In considering this topic thread it is important to realize that the NT gospels embellish what Jesus said. They incorporate ideas about Jesus which Jesus did not hold about himself. This is brought out at https://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/did_jesus_think_he_was_god_new_insights_on_jesus_own_self_image/ which is an except from Bart Ehrman's book called How Jesus Became God.
In the except Ehrman says that though the historical Jesus taught about the Son of Man, Jesus did not consider himself the Son of Man, nor did Jesus consider himself God. Ehrman says the message of Jesus was about the coming of the kingdom of God, and that Jesus never publicly (except when he was on trail before Pilate) said he would be the king (though Jesus had privately told his apostles that he would be king). I think that Ehrman is correct about this. [H. G. Wells got some of this right in his book called The Outline Of History, but Wells didn't conclude that Jesus taught an apocalyptic message, and Wells seemed to believe Jesus taught the kingdom would only exist within people and only be manifested by their actions.] As a result, the WT's emphasis on Jehovah God and his kingdom (with the kingdom having an administration on Earth which benefits human subjects) is much closer to what the historical Jesus taught than what virtually all of the Christian religions teach. [However, it is very improper for the governing body of the JW to elevate themselves and the WT organization so very high. They have no scriptural basis for doing it, nor do they have any basis in the teachings of the historical Jesus for doing so.]
The excerpt of Ehramn's book says, in part, the following.
'According to our accounts, the trial of Jesus before Pilate was short
and to the point. Pilate asked him whether it was true that he was the
king of the Jews. Almost certainly, this was the actual charge leveled
against Jesus. It is multiply attested in numerous independent
witnesses, both at the trial itself and as the charge written on the
placard that hung with him on his cross (e.g., Mark 15:2, 26). Moreover,
it is not a charge that Christians would have invented for Jesus—for a
possibly unexpected reason. Even though Christians came to understand
Jesus to be the messiah, they never ever, from what we can tell, applied
to him the title “king of the Jews.” If Christians were to invent a
charge to put on Pilate’s lips, it would be, “Are you the messiah?” But
that’s not how it works in the Gospels. The charge is specifically
that he called himself “king of the Jews.”
Evidence that Jesus really did think that he was the king of the Jews
is the very fact that he was killed for it. If Pilate asked him whether
he were in fact calling himself this, Jesus could have simply denied
it, and indicated that he meant no trouble and that he had no kingly
expectations, hopes, or intentions. And that would have been that. The
charge was that he was calling himself the king of the Jews, and either
he flat-out admitted it or he refused to deny it. Pilate did what
governors typically did in such cases. He ordered him executed as a
troublemaker and political pretender. Jesus was charged with insurgency,
and political insurgents were crucified.
The reason Jesus could not have denied that he called himself the king
of the Jews was precisely that he did call himself the king of the Jews.
He meant that, of course, in a purely apocalyptic sense: when the
kingdom arrived, he would be made the king. But Pilate was not
interested in theological niceties. Only the Romans could appoint
someone to be king, and anyone else who wanted to be king had to rebel
against the state.
... The evidence for Jesus’s claims to be divine comes only from the last
of the New Testament Gospels, not from any earlier sources.
Someone may argue that there are other reasons, apart from explicit
divine self-claims, to suspect that Jesus saw himself as divine. For
example, he does amazing miracles that surely only a divine figure could
do; and he forgives people’s sins, which surely is a prerogative of God
alone; and he receives worship, as people bow down before him, which
surely indicates that he welcomes divine honors.
There are two points to stress about such things. The first is that
all of them are compatible with human, not just divine, authority. In
the Hebrew Bible the prophets Elijah and Elisha did fantastic
miracles—including healing the sick and raising the dead—through the
power of God, and in the New Testament so did the Apostles Peter and
Paul; but that did not make any of them divine. When Jesus forgives
sins, he never says “I forgive you,” as God might say, but “your sins
are forgiven,” which means that God has forgiven the sins. This
prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven was otherwise reserved for
Jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at the
temple. Jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative, but not a divine
one. And kings were worshiped—even in the Bible (Matt.
18:26)—by veneration and obeisance, just as God was. Here, Jesus may be
accepting the worship due to him as the future king. None of these
things is, in and of itself, a clear indication that Jesus is divine.
But even more important, these activities may not even go back to the
historical Jesus. Instead, they may be traditions assigned to Jesus by
later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence and significance.
Recall one of the main points of this chapter: many traditions in the
Gospels do not derive from the life of the historical Jesus but
represent embellishments made by storytellers who were trying to convert
people by convincing them of Jesus’s superiority and to instruct those
who were converted. These traditions of Jesus’s eminence cannot pass
the criterion of dissimilarity and are very likely later pious
expansions of the stories told about him—told by people who, after
his resurrection, did come to understand that he was, in some
sense, divine.
What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus is that his
public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in
fact, they were not about his divinity at all. They were about God. And
about the kingdom that God was going to bring. And about the Son of Man
who was soon to bring judgment upon the earth. When this happened the
wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be brought into the
kingdom—a kingdom in which there would be no more pain, misery, or
suffering. The twelve disciples of Jesus would be rulers of this
future kingdom, and Jesus would rule over them. Jesus did not
declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the
future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be
revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the
end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward,
once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised
from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be
God.'
