I have just started reading Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology (2024), in which he sets out to show that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine because “Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime”—only he did so in a very Jewish way, “using riddles, questions, and allusions to Jewish Scriptures to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity” (12, italics removed). So a “divine messianic secret” sort of thing.

In the introductory chapter he presents four “historical warrants” for asking the question about Jesus’ consciousness of divinity when most scholars dismiss the idea (13-24).

First, many scholars now recognise that some second temple texts “describe expected messianic figures as superhuman.”

Secondly, there is quite widespread agreement that the historical Jesus regarded himself as a messianic figure.