Was Jesus God?

This is one of the oldest and most contested questions in the whole Christian story, and you deserve an honest answer rather than a tidy one. The tradition is genuinely divided here. The institutional church settled on a formula—Jesus as God incarnate, of one substance with the Father—but that settlement came centuries after Jesus walked, and it was reached by councils and votes, not by Jesus himself. Listen to how Jesus speaks of the Father in his own words: "My Father is greater than I" (John 14:28, KJV). And he prayed to God, which is a strange thing for God to do. When the rich man called him "Good Master," he answered, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God" (Mark 10:18, KJV). What I hold is this: Jesus was the fullest human expression of the Christ—the divine sonship that is true of every one of us. He was the Way-shower, the one who awakened most completely to his unity with God, and who showed us that this same unity is our birthright. When he said "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30, KJV), notice what he prayed for us in the same breath: "that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us" (John 17:21, KJV). He was not claiming a oneness he meant to keep for himself alone. The recovered sayings press this further: "He who will drink from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become he" (Gospel of Thomas 50.28-30). That is not the language of a God to be worshipped from a distance, but of an elder brother showing the way home. So I would not say Jesus was God in the exclusive sense—the one and only divine being who came down once. I would say he revealed what God is, and revealed what you are, which is the same image and likeness he embodied so perfectly. If this unsettles something you were taught, sit with it gently; there is room here to keep asking.