The pedigree of this ambivalent belief is so interesting. How can anyone be someone else? Literal truth is never going to come to rescue us since the characters involved are mythical.
Only in myth can the irreconcilable become reconciled, that is its function.
Contemplate the mental cog-whirring which has occupied the religious minds over time in attempting to understand this story. It makes more sense when understood in its original setting.
It began in the solar mythos, as do most religious essentials; the fundamental legends drawn from the earliest farming communities of the late Stone Age. These were based on the mnemonics of oral tales describing the annual path of the stars, sun and moon as they passed through the twelve heavenly 'houses'. The legends of the Twelve Labours of Hercules exemplify a Greek version of the stories i.e. one momentous labour for each zodiacal month. The constellations of the ancients being used as markers in a calendar to facilitate the timing of the various duties throughout the farming year.
The supreme deity was the sun, and the Sun God fathered a solar son god born in the 'Virgin' (Virgo) three days after the annual death of the old sun on 22 December, which the astute might note is no longer the case due to what is called the precession of the equinoxes. (Son and sun are not to be confused... it's just a homophone in the English language and these stories are almost global).
To keep it as brief as possible; what was a compendium of orally transmitted stories about the heavens and the activities of its Gods became the framework for formal religious teaching.
The Egyptian Horus/Osiris legends carry forward the ideas with an ambiguous solar hero Osiris, who is also his father Horus. Just to make one startling connection with Jesus. Horus raised from the dead, as did Jesus, 'his friend' Lazarus -( Elazarus> El Osirus> Osiris). His other self!
I could go on but enough to say that most christian stories were already found in ancient pagan mythology two and a half thousand years before Jesus' name was appended to them.
Carl Jung recognized that the Horus/Osiris myth was the source of the Christian rising and dying saviour.
As a last point, note the convergence of all major religious festivals with the winter solstice; the death of the Sun and the rebirth three days later on Christmas day, next the spring equinox, the time when the solar deity is sacrificed and goes up to his heavenly father who is also a solar god.
The river of time flows but the myth in whatever dress remains, and so will the essential ambivalence of the identity of the solar deities.
