People did not know what to make of Jesus. They tried to understand Him by comparing Him with famous figures from the recent and more distant past - ‘ John the Baptist … Elijah … Jeremiah or one of the prophets’. Into this situation of confusion came something new, something different - ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’. Where did this come from? It came from God - ‘flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven’ (Matthew 16:14,16-17). What we have here is divine revelation. Our thinking about Jesus is not to be limited by what people say about Him. We must listen to what God says about Him - ‘This is My beloved Son’ (Matthew 3:17).
