May 19th, 2008
Jesus of the day: "Jesus aux noce de Cana"
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One of my guests (Gabriele) brought up the question how it was possible for something like Christianity to develop in general. Even if Jesus lived, he must have been an extremely charismatic person to attract so many followers, and educated followers at that (it wasn't so common for people to know how to read or write at the times, so 80 gospels was quite a large number).
My theory is this: In the Old Testament, you find things that mainly deal with everyday life (not counting the wonders). The 10 Commandments a rules that ask for things you could morally manage to accomplish by willpower and they are designed to make life among people more peaceful.
Jesus however went further and asked for things that are hard to achieve with willpower, because the interfering instincts of homo sapiens are very strong: Love your neighbour as you love yourself. That's a sort of unconditional acceptance of other people that is difficult to follow through at a 100%. He even goes so far as asking us to love our enemies. Now that is outright illogical and goes against anything our instincts tell us. But we needn't go so far. "Love your neighbour as you love yourself. That asks for an unconditional acceptance of yourself, and we all now how difficult it is to do that. 2000 Years ago, the level abstraction of these thoughts must have been pretty high and hard to grasp. Not to lie and not to kill, these are easy, clear and manageable things (one should think). But to unconditionally accept yourself for what you are ...
To get to the point: I think that Jesus gathered a rather large following among the educated because he offered an abstract philosophy that was based on religion and faith (maybe in contrast to the greek philosophers but this is extremely thin ice I'm skaiting on).
That alone wouldn't have sufficed to create such a huge and well oiled machine as the church is today. I assume at some point some people realised how powerful a means Jesus' theories are in terms of manipulating people. Manipulation is not necessarily or excelusively a bad thing. Every teacher who aims for his students to find answers for themselves is manipulating his students. Every parent raising a child is manipulating a human being.
I believe that if Jesus' theories hadn't been advanced in some form and if these theories couldn't have been used for manipulation, religion would not be what it is today.
Find out more about this Jesus, click here.
TOMMI BREM © 2008