text: No, I'm not of that camp, but not for any ideological reason. But one thing strikes me about Mark's portrait of Jesus (and John's adds some fine shading), apart from Jesus' titles, viz. his teaching with "authority," unlike that of the Scribes and Pharisees. When we consider that this man was able to gather to him a fellowship of deeply committed and not unintelligent followers, who went on to lay the foundations of a major world religion, in the course of a very brief ministry (in Mark maybe no longer than a year; probably a bit longer than that, but not much), we really must attribute to him an extraordinary, unique charisma, the plain sign of the divine presence.
  
  Perhaps the extreme counterparts to the Jesus Non-Christ gang are those who insist he knew everything that would happen to him, and everyone he would ever meet, already when he was a fetus in Mary's uterus, and to say otherwise is heresy. There's an orthodox logic to that; Cyril of Alexandria would have loved it.  tbc.