| • Scapegoatism. He preached and encouraged a belief that people need not atone for their sins themselves. Pretty ghastly stuff. As Christopher Hitchens said, even if you served my prison sentence for me, you couldn’t absolve me of the crime itself on a moral level. It’s by this scapegoatism that we know Christians must accept that Hitler, murderer of 6 million Jews and Roman Catholic, is very possibly in heaven, whilst Bill Gates — agnostic atheist who has done as much for mankind as anyone you’d care to mention — is destined for hell. But, the good news is for our argument that whilst this is obviously utterly immoral and disgusting, the idea of sins being cast on to symbols of purity is by no means novel. It is present in many traditions and religions, and predates Christianity. As does the notion of the "dies and rises again" superhero. • Beatitudes. Lots of people inexplicably consider these to be fairly radical. The concepts and morality within are echoed in Buddhism (which, uncomfortably for “JESUS WAS TOTES RADICAL!” fanbois, predates Jesus by centuries), and of course the Old Testament (he’s basically just remixing Psalms ffs — “For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he knows from afar.“) but if you subscribe to Marcan priority it’s a bit sad to see that in Mark the reaction is so bad that Jesus says “Lol tough crowd, nobody is appreciated in their hometown”, when everyone is like “????”, and when the story is repeated in Luke he still sheepishly says that, but the reaction of the assembled congregation becomes “omg radical huge this guy is incred!!!” — a likely interpolation unfortunately. So people didn’t consider it especially radical when he said it, and it’s all stuff from other religions and texts. (You have a really, really hard time ahead of you if you’re going to try to claim that an illiterate Jew who lived for 30 years nearly 100,000 years into mankind’s existence had anything especially interesting to say.) • Turn the other cheek. As discussed above, this is widely misunderstood. It wouldn't have been that radical for Jesus to be a pacifist. Most of the Old Testament is either God saying "BE NICE TO EACH OTHER FFS" or "Ugh OK let's kill them all but only because I said so" (uncomfortable scene where he has bears kill teenagers for mocking a bald guy notwithstanding). • Universal judgement and coming apocalypse — everyone at the time had a big hard on for apocalyptic cults, so this is not novel. He tells his followers to sell all their stuff which I guess is pretty radical? In the same way as Scientology pursuing years-long vendettas against apostates is ‘radical’? (I.e. it’s totally fucking immoral?) • Obviously he calls a Canaanite woman a dog and was pretty dickish towards Samaritans (even a charitable interpretation of the “good” Samaritan must be balanced against Jesus telling the bois to not spread the word to Samaria at all (or any Gentiles), but I expect you’re not looking for examples of him being a radical douchebag and just examples of the novelty of what he said, right? Anyway, fast forward the 50-90 years we need to get to any written accounts of Jesus which aren’t the hilarious bundle of contradictions we find in the synoptic Gospels, and where we would hope to see the impact of Jesus and his mega radical ideas… and you get to Josephus and the Antiquities & Tacitus. In terms of proving Jesus the Radical, the first mention of Jesus from Josephus is pretty good for your cause: > About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. The bad news is that literally nobody considers this to be authentic. It looks like it’s from several hundred years later, when Jews were trying to really boost Jesus’s street cred. It may as well be written in red crayon over the original text, it's so obviously fake. The other two references are just “Jesus was this dude’s brother” type things. No indications of his radical nature. Tacitus mentions that he was executed and that Christians were antagonising Jews and cheesing people off. There are multiple other sources which suggest that Christians were agitators in Rome and generally not well-liked, but it’s fascinating that for all the radical wisdom Jesus allegedly preached, he made very little impact on those around him until he was the subject of significant posthumous interpolation and rewriting. Folks who try to draw conclusions about Jesus’s teachings in the year 2020 really need to consider them in the context in which they were written (you can’t know whether or not he said it, so view them through the lens of “person writing to try to perpetuate a religion for some reason in the year AD 50”. It makes things a lot easier. Jesus didn't say or do anything interesting, let alone anything suggestive of his being God. Very open to being shown areas I'm wrong if you're comfortable rooting your analysis in the proper historical context. |