The basic problem afflicting the "traditional" ways of theorizing about Jesus; is that they were doing theology or philosophy without Jesus, then trying to insert Jesus into the scheme.
Therefore; insofar as they have been successful at providing a model of reality without Jesus (e.g. pantheism or monotheism) then they have created a model that has no need for Jesus.
This has been the problem with mainstream Christian theology - it derives from world-views that existed before Jesus (such as Judaism, or the pagan classical philosophers), a world-view that did not include Jesus - and then has tried to insert Jesus into the model; while asserting (as dogma) that Jesus is necessary to the model.
The outcome has either been to assimilate Jesus into the pre-existing model - e.g. with Trinitarian formulations of the nature of God, which strive to maintain Hebrew monotheism.
Or else (as with Neo-Platonism and most of the mystery traditions) they render Jesus an "optional extra" to their already-complete schema - merely helpful, rather than essential.
What we should instead do in a philosophical or theological sense, is to build our model of understanding from Jesus, around Jesus... starting with Jesus.
For instance; Jesus says he came to save us from death, to offer us eternal life - so we may infer that this was not possible before Jesus or without Jesus.
Jesus offered a post-mortal life in Heaven - so we may infer that Heaven did not exist before Jesus.
And so on...
Of course; we need to insert Jesus into pre-existing reality and reality after Jesus - but this contextualization ought to be done narratively, not philosophically.
The story of Jesus is a linear story about (among many other things) creation of this world by God, the nature of Men and our place in creation, and Man's possibilities in the future.
Creation (obviously) came-before the incarnation of Jesus and continued-after Jesus's ascension.
And it seems most people (at the time of his life, and after) never recognized or accepted Jesus's gift of eternal incarnated life in Heaven.
And everyday life in this mortal world as a whole (e.g. the balance of present human suffering and gratification etc) seems not to have been positively and qualitatively made-better by the life and work of Jesus.
From which I infer that the story of Jesus is one that (as he seems to have said) is one that ends and aims-at our situation after mortal-death.
The above are examples - the general point I am making is that we should start our attempts to understand what Jesus did, with the life and death and resurrection of Jesus himself; and our explanations of how this fits with everything else should take the form of a narrative - the history of creation.
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