Jesus Christ

For Inquirers

If someone asked you to describe Jesus in one sentence, you might say something like: God's Son, who came to earth to save people. True as far as it goes — but it can make it sound as if the story only really starts in a stable in Bethlehem, as though God had been distant and silent until then and finally decided to send help. The actual claim Christians make is bigger and stranger than that, and worth sitting with slowly.

Christians believe that the person born in Bethlehem had already been present and active for the entire history told in the Old Testament — not watching from far away, but showing up, speaking, and acting, long before He was ever born of Mary. When God spoke to Abraham, when a mysterious figure wrestled with Jacob, when a voice called Moses out of a burning bush, Christians read all of it as the same Person: the eternal Word of God, whom we now know by name as Jesus. Bethlehem is not the moment this Person first appears. It is the moment He does something He had never done before: becomes one of us, fully and permanently, born of a woman, growing up, eating, sleeping, and eventually dying, as a real human being — while remaining, without any diminishment, fully God.

That is why Christians can look at the strange, thunderous, sometimes frightening scenes of the Old Testament and say: that was already Him. Not a preview, not a stand-in, not a different divine person who later handed things off to the Son — the same one. And it is why the story of Jesus never quite makes sense as merely "a good man later declared divine by his fans." From the very beginning, He is presented as someone who has been there since before there was an "beginning" to be there since.

Overview

Jesus Christ is the eternal Son and Word (Logos) of God, incarnate as a real human being for the salvation of the world — one Person, fully God and fully man (see Christology, The Incarnation).
The Church reads the Old Testament as already His: the "Word of the LORD" who comes to the patriarchs and prophets, and the "Angel of the LORD" who speaks and acts as God to Abraham, Moses, and Israel, are read as the Son Himself, not a created intermediary.
The New Testament makes this identification explicit rather than inventing it: Paul calls the Rock that followed Israel in the wilderness "Christ" (1 Corinthians 10.4), and John's prologue states plainly that the Son "has declared" the Father whom "no one has seen… at any time" (John 1.18).
This continuity matters because it means the Incarnation is not the introduction of a new mediator, but the eternal Mediator's decisive, final self-disclosure — see Priesthood and Tearing of the Veil for what this changes and what it does not.

The Word made flesh

The title John gives Jesus at the opening of his Gospel — the Logos, the Word — is not a piece of Greek philosophy grafted onto the Gospel from outside. Christology traces in detail how this language grows directly out of Second Temple Jewish thought about God's Word and Wisdom as a living mediator between heaven and earth, and how the Danielic "Son of Man" gives Jesus His own favorite way of naming Himself; that ground is not repeated here. What matters for this entry is the conclusion John draws from it: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1.1), and this same Word, having always been the one through whom the Father is known, "became flesh" (John 1.14). The Incarnation is not the invention of a mediator; it is that mediator's assumption of a human nature.

The Angel of the LORD

The Old Testament itself already shows this same Word appearing, again and again, in a way the text refuses to treat as merely angelic in the ordinary sense. At the burning bush, "an angel of the Lord appeared to [Moses] in flaming fire out of the bush," and then, without any change of scene, "the Lord called him out of the bush… I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraam, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3.2-6) — the Angel who appears and the LORD who speaks are, in the space of two verses, the same speaker. At the binding of Isaac, it is likewise "an angel of the Lord" who "called to him from heaven" and spoke in the first person as God: "now I know that thou fearest God, and for my sake thou hast not spared thy beloved son" (Genesis 22.11-12).

The pattern is not limited to these two scenes. When God promises to guide Israel through the wilderness, He says, "behold, I send my angel before thy face… hearken to him… for my name is on him" (Exodus 23.20-21) — the divine Name itself is said to dwell in this Angel, not merely to be represented by him, which is a stronger claim than the ordinary language used of a messenger simply relaying someone else's words.

This is a very old Christian reading, not a modern reinterpretation. St. Justin Martyr, debating a learned Jew in the second century, argued from these same passages that Scripture already shows "another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them."[^justin] Following that same reading, the Church does not treat the Old Testament's theophanies as appearances of the Father, whom "no one has seen… at any time" — they are appearances of the Son, "who is in the bosom of the Father," and who alone "has declared him" (John 1.18).

The New Testament seals the identification

What the Old Testament shows, the New Testament states outright. St. Paul, recalling Israel's wilderness wanderings, says plainly that "they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10.4) — the very Rock of Deuteronomy's song is retroactively named. The Epistle of Jude, recounting the Exodus, says that "the Lord, having saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who didn't believe" (Jude 1.5); some manuscripts and modern translations render this verse with "Jesus" in place of "the Lord," a textual variant worth knowing about even though it is not the reading this entry's own Scripture standard (WEB) carries — either way, the identification of the Exodus-era LORD with Christ is the same point Paul had already made about the Rock. And John's prologue draws every earlier thread into one sentence: every Old Testament vision of God was already a vision of the Word who "became flesh and lived among us" (John 1.14).

Was this a later legend?

A common skeptical objection holds that Jesus' divinity was not part of the earliest Christian belief but was gradually attributed to him by later generations — that the historical man was slowly mythologized into a god as the story was retold. Whatever else can be said about this claim, it sits uneasily with the timeline of the actual documents. St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, written from prison — on the standard dating, several decades after the Crucifixion, and to a congregation he had founded roughly two decades after it — already contains what reads like a pre-existing hymn or confession, something the church at Philippi would recognize rather than something Paul is composing on the spot: Christ "existing in the form of God" before He "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men," so that now "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Philippians 2.6-11). A confession this exalted, already fixed in form and quotable as shared common ground rather than argued for from scratch, fits poorly with a picture of divinity accumulating gradually over the following centuries; the highest claims about Christ are attested well within living memory of the events themselves, not only in much later sources.

What did these Old Testament appearances actually look like?

A natural question follows from all this: when the Logos appeared to the Patriarchs — walking and eating at the Oak of Mamre, for instance — how does that differ from the Incarnation itself? Fr. Stephen De Young, addressing exactly this question, draws the line at birth: "the primary difference is that when the Logos… appear[s] in bodily form in the scriptures they are not, as Christ in the incarnation, born of a woman. There is a profound difference between taking on a human appearance, even one with physicality, and taking on human nature as a whole."[^deyoung] On this account, the bodies assumed in these appearances were real and material, but not a full human nature entered through birth, growth, and mortality as Christ's flesh was; St. Paul's later language of "celestial bodies" distinct from "terrestrial" ones (1 Corinthians 15.40-41) reflects, on De Young's reading, a broader ancient framework for this same distinction. The Incarnation is therefore not simply one more theophany among many, however similar it might look on the surface; it is the one time the eternal Word did not merely appear as man but became man, permanently and by birth.

Sources

[^justin]: St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 56 — "there is… another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them.". [^deyoung]: Fr. Stephen De Young, "The Oak of Mamre" (Ancient Faith Radio, Whole Counsel of God blog, 2019) — on the difference between an Old Testament theophany "in bodily form" and the Incarnation: taking on "a human appearance, even one with physicality" versus "taking on human nature as a whole." Source.