Rowland:

And another point – from an excellent book ‘Who was Jesus?’ by N T Wright (Fellow / Tutor in Theology Worcester College Oxford):

‘There was… nothing particularly surprising in ordinary human beings thinking they might be the Messiah. That of itself certainly didn’t mean that the person in question was thinking of himself as _divine_ (his emphasis). One of the most persistent mistakes throughout the literature on Jesus in the last hundred years is to use the word ‘Christ’, which simply means ‘Messiah’, as though it were a ‘divine’ title (as in ‘The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith’ or ‘Jesus Who Became Christ’). If Jesus thought of himself as Messiah, this is a completely different matter to the possibility… that he might have believed that Israel’s God was active in and through him in a unique way. If we can get this separation clear, we will have done the debate a great service’. [p.57].

BTW pages 50-52 are, in my view, worth the price of the book. C S Lewis somewhere uses an analogy about Jesus going around the place offering everyone a half-holiday. Wright uses another one: the effect of Jesus forgiving sins and admitting people into the kingdom ‘must have had the same effect that you’d get if a total stranger approached you in the street and offered to issue you with a passport.’

Rowland Croucher.

Friend 1 wrote in message .

> >There is quite good scholarship to date John’s gospel to 60’s AD,

Friend 2:

> Do you mean the peculiar book that JAT Robinson wrote in his dotage?

> Or do you have something else in mind?

>

> There is certainly some debate about it, but most scholars would place

> John towards the end of the century and much later than the other

> Gospels.

Friend 1:

> >further Hebrews reference clearly declares the divinity of Christ. So

> >whilst Nicea defended against those who denied the fact, clearly the

> >teaching is Apostolic in origin. I am sure you meant to state that.

Friend 2:

> Which of the Apostles do you think wrote Hebrews?

>

> What I meant to state was that there were a variety of views within

> the early Church about the divinity and humanity of Christ, and it was

> a matter of some debate in the early Christian centuries.

> It was only at Nicea that the Church agreed on an authoritative and