Why is Jesus not a "madman"?

[Angrboda]

Robert Price, in an essay I recently read, claims that there is no scriptural support for Jesus claiming to be God. (Although I understand it sounds like he came close.) I'm willing to accept Price's scholarship on the matter and accept that there is no unambiguous claim to divinity in the traditional new testament of western Christianity. So, claiming him to be mad for thinking himself the son of God may be going further than the evidence allows. (Moreover, one contends with both senses of "mad" in that one sense is composed of a regular, mental pathology, mental illness, which there's little indication that the character Jesus was possessed of, and the informal sense of being deluded or out of touch with reality, which is another matter.)

That being said, I understand there are additional options. For one, he could have been liar or lunatic at different points and in different ways; the two aren't mutually exclusive. Also, as Minimalist may have already pointed out, he may have been non-existent, and purely a fictional, mythical character. It's also possible that he was simply wrong. It's possible to believe something to be true which isn't actually true without being either intentionally dishonest, or mentally unbalanced; this is especially true given that while there are self-conscious frauds, there are many people who con themselves into believing untrue things, and this phenomena, as well as standards of credibility, were considerably different at that time.

Given what I've read, I'm inclined to conclude that Jesus never existed (in the way portrayed in the Gospels; if a person upon whose life the accounts were based existed, that doesn't make 'Jesus' any more real, because the character of Jesus is these legends, not that other man).