Hick, John, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, page 27. "A further point of broad agreement among New Testament scholars ... is that the historical Jesus did not make the claim to deity that later Christian thought was to make for him: he did not understand himself to be God, or God the Son, incarnate. ... such evidence as there is has led the historians of the period to conclude, with an impressive degree of unanimity, that Jesus did not claim to be God incarnate."
Gerd Lüdemann, "An Embarrassing Misrepresentation", Free Inquiry, October / November 2007. "the broad consensus of modern New Testament scholars that the proclamation of Jesus's exalted nature was in large measure the creation of the earliest Christian communities."
