It does not seem possible to me that Christ claimed for himself what the Testament claims for him. These claims were made by admirers, by followers, by missionaries.
When the early Christians went to Rome they found plenty of demigods. It was hard to set aside the religion of a demigod by telling the story of a man from Nazareth. These missionaries, not to be outdone in ancestry, insisted--and this was after the Gospel "according to St. John" had been written--that Christ was the Son of God. Matthew believed that he was the son of David, and the Messiah, and gave the genealogy of Joseph, his father, to support that claim.
In the time of Christ no one imagined that he was of divine origin. This was an after-growth. In order to place themselves on an equality with Pagans they started the claim of divinity, and also took the second step requisite in that country: First, a god for his father, and second, a virgin for his mother. This was the Pagan combination of greatness, and the Christians added to this that Christ was God.
It is hard to agree with the conclusion reached by Renan, that Christ formed and intended to form a church. Such evidence, it seems to me, is hard to find in the Testament. Christ seemed to satisfy himself, according to the Testament, with a few statements, some of them exceedingly wise and tender, some utterly impracticable and some intolerant.
If we accept the conclusions reached by Renan we will throw away, the legends without foundation; the miraculous legends; and everything inconsistent with what we know of Nature. Very little will be left--a few sayings to be found among those attributed to Confucius, to Buddha, to Krishna, to Epictetus, to Zeno, and to many others. Some of these sayings are full of wisdom, full of kindness, and others rush to such extremes that they touch the borders of insanity. When struck on one cheek to turn the other, is really joining a conspiracy to secure the triumph of brutality. To agree not to resist evil is to become an accomplice of all injustice. We must not take from industry, from patriotism, from virtue, the right of self-defence.
Undoubtedly Renan gave an honest transcript of his mind, the road his thought had followed, the reasons in their order that had occurred to him, the criticisms born of thought, and the qualifications, softening phrases, children of old sentiments and emotions that had not entirely passed away. He started, one might say, from the altar and, during a considerable part of the journey, carried the incense with him. The farther he got away, the greater was his clearness of vision and the more thoroughly he was convinced that Christ was merely a man, an idealist. But, remembering the altar, he excused exaggeration in the "inspired" books, not because it was from heaven, not because it was in harmony with our ideas of veracity, but because the writers of the gospel were imbued with the Oriental spirit of exaggeration, a spirit perfectly understood by the people who first read the gospels, because the readers knew the habits of the writers.