Lekatt, sorry it took me so long to respond. to be honest I sort of forgot about this thread.
Your points about compassion and forgiveness are usually held up as original to Jesus, but in fact much of what Jesus said was already present in Jewish tradition (not to mention Buddhist, Hindu, etc.) In fact many of Jesus’ teachings were very similar to those of Rabbi Hillel a century before. For example, compare the “Golden Rule” with this quotation from Hillel :
What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: this is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; now go and study. - Rabbi Hillel, Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a
For that matter, take a look at Leviticus 19:18
There are similar variations of the Golden Rule present in virtually every other world religion, including many pre-Christian religions. Jesus’ ethical teachings in this area may have been admirable, but they were not startling or unique, even in his own Jewish tradition.
When I say that Jesus was “subversive” on the other hand, I’ll start with one of your own citations, i.e. “…the Kingdom of God is within you now.”
This is subversive because it undermines the authority of the church as an intermediary between the individual and God. Jesus basically said that access to God is available to anyone, at anytime, and that such access does not need to be moderated or brokered by religious institutions. This was probably best embodied by Jesus’ symbolic “destruction” of the temple; the act for which he was probably crucified.
Jesus was also quite radical in other ways. John Crossan speaks of two significant aspects of Jesus’ ministry in particular. The first is what Crossan calls “open commensality” or common dining. First century Palestine was a very stratified and rigid in its social classes. It was something akin to the Indian caste sytem in this respect. Who one associated with, ate with, or even touched was fraught with perils to perceived ritual “purity.” When Jesus ate with prostitutes, drunks, etc., this was much more radical in his own social context than it sounds to us today.
Crossan’s other discussion centers around what he calls the “radical egalitarianism” of Jesus. The culture that Jesus lived in perceived social conditions as being mandated by God. The poor, the outcast, the “meek” of Jesus’ beatitudes, were thought to be so because they were being punished by god. So for Jesus to say “blessed are the meek” was subversive in the sense that it inverted the accepted moral worldview.
Even Jesus’ “healings” were subversive. First of all, it should be understood that “healing” did not literally mean “curing.” They are two different words with different meanings. “Healing” referred to a spiritual exercise. If a person had “leprosy” for instance (this was not leprosy as we think of it today btw, it was just a generic term for any kind of skin condition, including eczema and psoriasis) He was considered “unholy.” When Jesus “healed” lepers, it was a social healing. He was accepting them as spiritual equals. In the book of Mark, when Jesus heals a leper, he is actually rendering himself ritually unclean simply by TOUCHING an “unclean” person. By doing so, Jesus was forcing people to either accept the “leper” into the community or to reject Jesus himself. Ditto all the dining with sinners. Jesus was sort of throwing himself onto a grenade of social conventions, risking his own social acceptance in order to bring such acceptance to others. These acts of Jesus, I believe, are the true marks of his greatness. He was not necessarily unique in that he elevated compassion over law; love over ritual “purity.” He was, however heroic in his committment and sacrifice for those beliefs.