The Survival of the Jewish Jesus

So if there is at least as much evidence that Jesus only saw himself as a rabbi seeking to reform his society, as there is for the traditional view that Jesus was God's Son and the Messiah, is there any evidence of his survival in religious faith as a Jewish Prophet? It would seem on first glance that the answer must be no, because if one looks at Judaism as it has existed for nearly two thousand years, no place has been given for Jesus among their hall of Jewish spiritual heroes. And yet there was indeed a Judaic sect where Jesus was centrally honored as an enlightened teacher, a sect as real as other contemporaneous Jewish groups, including the Essenes, Ebionites, Zealots, Pharisees and Sadducees. This Jesus-venerating group were called the Jacobean Christians, followers of the Apostle James the Just (as distinguished from the other apostle of the same first name, James the Great), who centered their cult in Jerusalem, observed the Torah, and lived among fellow Jews of more mainstream inclinations in a composite community. Please forgive a necessary explanatory digression: in his own time among the Aramaic-speaking Jews, this early Christian leader was known as Ya'akov ha Tzadik, and Ya'akov is sometimes rendered as "Jacob" rather than as the Greek form "James" -- thus the adjective, "Jacobean". So to continue the main narrative, the Jacobeans distinguished themselves in that they believed Jesus was a prophet on a par with those honored in the Hebrew Testament, and transcended death through bodily resurrection; a prophet transcending death had precedent in Jewish tradition: Elijah was bodily assumed into Heaven. However, the Jacobeans suffered and eventually died out as a sect for two scissor-like reasons: the rest of the Christian community came to reject them for continuing to observe the Torah when the Miracle of the Pentecost and the teachings of the Apostle Paul moved non-Jacobeans to abandon Jewish religious rites and strictures, while at the same time the broader Jewish community came to identify the Jacobeans with the rest of the Christian community, which was becoming a separate (and sometimes competitively hostile) religion, and therefore could no longer be identified as fellow members of what was even then a still a very diversified Jewish world. Rejected by both sides as either not being enough Jewish, or not being enough Christian, they found themselves in a religious no-man's land, and they disappeared as a going concern. But this is not the end of the story. The notion of Jesus as Great Prophet rather than as Divine Incarnation survived in several heretical sects, to see final crystallization centuries later in the faith expounded by the Arab prophet, Muhammad.