What’s the Difference Between God and Jesus in the Bible? (And the Holy Spirit)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

For many Christians, the belief in one God who exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a foundational part of their faith. Yet, this belief — the Doctrine of the Trinity — is also one of the most complex and often confusing aspects of Christian theology. What is the difference between God and Jesus, and where, exactly, does the Bible explain all this?

These are matters that have puzzled believers and theologians alike for centuries. In this article, I’ll explain how Christians came to distinguish between God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We’ll look at how the idea of the Trinity emerged, what the Bible does — and doesn’t—say about it, and how theologians have tried to explain the difference between the three persons of the Trinity.

The Doctrine of the Trinity

In God in Early Christian Thought, Brian Daley explains the Trinity as the notion that there is  one God who exists as three divine “persons” (the Greek word is hypostasis, a word meaning something like “the substance underneath”), namely God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. While these three persons are said to be distinct from one another, they all share the same essence. If this seems to contradict logic, many theologians stress that it is indeed a mystery, something humans cannot fully comprehend. In a letter, 4th-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa wrote the following of the Trinity:

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If that explanation broke your brain, you’re not alone. Even ancient people with opinions on the difference between God and Jesus knew that the notion of the Trinity defied logic, but as 4th-century monk and theologian Evagrius Ponticus wrote, “God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.” So where did this idea originate in the Bible?

One verse often cited as an early example of trinitarian teaching is 1 John 5:7-8, which says this:

While this may seem like early evidence for belief in the Trinity, David Rensberger, writing in the HarperCollins Study Bible, notes that only a few very late manuscripts of 1 John contain this verse, leading the vast majority of scholars to confirm that it is a much later scribal addition and not original to the book.

In fact, in a blog post, Bart Ehrman tells us something that many will find shocking: The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly found in the Bible at all. How can such a fundamental Christian doctrine, one of the pillars of Christian faith which most, if not all, Christians believe in not have  originated from the Bible?

Ehrman notes that like many later Christian doctrines, the notion of the Trinity had to be interpreted and deduced from various Bible verses. This is actually true of much of what people believe about Christian ideas —  Bible verses are often quite vague in reference to specific ideas and beliefs. Ehrman is quick to point out that this means nothing about the actual truth of the Trinity: it could be entirely true, despite the fact that it isn’t in the Bible. But if it’s not in Scripture, how did Christians formulate this doctrine?  It begins with the idea that Jesus was God.

How Jesus Became God

In his book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Bart Ehrman writes about the theological processes of thought which ultimately made Christians believe that Jesus was God. The theological discussion of the nature and status of Jesus is called Christology.

First, like many scholars, Ehrman believes that Jesus never claimed divine status for himself. However, his disciples came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead and taken up to heaven by God. Anyone taken up to heaven, in ancient thought, was exalted and thus made divine.

However, a further development occurred when some Jesus-followers became convinced that Jesus was not merely made divine at his resurrection but had been born divine through the union of the God with his human mother (this is the Christology of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the only ones to include birth stories for Jesus). Still later followers, such as the author of the Gospel of John, came to believe that Jesus had been a preexistent divine being along with God from the beginning of time. I should mention that these ideas didn’t necessarily lead to each other but were instead taken up by various Christian groups in different times and places.

Ehrman also stresses that it was nothing new in Greco-Roman thought to believe that a human could be born of a god or that a human being could become a god. These notions were common in Jesus’ time and long afterwards.

This doesn’t yet tell us the difference between God and Jesus, or between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but we’re getting there. Having established the general origins of the idea of God the Father and God the Son, how did the Holy Spirit become involved?

The Holy Spirit

The notion of the Holy Spirit may have been derived from the translation of the Hebrew Bible into a Greek version known as the Septuagint. The familiar King James Version of Genesis 1:1-2 says this:

The notion of “the Spirit of God” was derived from a Greek translation of the Hebrew word rūaḥ, a word which usually meant breath or wind, although it would later come to mean spirit as well in certain contexts. According to Bart Ehrman, the passage correctly translated from the Hebrew should indicate that God sent a wind to drive back or even dry up some of the water so that there would be land.

However, in the Septuagint, the word rūaḥ was translated to the Greek word pneuma, a word which also can mean breath or wind but often means spirit. God’s breath, then, was the same as God’s spirit, which is somewhat logical since a body that isn’t breathing is not alive. Early Christians interpreted the word pneuma in Genesis 1 as spirit, which seemed to indicate that there was a “Spirit of God” that was distinct from God, but also closely related to him, and that both were involved in creation.

On top of this, in Genesis 1:26 God says “Let us make humans in our own image.” That “us” was interpreted, and is still often interpreted, as God speaking to the Son and Holy Spirit during creation. The truth is that God here is speaking to a council of divine beings, an idea that was common in early Jewish and Mesopotamian thought, according to Katherine Sakenfeld in The New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible.

However, with this interpretation of the passage in Genesis, early Christians now had all three elements: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. But if the “persons” of the Trinity are unified and yet distinct, how does one differentiate between them?

What Is the Difference Between God and Jesus (and the Holy Spirit)?

In theological terms, the entire Trinity together is often called the Godhead (Greek theotes). This Godhead is then divided into Father, Son, and Spirit. So what is the difference, first of all, between God the Father and God the Son?

In The Orthodox Way, Bishop Kallistos Ware explains that first of all, the Father is “the ‘fountain’ of the Godhead, the source, cause, or principle of origin for the other two persons. He is the bond of unity between the three: there is one God because there is one Father.” But if Jesus is also God, how is he distinguished from God the Father?

Bishop Ware notes that calling Jesus “the Son” indicates the importance and dynamic of the relationship between the Father and the Son, and implies “a movement of mutual love.” More importantly for human beings, “it is in and through the Son that the Father is revealed to us.” So the Son is like a bridge connecting God the Father to humankind.

Then, what’s the difference between Jesus and the Holy Spirit? Bishop Ware says that “The Spirit is sent into the world, within time, by the Son; but, as regards his origin within the eternal life of the Trinity, the spirit proceeds from the Father alone.” What is the difference between the Son being “begotten” by the Father and the Spirit “proceeding” from the Father? That has long been held as a mystery that cannot be fully explained.

Is there a difference between praying to God and Jesus? According to Bishop Ware, there is essentially not. Referring to the Jesus Prayer commonly used in Orthodox Christianity (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”), Ware says that even in praying to Jesus

As a final summary explanation of the theological significance of the Trinity, Bishop Ware says “the Spirit is God within us, the Son is God with us, and the Father is God above or beyond us.” While this certainly doesn’t clarify the matter entirely, it is a decent simplification of the nature of the Trinity in relation to humankind.

If Jesus is God, Who is He Praying To?

One final question remains: if Jesus is God, just as much as the Father and the Spirit are God, is Jesus praying to himself when he prays in the Bible? Or is he merely acting as an example of correct prayer for his followers?

There are a couple of points to clarify here. First, remember that Trinitarian doctrine says that while each of the three persons of the Trinity is fully God, they are also distinct from each other. This implies a relationship between them which includes communication. When Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, for example, theologians would say that in his capacity as the Son, he is praying to the Father, the source of everything.

Second, remember that while Jesus is conceived of in Christian doctrine as God, he was also fully human, as confirmed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE (it says Jesus is “truly God and truly human”). This meant that he was praying to the Father, both as the second person of the Trinity and as a human being.

Conclusion

What’s the difference between Jesus and God? The Doctrine of the Trinity, while difficult to reconcile with logic, is nevertheless a complicated philosophical and theological conception of the nature of God. It posits one God (or Godhead) that consists of three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Surprisingly, this doctrine is never laid out explicitly in the Bible, despite the Bible’s use of the three terms.

Instead, Christians had to interpret multiple verses from the Bible in order to formulate the doctrine in later centuries. It all began with the notion that Jesus was divine. While some believed that this happened when God raised Jesus from the dead, others theorized that he had been born of the union of a woman with the divine. Still others believed he had existed alongside God from the beginning of time. In some sense, however, most Christians believed that Jesus was God’s Son.

The notion of the Holy Spirit likely came from interpretations of Genesis 1 in which God’s breath, wind, or Spirit hovered over the waters at the time of creation. With these three divine persons in place, the doctrine of the Trinity could be constructed.

So if Jesus was God, why would he pray and to whom? As the second person of the Trinity and a full human in addition to his divinity, it made sense that Jesus would communicate with God the Father, both on his own behalf and on behalf of his followers.