33. Responderunt ei Iudaei: De bono opere non lapidamus te, sed de blasphemia; et quia tu homo cum sis, facis teipsum Deum.33. The Jews answered him: For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God?
34. Respondit eis Iesus: Nonne scriptum est in lege vestra quia: Ego dixi, dii estis?34. Jesus answered them: Is it not written in your law: I said you are gods?

34. To the charge of blasphemy Christ replies, and His reply has been often urged by Arians and Unitarians to show that He did not claim to be the natural Son of God, but merely meant to call Himself God in some improper sense, analogous to that in which the Sacred Scriptures sometimes speak of judges, who were merely men, as gods.

The sense of verse 34 is: men are called gods in your own law, the reference being to Psalm lxxxi. 6.

35. Si illos dixit deos, ad quos sermo Dei factus est, et non potest solvi scriptura:35. If he called them gods, to whom the word of God was spoken, and the scripture cannot be broken;
36. Quem Pater sanctificavit, et misit in mundum, vos dicitis: Quia blasphemas, quia dixi, Filius Dei sum.36. Do you say of him, whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world: Thou blasphemest, because I said, I am the Son of God?

35, 36. While all Catholic commentators and theologians contend that Christ does not in these two verses withdraw His claim to true Divinity, yet they differ as to the sense of His reply, and hence as to the interpretation of the verses.

(1) Some, as Franzelin, hold that Christ here proves both that He is God, and that He has a right to call Himself God. The argument then is according to these: if your judges could be called gods, [pg 189] even in an improper sense, how much more in the strictest sense can He be called and is He God, whom the Father generated holy with His own holiness, and sent into the world?

(2) Others, as Maran, Jungmann, &c., explain the argument here from the context in the 81st Psalm. Christ, they say, reasons thus. If men could be called gods, as they are in Sacred Scripture (and the Sacred Scripture cannot be gainsaid), how much more, in a strict sense, can He be called God, and is He God, whom the same Scriptures address in the 8th verse of the same 81st Psalm: “Arise, O God, judge Thou the earth, for Thou shalt inherit among the nations”?

(3) Others hold that Christ in these two verses does not insist upon the nature of His Sonship, but contents Himself with showing that He has a right to call Himself God; then in the following verses He shows that He is God in the strictest sense. In this view Christ prescinds in these verses from the sense in which He is God, and shows that in some sense, as the legate of the Father, He has a right to be called God. This was sufficient for the moment to shut the mouths of His adversaries. Whether He is God in the truest and strictest sense, or only in an improper sense, He does not here insist, though His language shows that even in these verses He speaks of Himself as truly God. For the argument shows that in concluding, in verse 36, that He has a right to call Himself “Son of God,” He means to justify his original statement: “I and the Father are one” (verse 30); but these statements are synonymous, and the one justifies the other only when there is question of natural Sonship. No merely adopted son of God could say that He is one with the Father.

Any of these answers solves the objection drawn from these verses against Christ's Divinity; but we prefer the last, and hold, therefore, that Christ first proves against the Pharisees that He has a right to call Himself God, and then goes on to show in what sense He is God.

37. Si non facio opera Patris mei, nolite credere mihi.37. If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
38. Si autem facio, et si mihi non vultis credere, operibus credite, ut cognoscatis et credatis quia Pater in me est, et ego in Patre.38. But if I do, though you will not believe me, believe the works: that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.