Talking with some friends about the new pope and whatnot, I’m rapidly realizing that I’m woefully ignorant about the ‘roots’ of Christianity (raised Jewish, now a self-styled Godless Heathen).
Did Jesus’ original followers have a name? Not Christians, but…____? Were they mostly Jews? Romans? Both?
(this one, I think, may end up in GD territory, and I apologize in advance to the mods if it does.) Why did ‘they’ kill Jesus? Basically, was he just be a general rabble-rouser and making the higher-ups nervous? Was it a theological thing? Something entirely different?
I’ll try to tackle this, and I’m sure others will come along and give their insights as well.
Jesus’ original followers were Jews. The gospel was not taken to the gentiles until after his death, and they were not called Christians until later. Originally they were considered another sect of Judaism.
There are many reasons put forth as to why Jesus was killed. Most of the plotting came from the Sanhedrin, or ruling body of the Jews, led by Caiaphas and his father-in-law Annas. Partly they were afraid of losing political clout as they saw Jesus growing in popularity with the people. They also had a financial axe to grind, since Jesus on two occasions raided the temple and threw out the moneychangers and those who were selling birds and animals for sacrifice. These concessions were mostly run by Caiaphas & Annas, Inc.
There are lots of other political and social forces at work here, including the fact that many of the Jews looked to the promised Messiah as one who would free them from Roman bondage, and were then disappointed when he didn’t.
I know this is not a complete answer, but I think it touches on the basics.
I think that the Sanhedrin aslo had a slightly more noble goal in mind: prevent the Jews from being squished by nervous Romans. Any person/people as popular as Jesus was (yes, even the Beatles ;)) has/have a lot of clout that could potentially be turned to violence. Think about the Messiah prophesies. He was supposed to, as FatBaldGuy said, “free [the Jews] from Roman bondage.”
Now, if you’re the people in charge and you see someone who can draw crowds of thousands to his sermous and is welcomed into the region’s capital city with open arms, that’s already a lot to worry about. If many are saying that he’s the Messiah that’s supposed to beat you down, that would give you further reason to worry. So, the Sanhedrin wanted to remove this potential excuse for a Roman crackdown.
His early followers were called disciples. The first twelve (who were at the Last Supper) were disciples, and further were the Apostles (note the capital “A”).
All very true, but a disciple is a generic word for someone who follows another (derived from the same word as discipline). It wasn’t applied exclusively to Jesus’ followers.
Incidentally, to address a common misconception: Those temple merchants were not only allowed under Jewish law, but mandated. If a Jew lived too far from the Temple to be conveniently able to bring his own animals to be slaughtered, it was expected for him to sell the animals locally and buy new sacrificial animals at the Temple. Now, it may be that the merchants were price-gouging, and it may be only that to which Jesus was objecting (the Gospels are not entirely clear on this point), but their presence was not in itself illegal.
If you’re asking what really happened in the same sense as what really happened to Socrates or Marcus Aurelius, note that there really is only “bare historicity” of a man called Joshua (Jesus) who was crucified and conceived the parables and revolutionary philosophy described in the New Testament.
That’s it. No more. The Gospels were simply works of fiction written decades later by people who had never met anyone who had met Joshua the man. He could not even have been all that popular (certainly no 5000 strong audiences, miraculously fed or not) since such gatherings would certainly have been mentioned by contemporary historians.
If he was crucified, it was likely just for being a bit of a weirdo in the midst of a brutal Roman occupation where you might get crucified for anything.
This being GQ, let’s confine ourselves to the facts. And the facts are that we don’t know for sure who wrote the gospels, but it’s not at all impossible that those who did had at some point encountered Jesus (or Joshua, or Yeshua, or whatever language you want to refer to him in) or at least met someone who had. The gospels were probably written during the first century. (See the Staff Report here.)
As for your second claim, are you really saying that, throughout history, the only gatherings of 5000+ people there have ever been have been noted by contemporary historians in accounts that have survived to this day?
Rather than engage you in debate in this forum with point-by-point parsing, I will just state the fact that that was an extremely controversial and speculative post that amounts to nothing more than an editorial.
As others have gently sauteed Sentient Meat over his discourse in this quote, I won’t join. However, factually here’s what we can establish:
At some point between 60 and 100 AD, four polemic works, aimed at portraying the life and work of one Iesous (in Greek, for which the Hebrew appears to have been Yeshua, the same name that gave rise to “Joshua”), were written. Each was an attempt to portray Him in a particular manner, in a way that made his teachings and life make sense to those who had committed to follow Him. Of the four, Luke seems to have come the closest to what modern objectivity in biography would expect, but none of the four were interested in the slightest in historical objectivity: their intent in writing them was theological, not biographical.
It seems a reasonable conclusion that there was an actual historical figure behind these portraits, but like Socrates as portrayed by Plato and Xenophon, the actual “historical Jesus” is masked by the writings which depict Him in service of an ulterior motive.
The works were not fiction. But they were written according to First Century understanding of biography, and hence some highly erroneous conclusions can be drawn from them. (For example, the text of Matthew 5:3-7:27 alleges itself to be the Sermon on the Mount – and it’s as sure as anything in Biblical criticism can be that this is not a verbatim transcription of what Jesus may have preached at the time and place Matthew sets it, but a reconstruction based on His teachings. This was as kosher and non-misleading in those times as an accurate indirect quotation is now. For me to say, “Ed Zotti said that SDMB staff will not disclose personal information about members,” does not imply to anyone that Ed said those exact italicized words at any time or place, but is clearly understood by all as a report of the meaning of what he might have said regarding that issue; so likewise any literate person in the first century would not assume Matthew to be doing verbatim reportage but the equivalent of a long indirect quotation: “Jesus taught these kinds of things about righteous behavior and faith on different occasions, and here’s a summary of them as He might have taught them in this particular one.”) Matthew is also hot on the idea that Jesus was the promised Messiah, and will quote the Tanakh, sometimes wildly out of context, at the drop of a yarmulkeh. Each of the others has his particular theme, and paints Jesus as having fulfilled some metaphysical role or other. They were, however, not fiction per se, but polemic biography, intended to bolster faith.
Albert Schweitzer made a diligent but failed effort to unearth the “historical Jesus” from this welter of information.
Some other of SM’s comments are most emphatically not GQ-appropriate. There are a lot of events that would make CNN today that are not mentioned or barely touched on in secular histories of the time. A gathering of 5,000 Jewish men to hear Jesus teach? Outside Christianity, who would record it, and why? The info. on the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, on Bar Kochba, on Mani, on whatever the historical analogue to Mithras may have been, is far scarcer. Things they may or may not have done are not recorded anywhere.
Also, Roman law was extremely strict, but in theory scrupulously fair, though military governors, Pilate among them, were not noted for being that fair in practice.
Many respected Christian scholars (such as Burton Mack) find the justification given in the Bible for the alleged Crucifixion to be grossly inadequate. For Mack, et. al., this is one of the many large failures of the NT which makes the story wildly improbable and nearly impossible for critical thinkers to believe.
They were known first as The Way, then “by divine providence” later called Christians. Mostly of Jewish origin at the start, they gained membership from non Jewish populations by means of fairly aggressive proselytising.
