I'm sorry for if this question is more suited for a religious subreddit but I'm concerned with the basic historical fact.
We all know that Jesus Christ existed and preached and gained a following, but is there any actual evidence he claimed to be the Son of God?
If im not mistaken, this would be a foreign concept for a Jew of the time and is more similar to Greek or Roman culture.
Experts or knowledge people in the field, do you think Jesus actually claimed this title during his life of is it a later interpretation and title after his death?
Thank you!
In terms of constructing a picture of the historical Jesus, our best and primary evidence remains the canonical text of the New Testament. Not because they are canonical per se, but because they are the only historical texts that speak of Jesus within a time-frame that is likely to yield information about Jesus that is useful. Texts outside the New Testament either barely say anything content-rich about Jesus, or are too late and unreliable to give us useful historical data on Jesus (e.g. non-canonical religious gospels and the like tend to be 2nd century and later constructions).
One of the intriguing, and infuriating, features of the New Testament collection is that they represent the writings of 1st-3rd generation believers of a new-ish religion that is emerging out of Judaism, gains large degrees of traction in the Hellenic east, is written in Greek, but soaked in Jewish thought. That kind of interaction between Jewish origins and Graeco-Roman context makes your question a difficult one (and hence questions about ‘Son of God’ are regularly debated)
There are at least five relevant concepts of ‘Son of God’ that are worth thinking about before trying to resolve your question. The first is that of the Jewish background. The phrase ‘Son of God’ does appear and function in the Old Testament, but there it appears to be tied up with the notion of the King as the ‘son of God’ in parallel to other Ancient Near Eastern cultures (parallels can be found in Egypt, Sumer, Ugarit. This appears to be the usage in Psalm 2, widely considered a ‘coronation psalm’.
Secondly, there appears some post Old Testament usage among Jewish writers to refer to (semi-)divine beings, aka angels and the like, as ‘sons of God’, as well as some texts from the Qumran community seem to use the title in a messianic sense.
Thirdly, the term does have widespread currency in Graeco-Roman contexts for (a) hero-type figure who had a divine parent, and then later (b) Roman rulers who claimed divine lineage, either indirectly (i.e. they traced their line ‘back’ to a god) or directly (having deified their predecessor).
Fourthly, the usage in John’s Gospel in particular appears somewhat ‘unique’. Jesus in John does not only use the language of ‘Son of God’, but ‘Son’ spoken without ‘of God’, and in contrast to ‘Father’, these usages suggest a distancing from ‘Son of God’ as a set idiom, and appear to function to indicate a unique relationship between Jesus as the Son, in relation to God as his [own] Father.
Fifthly, the phrase ‘Son of God’ came to be used in subsequent early Christianity to refer to Jesus as ‘the divine Son’ and to designate his divinity. This is often the usage most familiar to use today, in which ‘Son of God’ means something like “Jesus is God, the Second Person of the Trinity.” That usage, on the whole, is a latter development and not exactly what the New Testament authors mean by the phrase.
So with that conceptual material in place, you turn to the New Testament documents. Jesus never refers to himself directly as the ‘Son of God’ in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke). Where that title does appear in those texts it appears (to me, at any rate) to more likely draw upon the Jewish usage as the King of Israel, and from that background tap into messianic themes. Matthew 27:43 is perhaps pertinent directly in that those mocking Jesus on the cross claim that he claimed to be the Son of God. Mark 15:39 also contains an interesting reference, as at the point of his death a centurion exclaims that Jesus is ‘son of God’ (but not the Son of God). The lack of an article has caused, and continues to do so, considerable debate about whether this was meant in a ‘divine hero’ kind of way, or is part of an anti-imperial element in the New Testament, or some other meaning.
John’s gospel, unique in so many ways, has extensive use of both ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son’ language. It is also the only gospel in which Jesus refers to himself as Again, for my part I think there is a distinction in the usage, and the former taps into messianic themes, but the latter into divine relational language. In terms of the general balance of scholarship, most see John’s gospel as ‘less historical’ because of how much it differs from the Synoptics coupled with the fairly involved theological structuring of the text and its contents.
I’ll leave aside the rest of the New Testament, although it’s interesting how those texts use Son language as well. But they are less directly relevant to your historical question. Is it possible that Jesus claimed to be ‘son of God’ in his life? Certainly. But if so, that title in particular was probably along the lines of being a messianic claimant, rather than a claim to divinity itself. (This is not to pre-judge the question of whether Jesus also claimed to be divine or not, just to point out that they are different claims).
Is it probable that he did so? Again, I would say yes, even though the Synoptics don’t put those words on the lips of Jesus himself. The fundamental driving narrative of Jesus’ ministry and its end in execution is bound up in messianic claims, and unless we think that the gospel texts, our only access to the historical Jesus, fundamentally misrepresent Jesus, it’s hard to construct a Jesus who was not a messianic claimant. To posit that, would be to argue that our only texts are mistaken at a basic level about the Jesus they portray (again, possible – but then our attempts to reconstruct a historical Jesus must become pure speculation).