What leads me to believe that ONE of the men of Genesis 18 was the image of the invisible G-d, is John 8:54-59, in which Jesus indicated that he had met Abraham. When I put that along with the observations I made about the passage itself, it seems like this must be when Jesus met Abraham, although it is possible that a meeting could have happened in another instance that is unrecorded.

"The reason James and Peter were tolerated for so long should be quite obvious to you. They were never Trinitarians and did not teach about Jesus' divinity. Jews didn't mind that they believed Jesus was Messiah."

You can believe this if you want but the NT most emphatically disagrees. Many unbelieving Jews most certainly DID mind, especially the Sadducees, who wanted to maintain a belief that Jesus did not raise from the dead. The Pharisees were also very upset when the apostles started teaching the gentiles that they could have direct access to the kingdom of God (Acts 22:21-23). I doubt that an additional teaching about the nature of God could have gotten them more riled than this verse of Acts indicates. How about 40 Jewish men taking a vow not to eat or drink until they killed Paul (Acts 23:21)? Yet they were unable to. There are a lot of possible explanations of how the apostles could escape death for so long other than your suggestion that the Jews simply did not want to kill them because their view of G-d was correct.

When I read the portion of Josephus that you quote, I don't see such a strong case as you do for your point. Josephus, first of all, is upholding the national pride of the Jews, and is emphasizing the positive. Such a person might tend to leave out certain points of difference. In fact, he specifically mentions that the "Jews have avoided all discourses about God that any way contradict one another". This directly implies that there might be differences of opinion about certain aspects of God, but that such arguments are squelched to maintain unity. My point exactly about what happens to a Jew who might believe in Jesus. He suddenly is no longer a Jew, so "Jews all agree about Jesus". Second, his comments on the unanimous agreement about the nature of God specifically mention "providence over mankind", and "he sees all things". Why, any Christian theologian from the Pope to Martin Luther to Mike Huckabee would agree with those statements about God. Josephus is obviously offering a contrast of the Jews to the heathen philosophers and religious teachers such as Hindu gurus who even doubted those things. An argument over whether God did in fact reveal Himself in human form could well have been one of those discourses studiously avoided, and considered of little consequence to Josephus in his defense of the Jewish nation. He does not mention the idea of the complex or absolute unity of God and so you can't use this passage to support your claim that such an issue was not a point of consideration to Jews of his day. I can't use it for support for my view either, but then again I never set out to do so.