Xtianity without the Incarnation

The two pillars of Christianity are that Jesus was the Messiah and that he was the Incarnation & Corporification of the Deity.

WI the latter was rejected by even by the newly won-over Romans as not being in consonance with the Old Testament and Judaism?

Could a Christianity without this less radical premise (ie it became a form of "Judaism-Lite" cf a Shabattean-Frankist Messianic-Wake type movement, with little or no observance of the OT's commandments required from gentiles apart from the Ten) still have flourished in the world and with what result?

Actually, the divinity of Jesus was (and remains) hard to swallow for many Christians. There have always bee movements that, to some extent, reduced or denied it (Arianism, Adoptionism and their various related -isms). I see no reason why a Christian church embracing the view that Jesus was the adopted (rather than literal) son of god, the expected Messiah, or the last prophet, could not flourish.

In my circle of acquaintances, that is what most Christians actually believe, BTW.

Isn't it also true that Jesus (in the bible) never explicitly calls himself "son of God"? "son of man", yes, but that's way different...

The title is used alot in the Septuagint as a poetic variant for "man." Contrary to the Gospels, however, it never appears with the article in the Septuagint, whereas it is always definite in the New Testament. A possible, Aramaic, equivalent to the Greek ho huios tou anthropou, "the son of man" is barnasha, which means "person, human being." Strangely, however, this form does not appear in any of the surviving Aramaic versions of the Bible (I'm thinking specifically of the Pshitta). Instead, breh d-nasha appears (quite literally "the son of man," not simply "person"), suggesting that the suriving Aramaic accounts are derived from Greek, and that they didn't know what to do with the title, either.

Leo,

In Daniel (I think), the Bible talks about "one like a son of man" who is given a universal, everlasting kingdom by Jehovah God and all humanity will either "serve" or "worship" him (the NIV says "worship" but some other versions say "serve").

Did "Son of Man" become a messianic title after Daniel was written, or just after Christ used it to describe Himself?

That's the title in question. No one really knows what to do with it. In Daniel, it is indefinite (without the article) whereas it is definite throughout the NT. That suggests to me very strongly that the term in Daniel refers to the Aramaic expression barnasha "human being" (eg. simply "one like a human being"). However, there is some debate over the composition of Daniel and whether this term (barnasha) was current at the time.

The term is used for the Prophet Ezechiel more than 90 times. By the time of Christ, it is uncertain whether or not it was widely known as a messianic title; from what I understand, its first use as such (beyond that one passage in Daniel) is in the apocryphal Book of Enoch.