Spinning this off from a thought I had in the SRIOTD thread where Marjorie Taylor Greene is being called out for the old “the Jews killed Jesus” canard. I never really understood why that was supposed to be a bad thing, since “Jesus died for your sins” is pretty much the crux of the entire religion.
Let’s stipulate that, for the purposes of this thread, the Biblical narrative is by and large true - Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham, born of a virgin, the Logos made flesh who was with God the Father at the beginning of time, and the way to the Father is through Him alone.
Depending on which Gospel you read, it’s not clear whether Jesus knows His fate is to be crucified to redeem mankind’s sins, and He certainly doesn’t fight it when the Romans come for him, but what if that just didn’t happen? Perhaps Judas refuses to betray him, or Herod sticks to his guns and refuses to execute him, or the crowd chooses to pardon him instead of Barabbas, and his Passover vacay in Jerusalem ends with him a free man. Where do things go from there, in both a historical and a theological sense?
What was Jesus the man planning to accomplish by going to Jerusalem if it wasn’t going to get him killed? What happens to the souls of mankind if there’s no divine sacrifice to atone for sin?
All that “crucifixion was necessary” stuff was created after the fact to explain why things went south for Jesus. If it hadn’t happened whatever did happen instead would have been retconned as “necessary” into the story.
If Jesus isn’t crucified, then you don’t have Christianity in anything like the form that we know it, and in that case I’m nto sure that the phrase “from a Christian perspective” has any determinable meaning. So the question posed is meaningless.
From a secular historical point of view, if Jesus weren’t crucified he would likely now be completely forgotten. But there’s a slim possiblility that the movement he led would have survived and that there would still be a living religious tradition which takes, or claims to take, its beliefs and practices from the teachings and example of Jesus. But, without the crucifixion, and associated belief in the resurrection, these would very likely be a very different set of beliefs and practices to those of real-world Christianity, since Christianity’s understandging of the teaching and example of Jesus is mediated through the signficance of his death and resurrection.
That’s fighting the hypothetical, isn’t it? I’m imagining a world where Jesus’ divinity isn’t in question and the practice of blood sacrifice as atonement for sin from the Old Testament is correct, but for whatever reason Jesus’ trip to Jerusalem doesn’t result in Him becoming a martyr. Where does He go from there?
That depends on whether Paul is still doing PR for the cause, or stays Saul. If he still pushes his version of the Jesus agenda (and if Jesus decides go along with it) then I’m sure Jesus would still be a celebrity of sorts…for a while. Eventually the lack of progress as promised in the Old Testament would be his downfall and I that, if new books are added by the Jews, there would be any mention of Jesus.
He would have complained about the new generation of disciples being too sensitive and how “you can’t even deliver a sermon on a mount these days” and 4 of the apostles would have eventually went on the record in a bombshell piece about how there was a history of verbal and physical abuse stretching back decades and a systematic pattern of sexual assault that Jesus was aware of and did nothing to stop.
Jesus would have taken 6 months out of the public eye before eventually coming back as a pro-pharisee, Make Rome Great Again, holy water peddler.
I don’t identify as a Christian, so it may seem misplaced for me to have a strong opinion. But from a Jesus of Nazareth perspective I think it is fair to say that’s the preferred way to go, to not get crucified. Maybe you understand him different but I don’t think his goal was to get himself killed. Accept the risk, sure, but that doesn’t conflate with “wants the crucifixion to happen”.
And it seems like Christianity ought to be tuning in to what it was Jesus wanted to happen, or why is it calling itself that?
Jesus had to drink the cup, and accepted the Father’s will over his own, though did ask the Father if there was a way not to do that.
That would seem to leave 2 options for the crucifixion not happening. 1: Jesus would not accept the Father’s will or 2 the Father changed His mind or it was a test (like Abraham ready to slaughter his son, which was canceled at the last moment) .
If it were 1, Jesus would have stepped outside the will of the Father, and thus break what we call the trinity, ‘God is one’. Which I suspect would have the same consequences as Adam and Eve eating the fruit. Jesus would be man in a fallen state.
If it was 2, Jesus would not be the way, as salvation would not be through Jesus. This would run contrary to the Father’s purpose of glorifying His son and having Jesus receive His inheritance, which was apparently the purpose of creation. There would always be the separation between God and us, instead of brother/sisterhood through Chirst.
IANA a believer, but I’m pretty well-versed in the historical aspects and in scripture.
Ultimately, the resurrection is Jesus’ proof of divinity. He wasn’t just a rabble-rousing stump preacher; He was the Real Thing. The crucifixion was merely the necessary prep step to the resurrection. And an especially iconographic one. Nowadays we’d call that “camera-friendly” as in “if it bleeds it leads”. So it’s easy for subsequent authors to fetishize.
So in the OP’s alternate timeline, Jesus’ challenge is to come up with a different way to prove his divinity; to prove he’s worth listening to down the ages to now. Once he’s done that, the rest of selling either the “eternal life through me” or the “Jesus is love” or any of the other main narratives of conventional real-world Christianity becomes readily doable. The details of how those stories would evolve will of course be a bit different, but the broad strokes could certainly be almost the same.
So what other proofs could he offer? Mass miracles are the obvious ones. A couple healings of a couple lame folks is nice and all, but how about poof into existence a temple made of materials the ancients had never seen that still exists today, impervious to the ravages of time? Maybe great feats of mass kindness, or mass cruelty. etc.
ISTM that whichever form of miracle(s) were chosen would influence the relative importance of the various narratives, dare I say slogans, of the multithreaded braid that are the central tenets of Christian thought about what Jesus and his life mean to us now.
e.g. If Jesus had committed the genocidal depopulation of all Egypt with the wave of His hand to make a homeland for His people, that’d yield a different story than if He chose to make the entire desert from modern Libya to modern Turkey to modern Saudi Arabia bloom by abundant annual rainfall that continues to this day.
Years ago, in a book of graffiti, there was one example that said “Easter is cancelled this year. They found the body.”
But notwithstanding that, I think, in answer to OP’s question, that most of the currently Christian world (practicing or otherwise) would be Jewish (perhaps some other level of orthodoxy) instead of Christian.
In the hypothetical, Jesus is the incontrovertible Messiah. That means, absent the crucifixion, he goes on to do the things the Messiah is supposed to do if he doesn’t get sidetracked by a bunch of fishes and loaves and feet-washing.
This means ushering in the messianic age and, you know, establishing an eternal kingdom of peace and goodwill.
Judaism doesn’t proselytize, it is an older sort of religion that doesn’t claim to be universal - it’s intrinsically linked to a specific ethnic group. So I doubt you’d have half the world turn Jewish (although if Christianity and Islam don’t arise there might be quite a few more Jewish people alive today).
If Jesus stays Jewish then he might be a big figure in Judaism but he wouldn’t have as many converts.
If he creates a more universalist religion then that religion may have spread the way Christianity did, but like Christianity did, at some point it would stop being a Jewish faith.
What if Jesus was a successful messiah as understood in his day? As in, he leads a successful revolt against the Romans and is crowned king of a new Jewish dynasty in Israel?
The fact that he is successful in doing so implies to me a weaker Roman empire, which means less of a check on the eventual rise of a Sassanid empire. So Jesus’s heirs would likely be conquered by the Persians eventually.
I really do wonder whether a different religion would have eventually made the jump to universalism and been as succesful in spreading. If so, that faith would likely fill the same role that Christianity and Islam did.
It does seem as if Christianity really took off as a universalist faith when the Romans needed a religion to bond their empire together, so you have to wonder whether they or another large empire would have eventually made a different religion for their purposes. Maybe we’d all be Manichaeists today.
Yes that makes sense. So I wonder if the alternative would be that we would all be either a bunch of pagans of various flavours or descendants thereof.
My next statement is based on old, vaguely remembered something about Lewis Mumford stating that characteristics of Christianity led to systematic and analytical approaches that led to the scientific revolution (again, I don’t recall the specifics and I may be wrong); there is a Wikipedia article about Christianity and science (Christianity and science - Wikipedia) that discusses this in depth.
All that to say, what would be the impact on science?
I think the MTG stuff is more about the idea that “the Jews” killed Jesus, as opposed to “the person who betrayed Jesus was a Jew, and the Romans crucified him.” One paints the entire ethnoreligous group as being responsible for the Crucifixion, and the other doesn’t make it the responsibility of the entire group.
But I’m with the others, in that Christianity as it stands today, pretty much HAS to have Jesus die and rise again. Without that, it’s something else. As I understand it, the whole rising from the dead was the big “proof” of his divinity and an integral part of the whole redemption aspect of the death and resurrection.
Without that, he’d have potentially been another prophet at best, I suspect.
I think that would make a fascinating alt history setting, where universalist proselytizing religions never took off and instead different regions of the world follow different polytheistic religions. Maybe the Roman/Hellenic idea of “our god X is your god Y” takes off, and that’s how different regions view the people in other regions; maybe you get Mystery Cults to the Feathered Serpent in the Hellenic world once the Americas are discovered, etc…
I would disagree with this. A lot of that kind of thinking was present in ancient, Pagan Greece; and in fact, the church labeled that sort of logic Pagan, because it could lead someone to notice inconsistencies in church teachings.
The only reason that the Western world didn’t have to start from scratch is that the Muslim Arabs prserved many Greek writings, and this was then translated back into European languages during the Renaissance.
Not to mention the scientific ideas from India and China that certainly weren’t inspired by Christianity.
