Carlisle 84: "Casting Jesus as the sole incarnation casts all others as witnesses and potential beneficiaries--as perceivers and receivers of a divine gift. The most pertinent spiritual question to ask of each person [in Christianized cultures*] becomes: how well or badly have they received this revelation? And if they do believe in Jesus as the son of God, how constantly and wholeheartedly have they lived out their faith?"
"These questions structure the narrative drama of the gospels. Who is Jesus? And who recognizes him, who rejects him? [...] Here is the one incarnation and there are the multitudes, the crowds, which are subdivided into the followers of Christ and everyone else."
85: "within the gospel narratives this logic [can be] intriguingly unstable. At times Jesus is depcited undoing any ontological distinction between himself and others"
* the phrase is Carlisle's, elsewhere on 84