2. It's next to impossible to say what is or isn't likely about "the historical Jesus" because Jesus doesn't exist as a full character in any documentary or archeological source other than the various canonical and non-canonical Gospels;
Maybe as a completely knowable figure, yes. But the few "I am" formulations of John's Gospel where Jesus declares his identity with God have no equivalents in the Gospels which came before it. I take that to be fairly significant. For someone, especially a king of Israel or Israel itself to be declared a "son of God" had conspicuous precedent in the Hebrew Scriptures, and so the early Gospel writers calling Jesus the "son of God," especially accompanied by the added messianic and "Son of Man" attributions, is not that unusual. But John's very late first-century identification of Jesus with God looks to me pretty novel, and not traceable to any earlier traditions of what Jesus said about himself.
Sure, but the "Synoptic theology early, Johannine theology late" formulation has its detractors even among historical-critical scholars (in fact, I've talked to members of a minority of historical-critical scholars who prefer a significantly
earlier date for John's Gospel than do most confessional theologians). I also think that the idea that earlier necessarily equals more accurate is leaned on too heavily in historical-critical work when it comes to parsing out differences between the theology of texts that were written at mostly maybe forty or fifty years apart.
(Personally, I do tend to favor the currently mainstream Mark/Q->Matthew/Luke/Acts->John order for Gospel priority, but I
also tend to favor the traditional Christian attributions of Gospel
authorship, even though, yeah, they indicate that John wrote his Gospel at a very advanced age.)
This is actually a good example of the fetish for counter-intuitive conclusions that DC was asking for examples of--a lot of today's historical-critical "minority reports" on Gospel priority seem motivated by the desire to SHOCK older generations of historical-critical scholars, which in turn were in some cases motivated by the desire to Own The Fundies back in the bad old days of the Fundamentalist/Modernist split.
