72Jews at the time of Jesus had been waiting for a

Messiah
who was both human and divine and
who was the Son of Man, an idea they derived from the passage from Daniel 7.
Almost the entire story of Christ - with important variations to be sure - is found as well
in the religious ideas of some Jews who didn't even know about Jesus. Jesus for his followers fulfilled the idea of the Christ;
the Christ was not invented to explain Jesus' life and death.

Versions of this narrative, the Son of Man story (the story that was later named Christology), were widespread among Jews before the advent of Jesus; Jesus entered into a role that existed prior to his birth, and this is why so many Jews were prepared to accept him as the Christ, as the Messiah, Son of Man.

This way of looking at things is quite opposite to a scholarly tradition that assumes that Jesus came first and that Christology was created after the fact in order to explain his amazing career. The job description - Required: one Christ, will be divine, will be called Son of Man, will be sovereign and savior of the Jews and the world - was there already and Jesus fit (or did not according to other Jews) the bill.

The job description was not a put-up job tailored to fit Jesus!

The single most exciting document for understanding this aspect of the early history of the Christ idea is to be found in a book known as the Similitudes (or Parables) of Enoch. This marvelous text (which seems te have been produced at just about the same time as the earliest of the Gospels) shows that there were other Palestinian Jews who expected a Redeemer known as the Son of Man, who would be a divine figure embodied in an exalted human.

Because it is unconnected with the Gospels in any direct way, this text is thus an independent witness to the presence of this religious idea among Palestinian Jews of the time and not only among the Jewish groups
within which Jesus was active.

En
nog steeds
is 't 'n kwestie van 'zuurdesem'
dat de aardbevolking doordesemt
als wereldbrood:
dat was ook
al duidelijk i/d
zestiger jaren
...