In behaving as he did, Jesus conformed to a pattern of charismatic behaviour attested among Jews throughout the ages and down to his own time. The Biblical prophets Elisha, Elijah and Isaiah are credited with miraculous healings and resuscitations. Similar phenomena are ascribed in rabbinic literature to holy men living in the age close to the New ­Testament.

Honi in the 1st century BC and the Galilean Hanina ben Dosa in the 1st century AD were renowned for their miraculous rain-making power; Hanina’s fame also comprised healing, including healing from a distance like Jesus, and general wonderworking. Flavius Josephus (AD 37–c.100) reports not only on thaumaturgists of Old Testament vintage, such as Elisha, but explicitly mentions Honi, whose wondrous intervention ended a disastrous drought shortly before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC. He also refers to Jesus in the days of Pontius Pilate and calls him a “wise man and performer of astonishing or paradoxical deeds”.

The reliability of Josephus’s notice about Jesus was rejected by many in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it has been judged partly genuine and partly falsified by the majority of more recent critics. The Jesus portrait of Josephus, drawn by an uninvolved witness, stands halfway between the fully sympathetic picture of early Christianity and the wholly antipathetic image of the magician of Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish literature. “Wise man” and “performer of paradoxical deeds” are genuinely Josephan phrases that no Christian interpolator would have found potent enough to describe the divinised Christ of the later church.

The contour of the historical Jesus, lifted from the Synoptic Gospels, suggests a magnetic prophetic figure who was convinced that the aim of his mission was to bring his repentant Jewish followers into God’s new realm. This kingdom of heaven was foreseen in many of Jesus’s parables as the outcome of a quiet and imperceptible change rather than a cataclysmic transformation in the not too distant future. It would seem, according to the evangelists, that Jesus considered himself, and his well-disposed contemporaries depicted him, along such prophetic-charismatic lines.