From Jesus to Marx - Birth and death of a civilization

By Marcello Caroti

"Da Gesù a Marx", di Marcello Caroti, è una profonda esplorazione storica e antropologica che parte dalla figura rivoluzionaria di Gesù Cristo per arrivare alle ideologie moderne di Karl Marx. In questo intrigante viaggio attraverso i secoli, l'autore getta luce su come gli insegnamenti e le azioni di Gesù abbiano influenzato non solo il pensiero religioso, ma anche le correnti sociali e politiche che hanno plasmato il mondo moderno. Il libro inizia analizzando in dettaglio la missione di Gesù, esplorando le sue differenze con Giovanni Battista e come il suo messaggio di speranza e salvezza si sia distinto in una epoca di rigide divisioni sociali e religiose. L'autore poi traccia un percorso intellettuale e storico che collega le dottrine di Gesù con le teorie di Marx, evidenziando come il cristianesimo abbia influenzato e plasmato il pensiero marxista. Con un linguaggio chiaro e una narrazione coinvolgente, "Da Gesù a Marx" non è solo una lettura essenziale per gli appassionati di storia e teologia, ma anche per chiunque sia interessato a comprendere le radici del pensiero moderno e il suo impatto sulla società. Il libro offre una prospettiva unica e stimolante su due delle figure più influenti della storia umana e sul loro impatto duraturo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9791222706931

Book preview

Introduction

There is a sentence that I have been hearing for many years that has always irritated me: Jesus Christ was a communist!

This statement irritated me for several reasons. First of all because it put Jesus in a position of inferiority relative to Marx as if Jesus could be considered a disciple of that great man of Marx and because, since Marx lived 1800 years after Jesus, it would have been more sensible to say that Marx was a Christian; something that would have left me perplexed anyway.

In fact, I could not see anything in common between those two characters. As far as I knew, the message of Jesus did not have anything violent and it seemed clear to me that Jesus refused political initiatives; the sphere of influence of his thought was strictly reserved to the spiritual field. Jesus refused social or political revolutions.

Than it happened something that radically changed the way I was looking at these matters because, actually, my irritation was hiding an indefinable feeling that there was something true in that statement.

It happened that the glowing success of the book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, made me decide to start studying the history of Jesus because I knew, more or less, that that book was full of nonsense but my knowledge of the history of Jesus was that of the average Christian raised in the Catholic faith: traditional and superficial.

The success of that book gave me the urge to know more and so I started searching for serious experts who could give me the state of the art of the history of Jesus; I needed history the real one. I realized immediately that this search was not easy because so many fables were circulated that made Dan Brown appear as a rigorous scientist.

At some point I stumbled on two American scholars and I started my study.

It was this study of mine on the history of Jesus that made me sense, by chance, what I was not looking for: the connection between Jesus and Marx, between Christianity and socialism.

No, don’t worry, Jesus was not a disciple of Marx; the point is that there is an evolutionary thread that connects these two persons.

They were both Jewish Apocalyptic Prophets.

If you consider these characters from this point of view, you will see all the history of Western Civilization in the light of what the revelations received by these characters have meant. The main feature of these revelations is nihilism, but with a big difference. The message of Jesus contained a strong element of nihilism (that destroyed the Classical Civilization) but also new ethics that produced a strong drive towards the creation of a new man. This new man started and realized what we now call Western Civilization.

Marx, on the contrary, brought a totally nihilist vision; the ideas contained in his message were only meant to destroy.

The evolutionary thread that I am illustrating in this work of mine is: so as Christianity destroyed the Classical Civilization same way socialism is destroying our civilization and no other civilization is going to arise from the ashes.

In a few words, our future is a black hole.

All my analysis is based on a vision of reality that will leave many perplexed or even resentful.

In fact, I think that the history of humanity is in good part the history of the hallucinations of Homo sapiens. From what I can understand, the moments of rationality or common sense are rare in history.

This work of mine is meant to explain the evolution of these ideas and how they merged together to make Western Civilization be what it is today.

This is important because, as a result of the success that our civilization has had in the second millennium, a good part of humanity adapted itself to our civilization, adopted its mores, for good or for bad, and in the end it has been tragically involved in our problems.

I - Jesus of Nazareth, the history

It is not easy to write the history of Jesus for several reasons. First of all, the mental conditioning due to the entrenchment of a religious faith that has produced a character, Jesus Christ, that is not compatible with a historical analysis. In fact, historians do not want to deal with a character that is both man and god, born from a virgin and resurrected from death.

The sources

We must add to this miraculous dimension the problem of the sources. Up to now the research of the scholars has identified up to forty Gospels produced by various Christian sects. Many of these Gospels are similar to those we know, the canonical Gospels, but many others are very different and many of these are clearly a delirium.

Contrary to what has been divulged in these later times by certain secularists cultural movements, that want to throw all Christian faith into the dustbin of history as if it were just a gigantic hoax, what surprises most the scholar is how much interest this "Marginal Jew" has aroused so many years after his death.

The secularists doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has ever existed but this seems nonsense to me. How is it possible that so many people put themselves to the task of writing the life, the works and the teachings of a man who never existed?

On the contrary, we should pause to think what this "Marginal Jew" had so special to motivate so many people to write about him to interpret his message.

It is an evident fact that no person of antiquity has provoked such an interest for so long.

Unfortunately, Jesus did not leave us anything written although he could read and, probably, write. The information we have about him, that arrived to us, have been written by people who did not meet him in person but who had access to several oral traditions and to several documents that were produced right after his death. Many critics affirm that our Gospels are not trustworthy as historical sources because they were produced many years after his death by people who never met him, but this is not correct. First of all, oral traditions are more dependable than you may think, in fact almost all ancient history was written in this way; that is, it was written many years after the events starting from oral traditions and several documents that were in circulation.

The canonical Gospels too were produced in this way, by putting together many histories passed down by word of mouth or written on documents that disappeared afterwards and therefore cannot be analyzed by us anymore, but which were produced many years before our Gospels and therefore very near our events and, probably, by eyewitnesses.

So begins the Gospel of Luke:

Whereas many have undertaken to write a narrative of those things which are most surely believed among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having accurately investigated all things from the very beginning, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you might know the certainty of the things which you have been told. (Luke 1:1-4).

The scholars think that Luke was written between 80 and 85 AD, therefore 50 years after the death of Jesus. Here Luke tells us clearly that he drew on sources which originated from eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, we have never seen these sources.

Of one of these sources we can guess its existence: the Q Gospel.

Q stands for Quelle that in German means source because the scholars think that this Gospel was the source from which our canonical Gospels have drawn a good part of their stories. We know that this Gospel existed because two of our canonicals, the synoptic Matthew and Luke, have several sentences which are identical therefore they must have been copied from an existing document. Unfortunately, this Gospel disappeared because the Christians did not think it necessary to copy it to divulge it; each Christian sect was busy spreading its own Gospel.

In fact, in those times press and paper did not exist and each copy had to be handwritten by a scribe on papyrus that is not a very resistant materiel, therefore, if the book was not copied anymore it disappeared because the papyrus on which it was written withered away. To copy a book was an expensive endeavor and few people could afford it. This is the reason why all this literature is no more available to us; we can only imagine its existence by analyzing the documents we have.

Many new Gospels have been found in the last sixty years just because they had been hidden in the Middle East, in very warm and dry places. An exceptional situation.

Here is a short chronology of our sources according to what the scholars consider historically true.

Being stated that no original exists of our sources and that all the documents we have are copies produced several years later, the first Christian documents in our possession are the epistles of Saint Paul. They have been produced between 50 and 60 AD.

Nothing we know of the hypothetical Q Gospel besides that it should have been written before Mark that was produced between 65 and 70 AD.

Luke and Matthew between 80 and 85, John around 95. After the year 100 we have the Apocrypha which, save one, do not have any content that could be considered of historical value.

In this work I will take into consideration only the Canonical Gospels in the Modern English Version (MEV).

The main problem that the scholars of the history of Jesus must face, is that all Gospels are so full of miraculous events that the doubt arises that it could all be a made up story and, moreover, there are several differences between our Gospels where you can tell the intention of the writer to fabricate an image of Jesus for the purpose of starting a Christian faith in compliance with the ideas of the Christian sect that had decided to write that Gospel.

It happened that, as the scholars progressed into the search for the historical Jesus, a multitude of Christian sects emerged which competed for the primacy by suffocating the others and each of them pretended to be the only one who knew the real Jesus. Each sect produced its own Gospel.

At this point the scholars had to devise a set of criteria to separate history from fantasy. A non easy thing to do. I will not annoy you with these studies; you have already understood that I adhere to the thesis that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. This is the thesis accepted by most scholars of the history of Jesus; I will introduce it to you in the next chapters.

A bit of history of Palestine

Before starting to talk about Jesus of Nazareth I must give you a short history of Palestine at the time of Jesus otherwise it would be impossible to understand what I am going to present you.

The Romans conquered Palestine in 63 BC and in 40 BC they appointed Herod king of the Jews who will reign until 4 BC the year that, we suppose, Jesus was born.

During the years of the Jesus ministry Palestine was divided in two, Galilee (where Jesus performed his ministry) is ruled by the son of Herod, Antipas, while Judea (where Jerusalem is located) was directly ruled by the Romans through a Prefect who at the time of Jesus was Pontius Pilate.

The Roman dominance was not meddlesome; they cared for two things only: order and taxes.

For all other things the people subject to the empire enjoyed all possible autonomy.

The taxes were heavy but not excessive and, together with the order, guaranteed to the people of the empire a peace never seen before.

The empire asked much to its subjects both in term of taxes and fealty to the authority of the emperor and of his functionaries, but it also gave much to everybody.

All subjects were aware of this and accepted, more or less willingly, the authority of the empire. We think that no other empire obtained such an obedience and consent for so long by so many different people as the Roman Empire.

The freedom of movement of people, goods and ideas together with the notable increase in the general welfare, produced a Classical civilization so brilliant that it is recorded as one of the most important civilization in history.

All people of the empire appreciated, participated and enjoyed this civilization, but one: the Jews.

For the Jews, Palestine was not just their land, as for all other people, it was the land that God had donated them and therefore to have a foreign power to dominate over this land was an affront to their faith; and they considered themselves the chosen people of God.

Here the Romans collided with something they did not know and could not comprehend: faith.

The religion, in the Classical Greek-Roman Civilization, was paganism an anthropomorphous religion where the gods were like humans with all their virtues (few) and vices (many) and did not pretend to offer a model of ethical behavior independent of the laws or costumes of society. In the Greek-Roman civilization ethics was a branch of philosophy, not of religion.

Paganism did not have the Ten Commandments and did not force the faithful to a behavior that could oppose the laws of the State.

The Jews, on the contrary, were possessed by their faith and refused, up to the supreme sacrifice of their lives, to obey those norms which were against their faith; an absurd and incomprehensible behavior for the Romans.

Moreover, the Classical culture was an existential threat for the Jews. It was a matter of life or death because this culture, just for being so brilliant, penetrated the people and Judaism was risking a cultural annihilation. The Romans did not force anybody to live with their lifestyle but, even without any obligation, the charm of such a sophisticated culture, as the Hellenistic culture was, attracted many Jews like a magnet.

All these elements meant that all the history of the Roman domination of Palestine was a history of irreducible conflicts; a unique feat in the history of the empire.

The armed revolts were frequent, sometimes they were spontaneous and sometimes they were organized. A few examples.

In 6 AD the Romans deposed the son of Herod to install one of their functionaries and initiated a census for the payment of taxes; a revolt explodes that is repressed in blood.

When in 26 AD Pilate took command, he put several standards with the image of the emperor around Jerusalem. The Jews rebelled and asked for the standards to be removed. Hundreds of the leading citizens staged a sit-in at Pilate’s residence in silence. After five days Pilate had the protesters surrounded by troops threatening to kill all of them. The protesters offered their necks to the swords of the soldiers. Pilate relented and removed the standards.

A few years later the emperor Caligula decided to install his statue in the Temple. Thousands of Jews gathered to oppose the move and stood against two roman legions sent to enforce the order of the emperor. The situation remained tense for a few days and a blood bath was avoided just because in those days the emperor was murdered.

When the Jews celebrated Passover the Romans sent troops to Jerusalem to keep in check the crowd of Jews that filled up the Temple for the ritual sacrifices. The troops stationed in the Temple and in 50 AD it happened that a roman soldier on the wall of the Temple turned his back to the crowd of Jews and made a vulgar noise to show them his contempt. A revolt explodes and thousands of Jews were massacred to restore peace.

In 70 AD the Romans put their hands in the treasure of the Temple. The Jews revolted and the Romans decided to put an end to the state of Israel with the first Jewish war. Four legions at the command of Titus destroyed the Temple and chased the Jews out of Jerusalem. The last resistance of the Jews on mount Masada ended three years later with the death by suicide of all the besieged rebels.

I think we can see a strategy of the Roman domination in Palestine.

When confronted by nonviolent revolts which did not spill any blood, the Romans gave in hoping, perhaps, that in time the Jews would have adapted to their rule as all the other people of the Empire. They even went as far as to exempt the Jews from the service in the army.

When confronted by an armed revolt the Romans intervened by exterminating the insurgents up to the last man and without any hesitation.

But the Israelis did not accept their rule and the Romans resolved to destroy the Jewish state.

Now I want to express a few considerations that are indispensable to comprehend this story.

The Romans never opposed the Jews or Judaism; they collided with the refusal of the Israeli to accept the rule of the Empire. The Jews of the Diaspora who lived in the Empire enjoyed the same freedoms of all other subjects.

Why the Romans left the Jews free to live according to their ways?

Because the Jewish faith did not promote proselytism. The Jews did not want to spread their faith among all the people as Christians will do later.

They paid their taxes and were obedient. They lived in their closed communities in order not to disperse among the gentiles and therefore they were not a problem for the public order.

For these reasons the Romans thought that they had no reasons to persecute them.

The Jews were even free to refuse to pay homage to the emperor, a thing that could have carried the death penalty for the other subjects.

Could this be due to the fact that the Romans felt confident?

There will be two more Jewish wars that ended as the first with the extermination of the rebels. However, the Romans never initiated a war against Judaism in spite of the fact that the Jews never accepted the authority of the Empire.

From this story it is evident that the Israelis did not have the force to free themselves of the Romans; against the Empire they did not have a chance.

Moreover, it was inevitable that, in time, the Classical culture would have provoked a dilution of the Jewish faith in the soul of the Jews with the risk of compromising forever the identity of the chosen people of God.

This dramatic situation (from their point of view) where they could not see any light at the end of the tunnel of desperation provoked two different reactions on the part of the Jews. On one side endless, useless, attempts at violent revolts and, on the other side, a phenomenon known as Apocalypticism.

Apocalypticism

Apocalypse is a term that comes from the Greek, it means revelation (from a superior being), and therefore an apocalypticist is a visionary, someone who has visions, because he has been revealed something by God.

With time, after Christianity, the term Apocalypse is used to indicate the end of the world because this was the vision of Jesus. In this document I will use it with this meaning, end of the world, even if it is not its correct meaning.

Apocalypticism is an ideology which began in Israel following the disastrous events that overwhelmed the Jewish nation, the last being the Roman domination.

The Jews believed they had entered a compact with God: He would have protected them if they had respected the Law.

The Law, not to be confused with the Ten Commandments, was a complex and debated collection of precepts. Among them: the circumcision of boy infants, the refusal of certain food, the rest on the Sabbath and many more. In exchange God would have taken them to the Promised Land and would have made them triumph on their enemies.

It was evident that this had not materialized. Israel had been conquered by several other people, it had been exiled and now, in the last, the Roman domination which called into question the very existence of Israel.

Here the complexes of guilt enter.

Many prophets before Jesus put the blame for these calamities on the Jews who did not respect their compact with God and had fallen Israel into these tragedies.

However, as these tragedies continued, many Jews started thinking that it could not just be the fault of their sinners but there must have been a wicked power who was raging against Israel in order to oppose God. This dark power had a name: Satan.

Now paranoia enters the play. Paranoia takes with it hallucinations and delirium.

It is inevitable that when confronted by a threat which can destroy your world and cannot be avoided, humans start producing hallucinations that give to their psyche the illusion to be able to overcome the disaster. This system of self-protection of the human psyche can be described with the term: delirium.

The apocalyptic prophets started representing a situation where God had been, somehow, defeated and Satan had taken control of the world; this was the reason why the Righteous (the Jews who observed the Law) were suffering. Therefore, the salvation could come only by an intervention of God in this world to defeat Satan permanently by means of a global upheaval that would have overturned this world, would have chased Satan and given birth to a new world where there would have been no more Evil. Thus the Righteous would have had their reward for the eternity.

Both before and after Jesus several documents were produced, called Apocalypses, which gave their vision of these events and of the future of humanity.

In general, Apocalypticism foresees a dualist reality where Good and Evil fight for the control of the world and at the end God wins. It is a very pessimist vision of the present reality because humanity cannot do anything to defeat Satan. This impotence of men causes that you had to wait for the intervention of God. At the end the Righteous will be vindicated by God, Evil will be crashed and expelled from the world. The Good News (Gospel) was that this intervention of God was imminent; it would have arrived in a short time:

And He said to them, Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power. (Mark 9:1).

According to Jesus the apocalypse and the salvation would have arrived in a few years, before some of his disciples would have died. Therefore, we suppose, not beyond twenty years.

To understand our thesis, it is important to point out that not all of humanity would have been saved by God, only the Chosen. What an individual should have done to be among the Chosen, besides to repent for his sins?

This is the fundamental element that distinguishes Jesus from the other apocalyptic prophets and it will be the subject of this work of ours. Who are the Chosen? What must you do to be a Chosen?

We will see this in the next chapter.

Both before and after Jesus, several apocalyptic prophets appeared in Israel; a short list.

The sect of the Essenes; we know it also from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of these Essenes, a thousand people, even withdrew from the Israeli society in a kind of monastic community, near Qumran, to wait for the arrival of God.

In the near future, at the end of time, God would have arrived and would have led the children of light (the Essenes) against the children of darkness (the renegade Jews and all the other nations). God would have triumphed in a final battle (the mother of all battles) and the children of light would have entered a new wonderful kingdom.

It is believed that this community of Qumran joined the rebels in the first Jewish war thinking that the time of the final battle had arrived. They were wrong; they were completely destroyed by the Romans.

A few years after Jesus a prophet called Theudas assembled a large crowd of followers promising miraculous events that would have set the Jews free. The Romans did not wait for these events and, fearing that the situation could worsen, sent their troops, massacred the rebels and took the severed head of the leader to Jerusalem.

A few years later a prophet called the Egyptian assembled a crowd of followers promising to tear down the walls of Jerusalem and marched on the city. Again the Romans did not wait; they intervened and exterminated the crowd.

Just before the first Jewish war, another prophet appeared who, by chance, was called Jesus the son of Ananias. This Jesus went around crying to repent because the end was near. The priests of the Temple delivered him to the Romans asking to execute him but the prefect of the time, who was no more Pontius Pilate, decided not to humiliate the Roman justice to the foolishness of the Jews and, after having flogged the wretch almost up to his death, satisfied himself that he was just a poor fool and there was nothing to be feared. He sent Jesus free. This Jesus died during the siege of Jerusalem hit by a stone thrown by a Roman catapult while he was going around crying the end of the world.

The most famous prophet of all, we know him from the Gospels, is John the Baptist. The introduction of John the Baptist requires an extended analysis because he will have a decisive influence in the life of Jesus.

John the Baptist had abandoned society, had withdrawn himself to a desert place on the shores of the river Jordan, near its mouth on the Dead Sea and from there he was preaching the end of the world.

Jesus of Nazareth was attracted by this prophet, left his family in Galilee and joined him. Thus his conversion began to apocalyptic prophet; we suppose he was thirty years old:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. (Mark 1:9).

The Gospel of Matthew presents us the Baptist:

In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying,

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make His paths straight.’

This same John had clothing made of camel’s hair, a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region around the Jordan went out to him, and were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said to them, "O generation of vipers, who has warned you to escape from the wrath to come? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not think to say within yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is put to the tree roots. Therefore, every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

I indeed baptize you with water to repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean His floor and gather His wheat into the granary, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (Matt 3:1-12).

We note that John the Baptist practiced baptism and confession. These rituals were not in use in the Judaic religion, it seems they were original of the Baptist.

They will become two sacraments of the Christian faith.

We cannot but being impressed by the strong charge of hatred which motivated these prophets. What did the Sadducees and Pharisees do to provoke such anger?

These sects were very important in the Jewish society of the time; we must introduce them because they will have a determinant part in the life and, most of all, in the death of Jesus.

The Pharisees were a sect of Jews ultra-observant of the Law; pedant and fanatic to the point of manic obsession. The problem was that the Law had not been defined precisely by the Bible. For instance, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath, a crime which carried the death penalty in the Bible, did not specify if traveling was to be considered work and, if this were the case, how far you should go in order to be considered work and therefore to be forbidden. The Pharisees put themselves to the task and produced a set of rules that will be included in the sacred text of the Talmud two centuries after Jesus. To do this they had to live apart from the other Jews in order not to be contaminated by their sins; matter of fact they put themselves into a ghetto inside the Israeli society. It is very important to comprehend the Pharisees because Jesus will distance himself from such a fanaticism and the Pharisees will offer the Christians the benchmark to define Christianity relative to Judaism. This is why in our Gospels there are many events where Jesus measures up to them even if this does not seem possible. The Pharisees were a small part of the people and they could not be everywhere to meet Jesus wherever he went.

The Pharisees did not enjoy the sympathies of the Israeli public opinion because of their manic obsession with the Law so that they focused all their efforts on the observance of formal rules forgetting the love of neighbor although this was a precept of the Bible too.

The Sadducees were considered the Israeli aristocracy; they were mainly made up of the priests who administered the Temple of Jerusalem.

The Temple was the most important building of the Jews because it was the house of God. God was everywhere, of course, but he dwelled in the Holy of Holies which was the innermost room of the Temple where only the High Priest could enter, just once a year, to perform a sacrifice to atone for the sins of all the Jews. This room was totally empty and there was no image of God because God is a supernatural being and cannot be represented.

The Law of Moses prescribed that ritual sacrifices of animals had to be done in several occasions and these sacrifices could be done only in the Temple. Problem was that there was one Temple only for all the Jews of the world and all the Jews of the world had to contribute with a tax to the building and maintenance of the Temple.

It was a huge building; its construction was started in 516 AC and was terminated thirty years after the death of Jesus. It was destroyed by the Romans seven years later; what a pity.

The administration of the Temple was matter of fact, a huge exploitation of the Jewish people. First of all, the faithful had to change their money into the official currency of the Temple at the desks of the money changers who were at the entrance, afterwards they had to buy one of the animals kept in the Temple (if they did not take this animal with them) to have it killed. The Levites, who were the assistants of the Sadducees, took care of the animals. They selected them for the sacrifice, then quartered them and gave the meat to the faithful to take home to eat. All this was expensive, starting from the money change. For this reason, the Temple and the Sadducees were unpopular with many Jews and, in particular, they were hated by the apocalypticists who considered all this matter a blasphemy.

From their part, the Sadducees considered themselves the only interpreters of the Bible and considered blasphemous the work done by the Pharisees who had produced their interpretation of the Law. Since the Bible was the word of God, nothing could be added to it even if in many cases the faithful remained in doubt of which were the right thing to do.

However, the majority of the Jews accepted these rituals because so it was written in the Bible. The Sadducees were the most authoritative chaste of the Israeli society which they ruled through a council, the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees with their Sanhedrin were the only authoritative interface the Roman prefect had in Judea. The Romans needed the Sadducees to keep in check the people of Israel; the Sadducees needed the Romans to keep alive the cult of the Temple. All this, of course, made the Sadducees particularly unpopular with many Jews who considered them traitors who had sold out to the enemy.

It was an explosive situation that could be hold only if the parties concerned, the Romans, the Sadducees, the other sects and the mass of the Israeli population were ready to step back but without compromising their power.

It is important to consider the relationship that Pontius Pilate had with the Sanhedrin and especially with the High Priest, Caiaphas. In fact, Pilates managed to achieve a truce, unstable but long lasting, with the Sanhedrin which lasted throughout his administration, bearing all the insanities of the Israelis and thus obtaining a peace and a respect for the Roman administration that will cease when Pilate was removed and substituted by another prefect who will not have the same tolerance of Pilate and will provoke the final break up between the Roman Empire and Israel.

Moreover, as far as the history of Jesus is concerned, we must specify that the Sanhedrin in Judea, like the king Antipas in Galilee, had ample powers and also a few troops to enforce its authority but it could not execute death sentences. The Romans had kept this power to themselves; therefore, the Sanhedrin had to find a way to convince Pilate to sentence Jesus to death.

Jesus could perform his ministry and provoke the Jews for so long, three years approximately, without being killed thanks to the pax romana that Pilate had realized.

I think that without this protection by the Romans Jesus would have not lasted so long.

In other words, would we have had Christianity without the presence of the Roman Empire in Palestine?

Jesus of Nazareth, the beginning

Our story, the preaching and the death of Jesus, begins when Jesus decides to leave the community of disciples that was born around John the Baptist:

After John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. (Mark 1:14-15).

He returns to his region, Galilee, but he does not return to his home in Nazareth. We suppose he had cut off contact with his family that, probably, did not approve his conversion to Apocalypticism. The majority of Israelis was faithful to the priests and to the cult of the Temple and was suspicious of these prophets who sowed disorder and pitted one Jew against the other.

Since then Jesus will be based in Capernaum:

Now when Jesus heard that John was put in prison, He left for Galilee. And leaving Nazareth, He came and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali, ... From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (Matt 4:12-17).

It happened that king Antipas had started a relationship and then married the wife of his brother, although he was already married. John publicly and repeatedly denounced the scandal without relenting. At the end Antipas had him arrested but, fearing the ire of the people, he kept him in jail and didn’t dare to execute him. But the new wife too hated John and after some time she managed to have him executed by Antipas.

The Gospels tell us about the differences between Jesus and John.

Jesus did not agree with John on the method of preaching, on his life style and on the content of the message to be preached to the people: his revelation was different and he wanted to announce it.

John set himself apart from society by withdrawing into the desert and the people had to travel a long journey to listen to him and to be baptized; his message was full of resentment and hatred.

Jesus on the contrary, wanted to go among the people, he would have lived among them, and he would have eaten and drunk with them without caring if they were law abiding or sinners (a very inconvenient thing for a rabbi) because the sinners were those who needed his word. He would have preached the Good News (Gospel) that the Kingdom of God was near, he would have brought a message of hope and not of condemnation: the hope in the salvation.

The arrest of the Baptist made Jesus decide to leave the community of the Baptist and to start his own ministry with his own disciples.

However, he will remain in contact with his old teacher by means of his disciples:

Now when John had heard in prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said to Him, Are You He who should come, or should we look for another?

Jesus answered them, Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. Blessed is he who does not fall away because of Me.

As they departed, Jesus began to say to the crowds concerning John, "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written:

‘Look, I am sending My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You.’

Truly I say to you, among those who are born of women, there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist. But he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has forcefully advanced, and the strong take it by force. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to receive it, he is Elijah, who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. (Matt 11:2-15)

Here Jesus expresses his pain for the fate of his teacher, John, that he believed had been sent by God. You can perceive his frustration and resentment against the people of Israel who did not recognize the greatness of John, thus rejecting the will of God.

This is how Jesus continues his lament against the people of Israel:

But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like children sitting in the markets, calling to their friends, saying:

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge to you, and you did not mourn.’

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a gluttonous man, a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is justified by her children. (Matt 11:16-19).

Here Son of Man refers to Jesus himself.

Jesus acknowledges with bitterness that the people of Israel did not convert to the apocalyptic messages, both his and of the Baptist, in spite they had tried two very different approaches.

The Baptist was a hermit and preached condemning the mores of his time with violence and the people had judged him possessed by a demon.

Jesus had chosen a different style, living among the people, preaching love and they had judged him a gluttonous and a drunkard, friend of the sinners.

Jesus compares this situation to a play played by the children in the villages.

When a group of children mimed flute players the other group should have danced but if a group played a lament for the dead the other should have mimed a weeping.

The people of Israel were similar to these children who did not want to play along and quarreled because they did not want to follow the other group and did not react neither if encouraged to joy nor to sadness.

In these few pages we have explained the situation in Palestine and how Jesus started his mission but, before illustrating the revelation received by Jesus, we want to clarify two expressions that often arise in our Gospels: Son of Man and Son of God.

These two characters appear in the Bible where they have a meaning opposite to what you could think.

The Son of Man was a divine being, not a human, which God will send down on earth to unleash the apocalypse. Would he have been an angel?

The Son of God was a human being whom the Jews considered so exceptional as to seem the son of God, he was a super hero but absolutely human. The king David, for instance, was called Son of God. The God of the Jews was a transcendent being who did not make children.

In the Bible this is quite clear but in the Gospels these characters, Jesus, Son of Man and Son of God, are mixed up and they overlap up to the point of producing a Jesus who synthesizes all these characters but not in their biblical meaning.

All the Gospels put these two expressions into the mouth of Jesus (sometimes) when referring to himself. In the Gospels these two expressions are not used in their biblical meaning, they will acquire a new, all Christian, significance.

For example, in this short passage from Mark it seems that Jesus refers to himself as both the Son of Man and the Son of God.

Whoever therefore is ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels." (Mark 8:38).

You can understand this if you consider that the pagan religion was full of mythological beings. The Gods often descended from Mount Olympus and copulated with human women producing children who were humans but super gifted.

This for Judaism was unthinkable and blasphemous because the Jewish God is a transcendent being and cannot possibly copulate with women producing human children.

For this reason, Christianity had to introduce a divine being, the Holy Spirit, which would have inseminated Mary without an actual sexual intercourse, leaving her virgin and producing a being that was at the same time god and man.

If Jesus had been born out of an actual intercourse between God and Mary, he would have ended up in the multitude of super heroes which crowded the Classical mythology and would have never become the God venerated by the Christians.

In other words, without the virginity of Mary Christianity would have not even started.

II - Jesus of Nazareth, his revelation

Which was the revelation received by Jesus?

Jesus prophesized that a divine being sent by God, the Son of Man, would have descended from the sky to put an end to this world and start a new world, the Kingdom of God, peopled by a minority of Chosen people.

The Son of Man would have put an end to this world with a cosmic cataclysm, a tragic event that, in order to destroy this world would have provoked death and devastation on a scale never seen before in history. Nobody could escape this devastation therefore the suffering would have been immense. Not even death could have been a refuge because at the end of the Apocalypse, when the divine fury would have ceased, everybody would have been raised from the dead to be subjected to the Universal Judgment. The doors of the Kingdom of God would have swung open for the Righteous while all others, the majority, would have been thrown into the eternal flames.

This Apocalypse was indispensable because the world had arrived to such a state of perdition, it was so infected by Evil, that it was no more possible to redeem it. The wrath of God would have run wild to destroy it in a way to make it possible to create a new world, always on this earth, where Evil would be no more.

Nobody could foresee when this apocalypse would have arrived but surely it would have happened in the space of a generation, therefore it was indispensable for the Righteous to be prepared to face this imminent catastrophe.

The revelation of Jesus in the Gospels

This is how the Gospel of Mark describes the apocalypse:

As He sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked Him privately, Tell us, when will these things happen, and what will be the sign when all these things will be fulfilled?

Jesus answered them, "Take heed lest anyone deceive you. Many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am He,’ and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be troubled. For such things must happen, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famines and troubles. These are the beginning of sorrows.

"But take heed. For they will hand you over to councils, and in the synagogues you will be beaten. You will be brought before rulers and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them. And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. But when they arrest you and hand you over, take no thought beforehand, or premeditate what you should speak. But speak whatever is given you in that time, for it is not you who speaks, but the Holy Spirit.

"Now a brother will betray his brother to death, and the father the son; children will rise up against their parents, and will cause them to be put to death. You will be hated by all men for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end shall be saved.

When you see the ‘abomination of desolation’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let him who is on the housetop not go down or enter the house to take anything out of his house. Let him who is in the field not turn back to take his garment. But woe to women who are pregnant and to those who nurse in those days! Pray that your escape may not be in winter. For in those days there will be distress as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created to this time, nor ever shall be.

"Except the Lord shortened the days, no flesh would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, whom He chose, He shortened the days. Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘Look, there He is!’ do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. But take heed. I have told you all things beforehand

But in those days, after that distress, ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give her light; the stars of heaven will fall, and the powers that are in heaven will be shaken.’

"Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. Then He will send His angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the farthest part of the earth to the farthest part of heaven.

Now learn a parable of the fig tree: When her branch is yet tender and puts outs leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things come to pass, know that it is near, even at the doors. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things happen. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

"But concerning that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Take heed, watch and pray. For you do not know when the time will come. For the Son of Man is like a man leaving on a far journey who left his house and gave authority to his servants and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.

Watch therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, in the evening, or at midnight, or at the crowing of the rooster, or in the morning— lest he come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you I say to all: Watch! (Mark 13:3-37).

The description of the apocalypse in Matthew is almost identical, just Jesus puts more emphasis on how it is unpredictable but that it should happen after the Gospel is announced to all the people of earth:

As He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age? (Matt 24:3).

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. (Matt 24:14).

For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together.

"Immediately after the tribulation of those days, ‘the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’

"Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. (Matt 24:27-31).

"Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord will come. But know this, that if the owner of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for in an hour when you least expect, the Son of Man is coming. (Matt 24:42-44).

"When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. Before Him will be gathered all nations, and He will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. He will set the sheep at His right hand, but the goats at the left. (Matt 25:31-32).

In Luke the description of the apocalypse is very similar but it ends in a less dramatic way:

Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts become burdened by excessiveness and drunkenness and anxieties of life, and that Day comes on you unexpectedly. For as a snare it will come on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Therefore, watch always and pray that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will happen and to stand before the Son of Man. (Luke 21:34-36).

In John the apocalypse is almost absent:

And He said to him, Truly, truly I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. (John 1:51).

Jesus answered him, Truly, truly I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. (John 3:3).

Now we must inform our readers that this apocalyptic vision of Jesus was not original of him. This divine character, the Son of Man, is taken from the Bible, from the book of Daniel (Dan 7:2-14) that was written two centuries before Jesus.

We must point out that all the vision of Jesus is well rooted in the Bible but, through his preaching first and with the advent of Christianity after, this vision will have an evolution completely new and unpredictable for the people of his time.

This evolution of Jesus' thinking, which begins with the Bible, will lead to the birth of a new religion: Christianity.

The revelation of Jesus, the Chosen

Let us shortly analyze the teachings of Jesus to see what the Righteous should do to enter the Kingdom of God.

Many are the teachings of Jesus and it is difficult to separate those that can be attributed to the historical Jesus from those inserted by the evangelists during the years of the building of Christianity.

What is important is to be aware that the teachings given us by Jesus were necessary to the Righteous to enter the