[WT Sharpe]

.....Christianity's first sin was idolatry: It turned what Jesus was about into Jesus himself. It took the mystery he proclaimed—the utterly unfathomable mystery of God's disappearance into humankind—and reduced it to the Procrustean dimensions of the one who proclaimed it. By elaborating functional christologies initially and ontological christologies eventually, Christianity turned Jesus, in the phrase of the third-century theologian Origen, into hê autobasileia, the kingdom-of-God-in-person.
..........— Thomas Sheehan, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. The First Coming - How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity.


.....Jesus is ultimately dispensable. He is not irreplaceable—in fact, he demands to be displaced so that one can get to what he is about. Jesus is not the object of the message he preached. The proclaimer of the kingdom gives way to the reality he proclaimed. "The kingdom of God" is a language, an interpretation of human existence that was preached and lived by Jesus in the past and that can be reinterpreted and lived out by people today.
..........— Ibid.