Moved by some recent topics, and in the spirit of the day, I’ve tried to assemble a list of reasons to think Jesus was a religious revolutionary, in the sense that the new kingdom he expected would be a literal earthly kingdom established, at least in part, through human military agency. I.e., there would be a revolution assisted by God, not unlike the initial conquest of the holy land under Joshua.
I’m curious whether you have anything to add, or if you think I’ve overstated any of the points:
Some initial hints:
- He was from Galilee, which had a history of producing revolutionaries.
- He had at least one disciple who was a zealot: Simon the Zealot (Matthew 10:4; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13)
- Scattered sayings indicate a violent intention: Mt 10:34 “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” and Lk 22:36 “let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.” People try to interpret this away, but maybe he meant exactly what he said.
- He was crucified–not certain, but this seems to indicate a fairly serious offense.
- Jn 11:50–why would the Jewish authorities think there was danger of the whole nation perishing if Jesus were not killed? If they thought he was a random false prophet with a modest following, he wouldn’t have posed any real danger. If he was a popular revolutionary, then they would have had a very real reason to fear the destruction of the whole nation.
- Suetonius (probably) referred to Christ as an instigator (Claudius 25): “Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit” — “he expelled from Rome the Jews, always making disturbance [ablative:] instigator Chrestus”
- Jesus’ movements (both in Galilee and later in Jerusalem) seem to indicate that he was carefully avoiding authorities after major events. I suggest, particularly in Jerusalem, he was playing a dangerous game with the authorities–he would boldly come out in the open when the crowd was at his back ready to riot for him, and he would disappear and slip off to hide outside the city before the crowd dispersed.
The major events of the passion narrative make unique sense if we take him as a revolutionary:
- He was welcomed into the city as a king
- note that he was not immediately arrested, if accurate this means either the event was too small to garner any attention or that his supporters were numerous enough that arresting him in public would be dangerous.
- Also, obvious regal overtones. Christians may interpret them away (he was a *spiritual* king), but let’s not overlook the most obvious interpretation, the significance that everyone would have attached to the event. It is sort of hard for a Christian to blame the authorities for killing Jesus when Jesus acted in a way that everyone would have naturally understood to be insurrectionist.
- According to Matt, Mark, and John, he was anointed shortly after the triumphal entry–by itself it might be ambiguous (after all, it makes sense for messiah to be anointed; and Christians will admit he was a spiritual king; the gospels interpret this as preparation for his burial, which is objectively odd, but reinforces the Gospel contention that Jesus expected to die). But still the most obvious interpretation of the act is that he was claiming the earthly throne; after all, the anointed one everyone expected was a ruler, not a suffering servant. See Mk 8:31-33 and Lk 24:20-21
- He created a disturbance in the temple and was not immediately arrested; as above–either it was a very minor disturbance (and the gospels greatly exaggerate), or his followers were a serious threat and the authorities were afraid to confront him directly.
- Some of his disciples seem open to a violent conflict: e.g., Mt 26:35 (even if I have to die with you) Jn 13:37 (I will lay down my life for you). Christians may want this to be a reference to peaceful martyrdom; but it needn’t be read that way, it is a perfectly natural thing for a soldier to say to a military leader. Also, one of the disciples (according to John, Peter) takes up arms when they arrest Jesus: Mk 14:47 Jn 18:10: That puts “I’ll die with you,” in a new light–if it is accurate, Peter was ready to die fighting with Jesus.
- He was at last arrested in secret, away from the crowds–the gospels draw attention to this. But if his movement was committed to peace, why? Mark tells us (Mk 14:2 ): “But not during the feast,” they said, “or there may be a riot among the people.”
- It is also important to ask why the authorities needed Judas’s cooperation in finding Jesus. Even admitting that they didn’t want to arrest Jesus in front of the crowd, if he was going about openly, if he planned to be arrested and killed, it seems simpler and cheaper to just tail Jesus and find out where he is staying at night than to try to turn and bribe a confidant. The fact that they resorted to turning an insider shows that Jesus wasn’t going about openly, he was deliberately slipping away and hiding from the authorities when the crowd was not assembled.
- He was handed over to the authorities, for execution, by a close friend. People betray people all the time for all sorts of reasons; people kill other people for minor reasons, but it generally takes something very serious for a close friend to hand another friend over not only for execution but for execution as extreme as crucifixion. The fact that Jesus was betrayed by one of the 12 is an embarrassment for Christians. If Judas had simply lost faith in a pacifist preacher we would expect him to just leave and go back and pick up the pieces of his ordinary life; even if he had had a serious falling out with Jesus, we might expect him to take some less extreme form of revenge. But it makes sense for Judas to hand him over for brutal execution, if Judas realized that Jesus was inciting a delusional rebellion. Jewish rebellions had a history of ending very very badly; the stakes were high. One can imagine a disenchanted close associate of a religious revolutionary realizing that he had to do something extreme both to save the country and to save himself.
- The charges on which he was executed were explicitly claiming kingship. Again, Christians try to make this irony: Pilate testifies to a spiritual truth unwittingly, but let’s just take it at face value. He was executed by the Roman governor for claiming to be king. There needs to be some reason (good or bad) that the Roman governor would have had a man executed. The Gospels try to tell that Pilate was just appeasing the crowd; but that requires completely reversing the dynamic that the Gospels themselves have told us had been playing out up to that time: The authorities (the Gospels themselves tell us) were reluctant to arrest Jesus because they feared the crowd would riot for him. How the shift, such that now of a sudden Pilate feels he must crucify Jesus if he is to avoid a riot, when before even arresting Jesus might lead to a riot? I think the typical Christian explanation is to say that the Jewish crowd was fickle: they had expected a military leader who would overthrow the Romans, and when Jesus didn’t do that they turned on him. I’m suggesting that might be partly right: They did expect a military leader who would overthrow the Romans, and when they woke up one morning and learned that he was in Roman custody, they reevaluated who he was and their own loyalty to him.
An important point to take from this is that the crowds, when they supported him certainly thought they were supporting a military leader who would overthrow the Romans (even Christians admit this). Both Jewish and Roman authorities would have had every reason to treat him as an insurrectionist (thus the charge above the cross). He directly played into that image, and he seems to have been deliberately hiding from the authorities (rather than planning to be arrested and executed.)
yet, there is so much in the teachings of Jesus that promotes love of enemies and nonviolence. I don’t think all of that was secondary or later. The Kingdom of God could only come about by some major violence, but to repent of evil and live as one should in the Kingdom is a very different ethic. The apocalyptic genre and ethos is, like it or not, inherently violent. I would imagine that Jesus was perceived very differently by many of his contemporaries, and perhaps Jesus himself did not always have a clear handle on exactly what he thought or expected or how to put his ideas into action.
Yes, all good points. A few thoughts:
First, I don’t know how much of Jesus’s pacifist message was original to him. It seems possible, even natural, that it was exaggerated as Christianity morphed. I mean, a key part of the evolution that let Christianity survive the crucifixion was the idea that Jesus was the suffering servant, that he had always planned to die. Toning down any violence and turning up the peace in his message would be natural. I think the question is one of degrees: I suspect there was some of the forgiving and pacifistic element in his original preaching (perhaps painting the ideal of what the kingdom would be like once it was established) and that element got highlighted and exaggerated (to some degree) as Christianity came into its own.
Second, even in the gospels we see a tension: he teaches radical forgiveness and love but also has no problem with retribution. He can spew some real fire and brimstone when he is feeling it (Also note that we can see a progression–Mark’s Jesus has no sermon on the mount, Mark’s Jesus can be very irascible; it’s later that we get the Jesus we are more comfortable with). Now maybe he meant that we should be pacifists and let God do the punishing (though I don’t think he ever comes out and says that), but at any rate, he was no universalist; he didn’t think that all malefactors deserved unconditional love and endless lenience; he makes it pretty clear on a number of occasions that there are a lot of wicked people who really do deserve to suffer quite acutely. Like you say, apocalypticism has an inherently violent and retributive side to it.
Third, that sort of tension it is pretty common for people who preach a utopia; they frequently talk about love, and forgiveness, and universal brotherhood in the idealised future utopia, but here and now they are ready to knock some heads together and break some eggs to make that utopia a reality. In fact, that sort of seems like the standard MO for people trying to establish a utopia.
So it makes sense to me that his own message was a bit confused, or even incoherent in the same way the message of anyone seeking to set up a utopia tends to be incoherent: normal people deserve forgiveness and love; peace and love will reign once we get our new order established. But those who are aligned with the forces of evil, those who today stand in the way of the new order of peace and who are today perpetuating the current evil system, they deserve absolute destruction. We have to utterly destroy our enemies–the people who fight everything that is good–before we can establish peace. I don’t want to get political, but just look at communism and fascism. We have to increase the violence before we can be rid of violence.
It would make sense to me that the pacifist and loving element of his confused preaching was naturally emphasised early, and the violent aspect was muted, all as part of making sense of a messiah who was was crucified. A crucified messiah pretty much has to be a pacifist, otherwise he was a failure.
Yeah, I think his message had to be somewhat confused in order to allow for reinterpretation.
But in the gospel narratives, even his own closest followers didn’t “understand” until after he was dead. Then they reread the scriptures and realized that the messiah was supposed to suffer and die. If we trust the Gospels, Jesus was routinely predicting his own suffering, death, and resurrection and yet the disciples were still shocked and horrified when he was killed–they must have been exceptionally stupid if he had actually said flat out that he was going to Jerusalem to suffer and die. The idea that Jesus planned to die as a martyr doesn’t make sense to me: I think those predictions of his death were added later to solve the basic problem of a messiah who was crucified.
I think the transition–making the messiah into a suffering servant–happened for personal reasons: Jesus was charismatic, he inspired genuine affection and deep confidence in at least some of his followers. I think we tend to lose track of just how traumatic the crucifixion was for his disciples and we forget even how brutal crucifixion was: They had given up everything to follow him; they had placed all their hopes in him (they’d expected to sit on thrones judging the tribes of Israel); and they had then seen all that crushed.
When he was crucified, not only did they have to face the reality that they had given up everything for a mistake; they also had watched a close friend be publicly tortured to death.
And what is more, they must have felt some responsibility for that horror: they had encouraged him in his messianic delusions. They cheered for him at the triumphal entry. They probably gave him high fives (or something equivalent) after the cleansing of the temple. If Jesus was just a delusional religious nut, if his mistaken pretensions to be the messiah–pretensions they had encouraged and participated in–got him killed, then they bore some direct responsibility for his traumatic death. Forget about all they had lost in following him; responsibility for his death is a heavy weight for the human psyche to carry.
So they found a way to escape that burden; they “realized” in hindsight that he had always planned to die. None of them had understood at the time that the messiah had to suffer, but that was always his role. His brutal end wasn’t their responsibility. They weren’t mistaken about his being Messiah and king. They were only mistaken in that they didn’t understand that the messiah had to suffer and die.
So they reremembered what he had said, and they reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures, and their eyes were at last “opened”. And they fashioned a messiah who had always been destined to suffer and die–rather than admit that they had given up everything for a mistake and at the same time encouraged a good man whom they loved in acts that would get him killed for nothing.
They dealt with the trauma and guilt by living in denial.
In 1967 the literary critic Frank Kermode published a book entitled The Sense of an Ending. Among other interesting things he wonders why there is never an ending (pardon the pun) to predictions of the end of the world even when consistently discredited. Kermode’s answer is that while it lasts the interval between prediction and fulfillment is sacralized time, made significant. And that we need to experience this sacralized time so badly that we will endure repeated disappointment. A trivial example would be to imagine how someone feels between the purchase and the drawing of a high yield lotto card. Your imaginings are stimulated. The world becomes full of possibility even if you know intellectually that your chances are very low. But this sense of expectancy married to your deepest hopes? This is the “sense of an ending” Kermode talks about.
And this I think is why we couch our perceptions of future events like global climate change in such apocalyptic terms. It won’t come on like a tidal wave. It will be long and slow and appalling. (Like Frank Zappa said in another context, it won’t be the end – the world will just be ugly for a thousand years.) But those ones living in the Last Days have a spring in their step the rest of us lack.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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