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“It is not that Jesus is God. Time and time again the fourth gospel speaks of God sending Jesus into the world. Time and time again we see Jesus praying to God. Time and time again we see Jesus unhesitatingly and unquestioningly and unconditionally accepting the will of God for himself. No where does the New Testament identify Jesus as God. He said, “He who has seen me has seen God.” There are attributes of God I do not see in Jesus. I do not see God’s omniscience in Jesus, for there are things which Jesus did not know.”
(William Barclay, The Mind of Jesus, s.56)

“New Testament scholars disagree whether the N.T. directly calls Jesus as God because of the difficulty such language would create for early Christians with a Jewish background. It is important to note that every passage that identifies Jesus as “theos” can be translated other ways or has variants that read differently.

In biblical Judaism the term “messiah” did not necessarily carry any connotation of divine status and Jews of Jesus’ day were not expecting their messiah to be other than human. While some have used the title Son of God to denote Jesus’ deity, neither the Judaism nor the paganism of Jesus’ day understood the title in this way. Neither did the early church.”
(Douglas McCready, He Came Down From Heaven: The Preexistence of Christ and the Christian Faith, ss.51, 55, 56)

“The New Testament gives no inkling of the teaching of Chalcedon. That council not only reformulated in other language the New Testament data about Jesus’ constitution, but also reconceptualized it in the light of current Greek philosophical thinking. And that reconceptualization and reformulation go well beyond the New Testament data.”
(Joseph Fitzmyer, A Christological Catechism, s.102)

“The truth is that Jewish sources never thought of Messiah as divine or pre-existent – in mainstream Judaism he is the descendant of David’s covenant in 2 Samuel 7... If Jesus thought of himself as Messiah it is this human figure he had in mind, with the traditional terms “the Son of God,” “the Son of Man,” “Lord” – all used of Jewish kings in the Psalter (2:7; 80:18; 110:1; etc.)... Being a monotheist, Jesus cannot have thought of himself sanely as being Yahweh; and in the more primitive traditions he always speaks of himself in the human, messianic categories... [He did not think] he was God, but that he was God’s viceroy... It is the bias of orthodoxy constantly to overlook middle terms. The earliest church [did not view him] as God the Son, but as the man whom God raised up and [assigned] the Holy Spirit to pour out upon the church (Acts 2:33).”
(Michael Goulder, Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, s.143)