The Standard I Was Defending

Before I tell you what I went after, I have to tell you what I was protecting — because I didn't come at this as a skeptic with nothing to lose. I came at it as a man guarding the one thing he was sure of.

"Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4).

That is not one verse among many. It is the floor the whole house stands on — the confession an observant Jew recites morning and night, binds on his hand, writes on his doorpost, teaches his children before they can read. The first sentence learned and the last words spoken. And around it, God set a wall of fire: "You shall have no other gods before Me... for I, YHWH your God, am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:3–5). "You shall worship no other god, for YHWH, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exodus 34:14). "I, even I, am He, and there is no god beside Me" (Deuteronomy 32:39).

Then Isaiah closes every last door: "I am the first and I am the last; besides Me there is no god" (44:6). "I am YHWH, and there is no other" (45:5–6). "There is no other god besides Me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides Me. Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!" (45:21–22). "Before Me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after Me" (43:10). No god before. No god after. No god beside. No other savior, no other first-and-last. My glory, He says, "I give to no other" (42:8). There is no crack in that wall to wedge a second deity into. I have never wanted there to be.

So now you see my problem — the one that started everything. I had a man being worshiped. Thomas on his knees: "My Lord and my God." Every knee bowing at his name. And I had a God who said, in the plainest words He ever spoke, that worship is His alone and He shares it with no one. Both of those cannot stand at once. One of them has to give.

Unless. Unless the man is not a second anyone — not another god set beside YHWH, but the one YHWH Himself, in a form I could stand in front of. That single "unless" is the whole hunt of this book. But I didn't believe it then. I assumed the worship was the mistake, and I set out to prove it.

One thing has to be cleared first, because someone always raises it. "Isn't Elohim — the plural form — already a hint of more than one?" No. The word is plural in form, but wherever it means the one true God, the verb beside it is singular: bara Elohim, "God created" — one subject, one verb (Genesis 1:1). It is the plural of majesty: fullness, not a headcount. The very same plural word names single pagan gods — Dagon, Chemosh, Ashtoreth "the goddess (elohe) of the Sidonians" — none of them a committee. And no Jewish reader, in the Targums or the Talmud or the great medieval commentators, ever read Elohim as persons inside God. The grammar hands nothing over for free. The oneness stands, flat and hard.

That was the wall I was defending: one God, jealous, alone, who shares His glory and His worship with no other. I believed it then. I believe it now. This book never lays a finger on it. The question was never whether the wall holds. The question was what on earth to do with a Galilean who kept getting worshiped right in front of it.

So I went after him.