Your book, Jesus and Divine Christology, Christology, of course, being the study of the nature of Jesus.

My followers might know that I recently partook in a debate about Christology, about whether or not Jesus claims to be God as a historical figure.

Your book is about that topic, specifically in the first three Gospels, the synoptic Gospels. And you open this

book by describing a paradox in biblical scholarship. What is that paradox? Yeah, the paradox has to do with

two related fields of study. One of them would be the field of historical Jesus research,

which is its own area of

research where scholars set out to try to ascertain what Jesus of Nazareth, the man, really did and

said. And the other one is the study of early Christology, like the Christological beliefs of the

early Church, and Paul, the early New Testament authors, about the human or divine character

of Jesus. And so my own area of research has been primarily in historical Jesus' research,

although I'm fascinated by anything in the New Testament and Scripture as a whole. One of the

things I noticed over the years was that if you look at the field of historical Jesus research,

going all the way back to the 18th century,

some of the founding figures like Rymoros and David Friedrich Strauss in the 19th century,

the quest really originates almost as with an axiomatic assumption that the historical Jesus, by definition,

is a figure who did not make divine self-claims, right?

So you can just see this all over the literature.

Albert Schweitzer talks about it in his famous work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

He kind of begins with this statement that the quest was setting about to strip Jesus of the supernatural nimbus with which he had been surrounded and to look at him as merely a man. And so Schweitzer said that the quest,

although it's called the historical quest, also had a kind of theological aim, which was to

actually call into question the dogma of the two natures, that Jesus is both divine and human.

And so from that day until now, there's been an almost kind of reflexive reluctance to even raise the question of whether the historical Jesus claimed to be divine, because historical Jesus' research is almost characterized by definition as examining this human,

...