And if you made him a god on the grounds that his own disciples claimed that for him—when they were the people who knew him best—you have contradicted (1) the very Gospels you hold in your hands. Every one of them states, with the utmost clarity, that they ascribed to him nothing beyond what he ascribed to himself: that he was a servant.

Thus Matthew says in the ninth chapter of his Gospel, citing Isaiah’s prophecy about the Messiah from God: “This is My servant whom I have chosen, My beloved in whom My soul is well pleased” (2). And in the eighth chapter of the same Gospel he says, “I thank You, O Lord,” and, “O Lord of the heavens and the earth” (3).

Luke, for his part, says at the close of his Gospel: “Concerning the Messiah, an angel appeared to him and to another of his disciples on the road while they were sorrowful. The angel said to them, though they did not recognize him, ‘Why are you sad?’ They replied (4), ‘You must be a stranger in Jerusalem if you do not know what has happened there these days regarding Jesus of Nazareth. He was a man, a prophet, mighty and devout in word and deed before God and before the people (5); they seized him and killed him’” (6). Passages of this sort are exceedingly abundant in the Gospel!

And if you say, “We declared him a god only because he ascended to heaven,” then Enoch (7)