. As I stated in another post (“Euphemisms in the Bible”), for a Jew to even contemplate the phrase “curse God” was beyond them, and so in passages such as Job 1:9 where we read Job's wife as saying “Curse God and die!,” the literal Hebrew wording actually reads “Bless God and die!”

So the most logical reason for the Jews to use such a roundabout accusation is their dread of even hinting in their own speech the fact that someone could claim equality with God. It was just as much anathema to them as using the phrase “curse God.”