Theocrat - you’ve certainly done some thinking through of your position. Thanks for your concern about whether I’m the victim of a centuries old deception! Having read your post, I’m not sure I’m feeling any more enlightened. My darkness must be deep indeed.

It’s all (or mostly) well argued. I think I’ll leave the detailed responses to others better qualified than myself. One could go on interminably selecting evidence for Jesus as a divine being, and you would come back and say no - that merely shows Jesus was a divine agent.

The heart of the matter for me is the divine project - how a covenant-keeping God remains true to his people, but deals with their unfaithfulness to him, and thereby deals with the unfaithfulness of the world (which was always Israel’s vocation).

The biblical testimony for me is overwhelming - all born of Adam participate in Adam’s sin. It would therefore require a different order of humanity to become the sin-bearer on behalf of Adam’s race. The biblical Jesus is presented as of a different order from Abraham, Moses, David etc, all of whom were flawed individuals - a characteristic they share with the rest of the human race, before and since. But this is where a trinitarian understanding illuminates the love of God, over and above a non-trinitarian explanation. (It’s also where certain versions of the ‘penal substitution’ view of the atonement come unstuck). God did not require in a retributive way a human sacrifice to atone for sin (which would have made him seem a monster - cosmic child-abuser). The love revealed on the cross was self-sacrifice: God taking on Himself through the Son the sins of the world.

In addition, it is indicative of the depths of sin’s power that only God could provide in Himself, through the Son, a solution to sin’s power. Jesus as purely (not merely) of human stock did not have this ability, unless he had himself been redeemed by some prior act of atonement. All the other questions which you raise concerning the relationship of the Son to the Father on the cross can be answered fairly simply.

You try to sidestep some of these issues by suggesting that there is, actually, a difference between Jesus and the rest of mankind - in that Jesus was the highest expression of human nature (which nobody else, before or since, has achieved). So this leads you to the contradictory phrase ‘unique normality’ to describe Jesus.

When the early church saw Jesus, they saw God. This was in the light of Jesus’s death/reurrection, ascension/outpouring of the Spirit. The most attractive way of approaching the divinity of Jesus, for me, at the moment, is the historical route: the attempt to reconstruct how 1st century Jews (and gentiles) became believers in the light of their own mindsets and world-views, based on the historical context of the 1st century.

Tom Wright in ‘What Saint Paul really said’ shows how Paul came to this position in a thoroughly Jewish way, and gives three illustrations.

The first is 1 Corinthians 8:1-6. Having asserted that God is indeed one, Paul takes the Shema, the great Jewish assertion of God’s ‘oneness’, and proceeds to portray the Father and One Lord - Jesus Christ as right at the heart of the ‘oneness’ which the Shema asserts. And the context sets this against the pagan idolatry of worshipping many gods. A Jesus, and a Father, were central to a conception of God which shared the Jewish polemic of opposing pagan polytheism with creational monotheism.

The second is Philippians 2:5-11. Verses 10-11 apply to Jesus the text from Isaiah 45:23, which in context is monotheistic. The rest of the text from Philippians shows how Paul squares the circle of saying that a God who would share his glory with no other is now apparently sharing it with Jesus. A Jesus who was fully equal with God became human, dying on a cross, was exalted and given the name LORD (ie YHWH). How did this happen? Because Jesus did what only God could do, in fulfilling the purpose of the covenant - dealing with the sins of Israel, and thereby providing deliverance for the whole world - fulfilling the vocation of Israel.

The third is Colossians 1:15-20. Wright points out the parallelism of 1-18a and 18b-20; the poem picks up the traditional scriptural theme of Israel’s God - creator of the cosmos and redeemer of Israel, but the central character of Paul’s poem is not YHWH but Jesus, or as Wright says, ‘YHWH now recognised in the face of Jesus’.

Wright also points out ‘dozens of other pieces of data’. There is Paul’s use of the phrase Son of God both in its traditional Jewish meaning and as a technical term when combined with ‘father’ implying divinity. There is the use of the word Kyrios, with its echoes of the substitute use for YHWH in the OT.

Wright goes on to do something similar for the Spirit in the next section which he does for Jesus in this section. It’s all worth repeating, but time and space forbid.

So there you are; have a go at your own interpretations of these passages! (I’m sure you will produce something!).

By the way, I’m still sticking to my interpretation of Jesus as temple as implying his divine nature. I’ve rehashed all the arguments for this in a response to Andrew, who raised similar objections. Jesus was doing far more than simply offering a human body as the receptacle for the presence of God.