(I've shortened the quote a bit for reasons of clarity.) It seems quite obvious that Jesus - a Jew, and a zealous one at that - could not, in all probability, claim to be God; that would be utter blasphemy in Jewish eyes. (And quite rightly so, in accordance with the First Commandment.) It is only in early Christianity - that is, when Judaism and Christianity develop in alternate directions - that the claim that Jesus be God does arise.
I'm sure we've talked about this before, but I don't believe it's possible to be so certain about what Jews in Jesus' day would or would not have regarded as blasphemous. It's also not at all certain at which point Judaism and Christianity really separated. If, as some people think, most Christians remained Jewish in some significant sense right until the fourth century, then clearly thinking Jesus to be divine was not incompatible with being Jewish (since many, if not most, Christians thought Jesus to be divine by that stage).
At any rate, from the gospels it would appear that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah (i.e. Christ, the Saviour) - and even this emerged only gradually, judging from his delivered teachings as per the gospel texts.
"Messiah" isn't equivalent to "Saviour". In fact there are very few passages in the Gospels where Jesus explicitly claims to be the Messiah - only a couple, to my memory.
I guess my question got lost a couple of pages ago. I'd like to know more about why god created the world. If any of you could just tell me the name of this field in theology, I'd be happy to do some searching by myself. Thank you very much.
Sorry, I must have missed it in all the mess. There isn't really a name for this field but I suppose it would come under the general heading of the doctrine of creation. The traditional Christian answer is that God did not need to create the world, but he chose to do it for reasons of love. I'm not really sure how that can be cashed out, since I don't see how it's possible to love a non-existent thing, and until God had made the decision, the world was non-existent. A somewhat better answer is that God always acts to maximise the good, and it was better that a universe should exist than that no universe should exist, because a universe is morally significant. The problem with that is that it now seems that God had to create the universe (otherwise he would not be doing what is best, but that is impossible for God), and that is unorthodox.
John 8 is the first I could call up when quickly leafing through wherein Jesus seems to claim divinity or at least very many of its trappings: I am from above, I am not of this world, you shall know I am the Son of Man when I am uplifted/exalted, my Father sent me, the Father is with me, I am with the Father, if God were your Father you would love Me, he who is of God hears God's words but you're not listening to me so you're not of God, Abraham rejoiced to see My day, before Abraham was I AM...
John's Gospel certainly teaches very clearly (and tiresomely) that Jesus was pre-existent, and that he was very close to God. But I don't think either of these requires that he be literally divine. A Homoian Arian would have agreed wholeheartedly with all of the verses you quote, but would have vehemently rejected the notion that Jesus was God. And he would have pointed out that in John 14:21, Jesus says that the Father is greater than he is.
And what's with that "Son of Man" prophecy from Daniel that keeps appearing in the Gospels, anyway?
It's not a prophecy, it's an apocalyptic image (i.e. a description of the "true reality" that underlies the sensible world). Jesus seems to have used the title "son of man" (since it appears so often in the Synoptic Gospels, and so rarely elsewhere in the New Testament, suggesting that the Christians didn't much use it themselves). It is likely but not certain that he meant it to refer to himself. However, it is used in various ways in the Gospels. Some seem to reflect the Daniel passage you mention, where it is a reference to a heavenly being who rides on the clouds and ushers in the eschaton. However, some are more like its use in Ezekiel, where it appears frequently as a title for Ezekiel himself and means something like "mortal man". Precisely in what way Jesus used it, and what he meant by it, is a perennial topic of debate among New Testament scholars.
So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven... (Matthew 10:32)
Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. (Matthew 10:40)
Those are just a couple of examples. Does Christ specifically say, I am the son of God? No (although John's gospel is certainly the one that tries to make that point the most). However, it can certainly be implied that Christ is Lord and has an intimate relationship with God since he is saying that whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Again, these only indicate a close relationship between Jesus and God. The idea of "whoever receives me receives the Father" is especially interesting as reflecting ancient notions of messengers or representatives, according to which the person who is sent in the place of the sender could be regarded, in some contexts and in a functional sense, as identical with the sender. I once read a book about John's Gospel which argued that the whole Father-Son theology of that Gospel should be understood in this way, which I thought made a lot of sense. In fact I'm in the Radcliffe Camera right now, which is where I read that book a long time ago, but the shelves of books devoted to the Gospels are so large that I'm not going to search through them now to try to find it.
Why was man not allowed to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge? Am I misinterpreting the Bible when I see this as God wanting to keep us blissfully ignorant?
The question is too vague - are you asking what the intention of the author of Genesis 3 was, and what motivation he intended to ascribe to God? Or are you asking what views Christians or Jews have of this story and how
they explain God's motivation? Or are you asking what God himself actually intended, on the assumption that this story is true?
Taking the first question, I've had a look at some of the tedious tomes on this subject in the library and it seems that there's a lot of puzzlement regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Its meaning is obscure. Much of the problem here is that the whole story of Adam and Eve comes from different sources, and has been added to and edited by different authors before reaching the form that we have it in Genesis. Each of these stages has changed the meaning.
The commentary I'm looking at right now argues that the part of the story in chapter 3 is the original core of the story. An unnamed tree in the garden is forbidden. The serpent appears and explains to Adam and Eve that if they eat its fruit, they will gain knowledge. They do eat it, and they do gain knowledge.
The meaning of the serpent itself is uncertain, but it seems that many scholars think that it's connected to serpent cults that existed in Canaan (see 2 Kings 18:4 and Numbers 21). That would suggest that, in the original story, the serpent is a supernatural, benign (divine?) creature who informs the humans about the tree and the consequences of eating from it. The connection of serpents to life and immortality is common in ancient myths (think of the serpent in the Epic of Gilgamesh). In this case, the original story was about the divine serpent enlightening human beings. But the author of Genesis 3 as we have it disapproved of this and reworked the story to try to subvert this idea: he turns the serpent into a tempter, and has God punish the serpent. What he's really saying is that the traditional serpent cults will not lead to enlightenment after all, but only to death, and God hates them.
On this interpretation, then, to ask why God would want to prevent Adam and Eve from having knowledge is to ask the wrong question. That isn't what the story is basically about. The story is a reworking of an older myth about humanity learning things from a serpent God, and in the form we have, it tries to subvert that myth and instruct its readers to follow God alone and not such alternative cults. So it presents God as ordering Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge not because the author thinks God doesn't want people to know things, but because knowledge is what the human beings acquired in the original story. In order to subvert that original story, the author depicts God as forbidding what was acquired in the original story. On this view, then, there is nothing significant about the fact that God orders Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree - the whole point of the story, as we have it, is the disjunction between God and the serpent as rival objects of devotion. Presumably, no matter what the serpent had bestowed upon human beings in the original story, the author would present God as forbidding in his reworking of the story, since his intention is simply to show that the serpent god's promises are sinful and false.
Others, however, including Clauss Westermann (the author of the text I'm looking at right now,
Genesis 1-11), think that this is wrong and that the serpent does not derive from such cults at all. On this interpretation, there was never a stage of the narrative where the serpent was positive, and it was always intended as a tempter. The story is fundamentally about God giving a prohibition and the human beings breaking that prohibition. The dialogue between Eve and the serpent is an externalisation of the inner dialogue of the person who is tempted to sin. The character of the serpent is therefore introduced just to cast that temptation into a narrative form, and the character is a serpent because (a) there are no other human characters in the story yet, so it must be an animal, and (b) serpents are supposed to be crafty and clever. On this view, why does God forbid Adam and Eve from eating from the tree (although not from touching it, as Eve incorrectly tells the serpent)? That is unclear, but one possibility is that in ancient mythology knowledge and death are often closely linked. Again in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu curses the woman who brought him knowledge as he lies dying. There is of course also the idea of the "envy of the gods", another very common theme, which comes across more explicitly in 3:22.
As for the question what would have happened if Adam and Eve had not eaten from the tree, that is a pointless question in the context of understanding the story in question, since that does not happen in the story. From a theological point of view, theologians have differed over that issue. Irenaeus thought that Adam and Eve were morally immature, and that even if they had not eaten the fruit, they would still have needed to grow up morally - a process which would have been long and possibly unpleasant, and which would have involved the incarnation too. So when they sinned, it was not a great fall from grace, but a truculent childish spat, which may have changed the details of God's plan for humanity but not its basic form. Later, theologians such as Augustine developed instead the notion that Adam and Eve existed in a very exalted state (even with superpowers) and that, had they not sinned, they would have enjoyed this state permanently.
...Matthew and Luke depend heavily on it, as does John...
It is disputed whether John knew Mark.
Indeed you are. The garden of Eden story is an allegory of how man became sentient, similar to the Greek story of Prometheus. (Incidentally, in this light, the original sin isn't a sin at all; such a view merely purports a lack of undertsanding of human - and implicitly divine - nature.)
I don't think there's any good reason to suppose that it's intended to be an allegory. As far as I can tell, scholarly opinion seems to be divided over whether it should be regarded as mythic in genre or magical in genre (I am not quite clear on the distinction, but then I'm just a philosopher), but neither of those is an allegory.
