Sublime

the focus on Jesus as a continuous human subject, born, maturing, dying.

The fulfillment of Israel’s story in the story of the Messiah is the foundational charter of the church.

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.”

New Testament scholar Craig Evans says:

the identity of Jesus as human sufferer and the further identity of that suffering with the divine action are never eclipsed in the language of Christian Scripture.

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the