Despite my atheist inclinations I cannot simply discount the aura
surrounding such God-characters. There was something about them. In fact, there
was something massively-great about them to have their names survive across the
tempest of history, when it could easily have been rubbed out in a minor
accident. They were popular enough for their times to have recorded in oral or
written history, whether written by the discounters or by the worshipers.
Let’s go back to our thread on Jesus.
I look at some of the pictures (Google “Early Christian Martyrs”)
and wonder what Jesus would have preached to have inspired so many early church
martyrs so much to brave the pride of hungry lions, cauldron of boiling oil,
flaying and other unspeakable torture. It cannot just be zealotry because many
of these martyrs were also gentiles (non-Jewish). Just another rebellious
Jewish cult (there were many in the first century) wouldn’t have survived
history without solid fundamentals. And we know Jesus’s ideas were not about
Jewish fanaticism.
We now know how a local hero can become a legend and over time
achieve god-like status. A fun video from YouTube explains
it best without many paragraphs from me. Many Indian gods may have been such
heroes from the distant past. Legends become Lords … White and Dark, Dracula
being a dark one from the recent past.
To appeal to the mass, one must be a hero model. And to be a hero
one must do (or at least attempt) an almost impossible act … or maybe even
introduce a radical idea! And that maybe what Jesus really did.
But to appreciate the radical-ness of the Jesus-speak, one must
imagine the economic, cultural and political situation of the region in the
first century:
A lower-class Jew was oppressed by the rich and priestly.
An outcast (leper, prostitute, ‘sinner’) was considered doomed, shunned from the Kingdom of God.
A slave (gentile) was nothing but a furniture or appliance with no
independent aspirations … now or even in the afterlife.
Perfect storm-clouds for a revolution … if only someone could sow
the right seeds.
And along came in Jesus, opened the eyes of the outcast and the downtrodden, said “…the Kingdom of God is within you” and not elsewhere.
He dared to call the brahmins in the Jew community, the Pharisee and the Sadducee, a bunch of show-offs and
"... yee of unclean minds".
He told the oppressed and
the tired to not worry as their “...treasure awaits...” and so be resilient.
And if that was not enough for the perfect storm, the Apologetic Paul took the ideas to the gentiles in the then Western world (modern day Turkey, Greece and Rome). Paul attributed his inspirations as coming from Jesus. And this was the critical mass.
To such a large (and mostly illiterate) crowd, these words were liberating, for once there is something to life and its worth dying for.
Acknowledgements: Thank you Shanty
Mathews for the image. You rock dude!
