How do you understand the message of Jesus?

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Christianity brought something extremely important to the world, the ability to be imperfect and wrong. Before Jesus, in order to be considered good and holy, you had to be utterly perfect. Any little imperfection would be seized upon by those with political aims and used against you.

Why didn’t the Jews accept Jesus as their messiah? The answer to this is very, very simple, because he didn’t save them from anything. Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into the Promised Land. The Biblical narrative of Exodus allows no fault from Moses, if he didn’t deliver on his promise to remove the Israelites from slavery, no one would have bothered to ever put him in the Bible.

Think about it this way, why did Moses kill the pursuing Egyptians through divine tidal wave? Why couldn’t he lead the Isrealites in battle against the pursuers? Because Moses could not have been a military leader, the Jews were wholly uninterested in military prowess. Jews spent their entire history distrusting, evading and outsmarting political leadership and their militaries. They still do that to this day.

When you’re dealing with such real-world obstacles such as this, you expect your leaders and saviors to be veritable superheroes. Jesus wasn’t that. He was killed by the Romans, in fact, he willingly went to the cross, he didn’t even try to fight it. This is not something Jews of the time could have possibly countenanced, weakness. You had to have known Jesus personally to really grasp the gift that Jesus gave the world.

What early Christians understood, that Jews didn’t, was the power of symbolism. Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of those who followed him long, long, long after he was deaded by the Romans. Look, I’m well aware of the fact that Jesus didn’t become who we think he was until hundreds of years after he was executed. But there was a real reason why later Romans picked the Jesus story to mythologize over others. The Jesus story had staying power, it had the potential to become much, much more than ‘mere’ myth.

The concept of a man, a person, flesh and blood like you and me, offering, through personal torture and destruction, redemption to all who could ever want it, was totally and unexpectedly revolutionary. Nowadays we take Christian redemption for granted, something to distrust and worry about the intentions of the proselytizer.

Back then, it was a completely new idea. And it was a powerful enough one to sweep away the varied pagan religions and create a new social order. Around the idea that one can be wrong, profoundly and hellaciously wrong, but still good anyway.

It was so profoundly transformative that latter-day Christian mythology routinely ignores Jesus and instead just tells stories of Christian-themed redemption.

All of modern capitalism and democracy rests on the social foundations of Christianity. Science was once merely a twinkle in the eye of a Christian clergyman. What used to be apostasy is now completely tolerated and, frankly, entertained.

Ever hear of the monomyth? You know, that “universal” structure that undergirds the philosophical foundation of hero stories? Fundamentally Christian. Other religions only provided pieces. Christianity put them all together.

You gained the ability to question Christianity through Christianity’s own forbearance. To claim otherwise is to profoundly misunderstand both religion and history.