Weatherhead believed in the divinity of Christ, in that he (Jesus) stood in a special relationship with God and "indeed an incarnation of God in a fuller sense than any other known Being." Weatherhead pointed out that the New Testament never refers to Jesus as God and neither did Jesus refer to himself in this way. Jesus called himself the Son of Man and the Word. To say that Jesus was the "only begotten son" of God would be an impossibility, as such information is not presently available. The virgin birth was not an issue for Weatherhead, having (in his view) never been a major tenet for being a follower of Christ. Moreover, the New Testament traces Jesus' lineage through his father Joseph, not Mary, to show that he descended from the house of David. Weatherhead notes that Jesus did not claim to be sinless. He comments on the fact that Jesus got angry, cursed a fig tree because it didn't produce fruit and rebuked Peter, one of his closest disciples, calling him Satan. Since Jesus was morally superior, many theologians assume him to be sinless, though Jesus never made that claim for himself. Weatherhead apparently agreed with Dr. Nathaniel Mickelm, whom he quoted regarding the blood sacrifice of Jesus as something that was unnecessary for forgiveness. For Mickelm (and subsequently for Weatherhead), it would be a perversion of God to suppose that "God did not and could not forgive sins apart from the death of Christ." Yet that sacrifice revealed something of the nature of God that made one want to be forgiven.