To recapitulate, the philological, literary and historical analysis of the Semitic meaning of Jesus’s titles corroborates his image as it emerges from the Synoptic Gospels. Hence the only reasonable conclusion to draw from a combined study of the Gospel picture and the honorific titles is that the historical Jesus was a Galilean charismatic whose aim was to conduct his repentant Palestinian Jewish contemporaries into the spiritual realm called the Kingdom of God through preaching, healing and exorcising.

Traditional Christianity does not stop at this portrait of the human Jesus, but overlays it with the majestic image of the Christ of faith arising from the mystical meditations of Paul and John and the Hellenistic philosophy of the Greek Church Fathers.

In a nutshell, Jesus’s preaching was centred on God, the heavenly Father, on the dignity of all human beings as children of God, on life turned into worship by total trust, on an overwhelming sense of urgency to do one’s duty without procrastination, on the sanctification of the here and now, and above all on the love of God through the love of one’s neighbour.

To conclude, because of the cross, the task of Jesus remained unfinished. Yet despite the apparent failure of his mission, his magnetic impact was so profound that, instead of abandoning the cause, his disciples began to look forward to his imminent second coming. When by the mid-2nd century Jesus failed to return, Jewish Christianity progressively faded away, while St Paul’s Gentile church survived and after Constantine set out to flourish – albeit in a form that I believe would have perplexed Jesus the Jew.