the NT texts have a polemical function: in maintaining God’s essential ‘oneness’, for instance, they do so in the light of paganism’s idolatry. And they assert that in Jesus, God is summoning the entire world to obedience to himself…

This is an important observation. Your wide-ranging discussion with Theocrat never really touched on the question of to what extent the confession of Jesus as lord, saviour, god was influenced by the socially mandated confession of Caesar as lord, saviour, god. I suspect that this influence at least shows up in New Testament apocalyptic language and may well have left its mark more widely. For example, I wonder whether when Paul writes that Jesus ‘did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped’ (Phil. 2:6), he does not have in mind polemically the image of a blasphemous adversary, an anti-Christ, who aspires to the status of god. This is framed, though, in narrative terms: polemic only makes sense in a context of debate, confrontation, dialogue, as part of a story. I wouldn’t want to pretend that this is an absolute theological requirement but I do think it will help us to develop a more credible, useful, and indeed biblical christology if we keep this narrative, historical, polemical context firmly in view. This is the reason for my ‘postmodern hesitation’: ‘postmodernism’ has made me pause and wonder if there isn’t actually a better way of getting where we want to go. 

There needs to be some qualification of the idea that he was ‘acting out’ certain roles: this can lay itself open to the charge of ‘play-acting’, which does not ring true of Jesus’s consistent emphasis.

Two points in response to that.

First, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to suggest that there was an element of ‘play-acting’ in what Jesus was doing: the entry into Jerusalem was a prophetic acting out of the return of YHWH to Zion, for example.

Secondly, I did not mean to imply that he was only play-acting. I made the point that ‘acting’ is a complex notion: ‘Jesus acts out prophetically, he acts as agent, he acts as God’. It’s not easy to separate out the different layers. When, for example, he pronounces words of forgiveness, the ‘act’ could probably be interpreted at all three levels: he acts out the forgiveness of YHWH prophetically or symbolically in anticipation of the forgiveness of Israel that is to come; he acts on behalf of YHWH, as an anointed agent; and in some sense YHWH acts in him, is revealed in him, is encountered as a god quite unlike the god of the Pharisees or the god of the Roman centurions. Again, though, this is a narrative christology.