Who do you say that i am?

   And among the scholars? Some say he was a “peasant Jewish Cynic” ^1,2 who offered “free healing” and “open commensality,” thereby spreading “religious and economic egalitarianism”.³ Others say that he was a “prophetic sage offering primarily counter-order wisdom,”⁴ or (and I like this one) that he was a “spirit person and mediator of the sacred”.⁵ Some don’t see the cynic/sage/wisdom figure Jesus but do see a “millenarian prophet” Jesus with a decidedly ascetic bent,⁶ while still others see Jesus in the line of the “classical hero” who patterns the heroic life for his followers.⁷ Finally, Wright sees a prophet whose “vocation” was to proclaim and embody the completion of Israel’s history, enacting “the return of YHWH to Zion” as king of the long promised kingdom.⁸
           It’s all very interesting—if sometimes confusing—and it matters. As N.T. Wright pointed out, “What you say about Jesus affects your entire worldview. If you see Jesus differently, everything changes.” Jesus' question, “Who do you say that I am?” is an invitation to take personally and seriously the possibility that maybe we need to see him differently. It is an invitation, as Robert Funk has suggested,⁹ to venture beyond the iconic Christs of popular culture, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and even scholarship, and allow ourselves to be confronted by Jesus of Nazareth.

           Jesus’ question is an invitation to take personally and seriously the necessity to stop taking refuge in the answers of others and answer for ourselves. It is an invitation to stand as existentially naked as we are able before the one in whom our existence takes on new meaning.

https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20050815JJ.shtml