What are we to make of all this? Has anyone ever made such claims and got away with it? Indeed, has anyone ever made such claims? But Jesus didn't get away with it - he was executed. The celebrated Jew, M. Salvador, has made it clear in his book Jesus Christ, that in view of the claims of Jesus, a Jew had no logical alternative to belief in his divinity, except the imperative duty of putting him to death.

However, there were a reasonable number in his day who did believe him and there have been millions since. As Thomas Schutz said:

Jesus Christ is the only recognised religious leader who has ever claimed to be deity and the only individual ever who has convinced a great portion of the world that he is God.

Certainly, Mohammed never made such claims. Buddha never made such claims, though some of his followers have granted him divine status.

So here we are presented with a problem. Was he God? Was he history's most successful con-man? Or was he mentally deluded? The historian, Philip Schaff, put it like this:

Christ stands...solitary and alone among all the heroes of history, and presents to us an unsolvable problem, unless we admit him to be more than man, even the eternal Son of God.

Perhaps C. S. Lewis has summed up the options that we have as well as anyone, in Mere Christianity:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool; you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.