Richard Swinburne argues on a partially a priori basis that Jesus was indeed God. At first glance, this sounds ludicrous, but the argument is actually something like this: Given that God exists and has these particular traits, it then follows that, for a variety of reasons, Jesus was God.

For example, Swinburne argues that a morally perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient God would be expected to share in our suffering and respond to it and our wrongdoing by living a human life. And this is precisely what has happened in the case of Jesus of Nazareth. If God had done such a thing, and a human prophet was also God, then we would also expect that God would confirm this via a divine signature as an endorsement of the life and teachings of that prophet. This is what we see in the resurrection of Jesus, which seems to obviously be an event that could only be brought about by God, i.e. a miracle. And given the further evidence for the historicity of the Resurrection, Swinburne states that "...even if the prior probability of the existence of God is quite a bit less than 1/4, the historical evidence will still make it more probable than not that Jesus was God Incarnate" (p. 133).

The book ends as follows:

"I conclude that the fact that the later Church taught the other items of the Nicene Creed in no way detracts from the very probable truth of the central claim of the Nicene Creed (made, I have claimed, very probable on other grounds) that Jesus was God (that is, a divine person). From that it follows, since no divine person can cease to be divine, that Jesus is God" (p. 170).

I enjoyed this book, though at points I was not sure what to make of it. Someone not holding Swinburne's views about religion might simply view the whole project as defective and somehow question-begging. But it surely is not the latter. There is a provocative argument here that is worth considering. If there are a priori grounds for the claim that Jesus was and is God, given classical monotheism, then this is significant for many reasons, one of which is that most arguments for this claim are historical. ( )