>>24537100Sadly, this is an area or scholarship rife with biases and rampant speculation. Saying "we don't know" doesn't generate book sales, and so you get waves of novel theories and shifting "scholarly consensus," with no real change in the underlying evidence. Just consider Erhman's claims to have successfully psychoanalyzed the author of Revelation in order to determine that he "made Jesus divine" in order to compete with Roman emperors' claims to divinity. Or claims about knowing if the Apostles thought Jesus was God when he was alive, when, on their view, we have not one scrap of authentic writing from any of them. The amount of supposition laid out as "scholarly consensus" is insane. And there is a vested secular interest in trying to make "the real Jesus" a just a "progressive Jewish Rabbi," or for leftists to make him a "political radical." Consider that the book Zealot takes Jesus' fortelling of his own death as evidence of his political bent and radicalism, but then just simply ignores as inconvenient that almost every time he foretells his death he also foretells his own resurrection. Or consider that Saint Paul's texts are often considered the earliest Christian texts and he very clearly thinks Jesus is divine and that all things are created and sustained through him and for him (e.g. Colossians 1).
