explicitly to affirm that deity? Have the fathers and the creeds of the church outstripped the NT evidence in speaking so plainly and so often of Jesus Christ as “God”? The aim of the present study is to examine all those NT verses in which it has been thought possible that θεός or ὁ θεός refers to Jesus. This rather arbitrary criterion for choosing the verses to be discussed has, of course, excluded from consideration many other verses, passages, and themes that would be directly relevant in