The Gospels say Jesus raised the stakes. If the raising of Lazarus has any truth in it, from then on it was a fight to the death. I am not sure what I would have done. Emmerich de Vattel would not have approved of a refusal to make any compromise.
If Jesus worked all this out when he was tempted in the desert, and I suspect he did, his Ministry would have to be pretty parochial; and so it was. He considered his mission was to the lost tribes of the House of Israel. He never deliberately preached to the gentiles. He was steeped in what we call the Old Testament; and if he had tried to preach to the gentiles, he would have had almost nothing to say which they could have understood. So wisely, he did not. Nor did he try to persuade his followers that he was a god. On one occasion when he was accused of making himself out to be the equal of God, he quoted the psalms as saying, “Ye are gods”; in other words there was no difference between him and them. But the crucial reason why he did not, and could not, explain that he was a superior species of being to his disciples was that they could never have followed him, if he had done so. They could only have admired him. He would have prevented them from carrying on from where he left off. He would have ruined the entire purpose of his Ministry.
We must now translate ourselves to the present day; and leave behind the parochial circumstances in which Jesus preached. I still have not read Herodotus; but I have a moderate grasp of the 2000 years of history since the temptations in the wilderness. And it would be quite absurd for me to pretend I was a Bedouin, and very foolish to turn my back on such modern knowledge as I have. Today, you could say the world is crying out for any credible religion; just as in Jesus’ day it was crying out for a world religion. But today, there isn’t the remotest prospect of starting a new religion; the inauguration of the “Religion of Reason” in the aftermath of the French Revolution was a complete farce, and lasted no time at all. So I would conclude that today we have to be satisfied with the religions which we have got, and make do with them. Jesus reached the same conclusion; he modified Judaism. I know of course that the early Church failed to develop a political philosophy, and has never developed one; instead it became obsessed with doctrine. So Islam was able to fill a practical and emotional vacuum, and propagate a religion, which was very much concerned with how the state functioned. Nevertheless I too would want my modification to be “other worldly”, though in a sense more in keeping with modern knowledge, and modern needs.
I would want to carry the modification of Man’s Evolution a great deal further than anyone had taken it so far. Of course I would have welcomed Teilhard de Chardin’s view that Evolution was like a river, flowing round or over obstacles, rather than being a preconceived plan. Yet I would assume that the Creator was probably a participant in this process, though in an unobtrusive and undemonstrative way.