Jesus of Nazareth

He is here first because of what the rest of the corpus does with him. The Roman rite, the Byzantine prayers, the Sarum use and the modern deliverance manuals all argue from the same New Testament scenes and the same commission, and until now the figure at the centre of those scenes had no entry to point at. On the demonological question specifically the texts are unusually consistent: he casts out spirits directly and by his own authority rather than by invoking a higher name, which is precisely the feature every later rite has to account for, since none of them can do the same and each says so in its own way.

The filing is where this entry is most obviously unsatisfactory, and the corpus would rather say so than hide it. This site's categories are angelic, demonic, deity, realm, mortal and hybrid. The Chalcedonian Definition — seeded here, and the document the largest single division in Christianity is measured from — holds that he is acknowledged in two natures, without confusion and without division. No value on that list states that. `mortal` denies half of it, `deity` denies the other half, and `hybrid` in this corpus means the offspring of a union across the divine and human line, which is what the Nephilim are and what the creeds specifically deny of him. `deity` is recorded as the least bad of six, and this paragraph is the rest of the answer.

Three of the texts below are outside witnesses, and they are worth reading for what they do not do. Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny are respectively a Judaean historian writing for Rome, a hostile senator and a governor prosecuting the cult; none of them is interested in the subject, and none of them corroborates anything the creeds argue about. Between them they establish that the movement existed early, that its founder was executed under Pilate, and that within eighty years its members were singing to him as to a god. That is a narrow result, it is the honest one, and it is more than the corpus could show before, when every text naming this figure had a position on him.

The texts that name him disagree about him more sharply than the sources for any other figure in this corpus, and all of the disagreement is recorded below rather than resolved. The New Testament calls him the Word who was God and also reports him saying the Father is greater than he. The Nicene Creed says of one substance with the Father. The Qur'an names him as a prophet and messenger, born of Mary, and denies that God has a son. These are not degrees of the same claim; a corpus that showed only the ones that agree would be a worse record of what the texts actually say.