Mormons cite few if any texts in defense of their theology of exaltation as often as John 10:34: “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” Most Mormons think this text is a knockdown argument to show that God and man belong to the same species. This view, however, misunderstands the relationship of divine and human nature that is actually presupposed in the dialogue. What Christ is saying is that divinity, which is a different nature form humanity, transforms human nature to become like itself through the reception of the divine Word. This is a thoroughly Catholic and patristic understanding of human exaltation as opposed to the totally contrary view that Mormonism teaches and often confuses with the biblical and historic Christian teaching.
Before I give my own explanation of the verse, I will critque one common response that Mormons hear usually from Protestants, which I believe to be good but inadequate. Protestants normally argue that when Jesus says “Ye are gods,” he is not declaring the divine nature of humans but the condemnation of his accusers. The warrant for this is that the traditional Rabbinical understanding of “gods” in Ps. 82 is that it refers not to divine being but to human judges. This is not the only place in scripture where a man is designated as a “god” for undertaking some divine administration. (See Exod 7:1) It is because God’s speech in the psalm is addressed to mortal, non-exalted humans that it continues, “But you shall die like men and fall like any of the princes.” The Pharisees are aware of this context and would have understood Jesus as making a rhetorical argument to the effect that although the name “God” is an honor when applied to himself it is a term of reprobation to his accusers.
Now the Protestants are right that the psalm is about human judges. (Secular biblical critics and Mormons who do not seek or see a self-consistent monotheistic teaching in the Bible will claim that the psalm is originally about God and other divine beings in the Council of El, and that the Rabbis got it wrong, but there is nothing in the text to show that Jesus is challenging the accepted interpretation of the verse; rather he is utilizing it.) They are even right that Jesus is condemning the Pharisees. The difficulty, however, is that Jesus cites Ps. 82 not merely as a negative comment against those who deny him, but as a positive warrant for his own claim to divine status. Restricting the meaning of the text to a condemnation of the Pharisees gives priority to a likely secondary meaning over and above the primary, surface meaning. The Protestant reading is thus incomplete and leaves room for the following Mormon rebuttal:
"Jesus is making an a fortiori argument, that is, an ‘argument from the stronger,’ a common form of disputation among rabbis, in which one defends the truth of a proposition by showing that it is a lesser claim than what one’s opponent already believes. In this case, the Pharisees accept Yahweh’s claim that all the mortal elohim are gods. This is a stronger claim than merely to say that Jesus is a god, so the Pharisees have no warrant to accuse Jesus for claiming divinity. Their own scriptures bestow the name ‘god’ to many beings besides the Father, who are themselves lesser than Christ. This is an even more generous sharing of the title ‘god’ than Jesus is claiming for himself as ‘him whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world.’ Hence the Pharisees have no warrant to oppose him. It is seasy to see this reasing in the text:
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? (Jn 10:34-36)"
This way of reading suffers from really only one weakness, but I think it is a very fatal one: it diminishes the meaning of “god” in a way that clashes with the theological objectives and pattern of debate in all of Jesus’ controversial discourses in John. There are many instances in the gospel where Jesus creates offense by making a big, bold statement about himself. In each case, he responds to the disbelief of his hearers not by qualifying the statement but by making an even bigger claim than the one that shocked them in the first place. (The Bread of Life Discourse in John 6 is a good example of this.) This creates a problem for the a fortiori reading, because denying the uniqueness of godhood actually lowers the ante for Jesus’ claims about himself. On the Mormon reading, Jesus is saying something like, “You can’t say I blaspheme for making myself God for by your own scriptures you agree that divinity is a common property that you share yourself.” Here Jesus ends up making a big claim about human nature, and about the Pharisees. Yet the whole point of the story is that Jesus makes continually heightened claims about himself while attributing not divinity but diabolism to his interlocutors.
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