From Touchstone magazine, a review of “Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ” by Biola University professor Fred Sanders.
Excerpt:
The case as perceived by scholars for the deity of Christ is stronger now than it has been for a long time, and those who went through seminary more than a decade ago should take a moment to update their notes. Though the New Testament is clear about the deity of Christ, generations of modern critical scholars have picked away at the standard proofs. Here a verse, there a verse, the arguments that Christians have always relied on to demonstrate that the New Testament teaches that Jesus is God have been rendered dubious.
Putting Jesus in His Place does not simply reclaim those lost passages, revisit the standard debates, and bolster the old arguments (though in many cases it does that, and persuasively); it publicizes new arguments for demonstrating the deity of Christ, which have previously been available only to scholars.
The authors are ideal popularizers, each with one foot in the library and one in the local church. Robert Bowman is manager of apologetics and interfaith evangelism for the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, while Ed Komoszewski is the founder of the educational ministry Christus Nexus and a director of Reclaiming the Mind Ministries.
To help readers remember the arguments, they organize the book around the acronym “HANDS,” arguing that Jesus shares God’s Honor, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat. The text breezes along in straightforward, popular prose—it paraphrases the Nicene homoousios as “Jesus: The Right Stuff,” for example, and explains pre-existence as being “Older Than Dirt—Literally!”—with more technical matters referred to the endnotes.
If you are looking to make a case for the divinity of Jesus, you should go to the earliest sources, and try to see if Jesus has a divine self-understanding, whether he is acting in the place of God.
The book is basically one-stop shopping at a popular level for the best scholarly arguments:
Jesus didn’t so much verbalize his claim to deity, for example; he enacted it. The people of God were waiting for the Lord to show up in person to bring reconciliation; Jesus walked among men, healing, forgiving, and doing everything that God was supposed to do. When, on occasion, he also claimed to be more than a prophet, his claim made sense because it put into words what he was doing in the flesh.
Jesus does what God does. This is the foundation for his claim to deity. N. T. Wright has recently helped his readers see this with his massive narrative arguments, and Bowman and Komoszewski boil a lot of Wright down to a manageable size.
[…]Readers alert to the scholarly scene will recognize that the authors reproduce at an accessible level the arguments of Richard Bauckham (particularly in God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament) and Larry Hurtado (in Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity), among others. (Bauckham and Hurtado are among the book’s many endorsers.)
Wright, Bauckham and Hurtado are three of the leading historical Jesus scholars in the world. I got the book because I wanted to know about the latest research from these experts – but without having to comb through an academic book!
I have some good news, too. The book is on sale in the Kindle edition for under $2 for a limited time. If you don’t have a single book on the divinity of Jesus, you cannot go wrong with this book. It’s good to have one book on this issue, because it comes up a lot in conversations with skeptics. You see annoying documentaries all the time claiming that Jesus was initially viewed as just a man, and then was embellished into a divine figure later. This book helps you to answer that objection.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I just go the kindle version for $1.99 I don’t know how long that will last.
LikeLike
I think the deal goes until Easter, but at that price, why wait?
LikeLike
Excellent recommendation, WK. This is a very thorough work showing the pervasive scriptural support for the deity of Jesus Christ.
In addition to the authors you mention (Wright, Bauckham & Hurtado), I would add Simon Gathercole and his recent book “The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke”.
What Gathercole undertakes in this work is to counter the skeptical claim that there was no high Christology in the earliest gospels (the synoptics), but that such an idea only developed much later, making its appearance in John’s Gospel. To do this, Gathercole looks closely at the synoptics and shows that, although more subtle than the gospel of John, the synoptics themselves possess an equally high view of the deity of Christ. Centering on the “I have come” statements found in the synoptics (but reviewing other pertinent verses as well) he shows how the synoptics present a strong argument for the preexistence of Christ, and therefore indicate his deity as a corollary to this fact. Gathercole is sober and restrained in his examination pursuing his task in a scholarly, methodical way. In my opinion, he succeeds commendably. Here is the link:
BTW, your readers might remember Gathercole as one of the first Christian scholars to come forward to debunk the recent hysteria surrounding the so called “Gospel of Jesus’ wife”. Though not as well-known as the other authors you mention (not yet anyway) he is a top-notch conservative Christian writer. If you haven’t done so already, check him out. You won’t be disappointed.
LikeLike