His popularity continues baffling me, considering he didn't actually do anything! He was likely one of the biggest failures there ever was.
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." -Chuck Palahnuik
Well.... so deeply impressing himself upon his followers that they experienced severe cognitive dissonance after his death - to such an extent that they came to believe he'd actually conquered the grave, ascended into heaven and revealed himself as a pre-existent divine being, motivating them to go on (after convincing a linguistically and intellectually gifted Pharisee called Paul that this story was true) to risk life and limb to disseminate his message to the four corners of the Roman Empire, sounds pretty successful if you ask me.
The only comparable example in history I can think of is the Chabad Rebbe Lubavitcher, whose followers in recent times after his death in the 1990s did something similar.
How many other people can legit say they've provoked a response in other people like that? Some of the most revered individuals in history only became truly famous and appreciated posthumously:
Gregor Mendel, who basically discovered genetics back in 1865... nobody took him seriously until 1915, some 30 years after his death in 1884.
Vincent Van Gogh - often referred to as 'the misunderstood genius' - was in life an utterly unappreciated artist who died in 1890 and could sell only 1 painting during his lifetime. Today his unrivalled art is a legacy and is priced in millions.
But I do agree with you to an extent: by the standards of his time and culture, Jesus
was a failure.
Something to bear in mind about ancient Roman and Jewish understandings of death:
‘The condition of human life is chiefly determined by its first and last days, because it is of the greatest importance under what auspices it is begun and with what end it is terminated.’
- Valerius Maximus (Memorable Doings and Sayings (“On Deaths out of the Ordinary”) 9.12 praef. LCL 493, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey)
A person’s birth and death were felt to be an indication of his or her true character.
On both accounts, his birth and death, Jesus '
failed' the test - and very badly - of true Roman manhood and heroism: he was born of peasants in Nazareth (a backwater derided even by Judean Jews "
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (
John 1:43)) and died the most ignoble torture-death. Cicero described crucifixion as
‘the greatest punishment of slavery’ (
Verr. 2.5), while Josephus labelled it ‘
the most pitiable of deaths’ (
War 7.203).
Jesus's "
true" character, then, in the eyes of Romans would have been as a piteous '
slave' and insurrectionist against the empire, abandoned by even his closest followers and left to endure the mockery of the crowds as he hung there naked and asphyxiated with a mock crown of thorns on his head.
As
Professor Helen K. Bond, an expert on this period, has noted:
"Crucifixion was the most shameful, brutal and degrading form of capital punishment known to the ancient world, reserved for slaves, brigands and any who set themselves up against imperial rule.
There is no getting away from the fact that Mark’s account, particularly in the crucifixion scene, is the very opposite of a “good death”: Jesus dies alone, in agonized torment, with no one to perform even the most basic rites. As Adela Collins puts it, Jesus’ death in Mark is “anguished, human, and realistic.”"
(see also, J. G. Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
But this is, paradoxically, what has made his tragic story so moving and powerful for so many people.
If I might quote Professor Bond again:
"...Jesus’ crucifixion was an attempt by the rulers of his day to consign not only his body but also his memory to oblivion. In many ways, Mark’s bios can be seen as an act of defiance, a refusal to accept the Roman sentence and an attempt to shape the way in which both his life and death should be remembered.
His work takes the place of a funeral ovation, outlining Jesus’ way of life and pointing to the family of believers who succeed him.
While men of higher class and greater worldly distinction might have had their epitaphs set in stone, Mark provides his hero with a written monument to a truly worthy life. Mark redeems Jesus’ death not by casting it as ‘noble’ or conventionally ‘honourable,’ but by showing that it conforms perfectly to his counter-cultural teaching..."
(Bond, H 2018, 'A fitting end? Self-denial and a slave’s death in Mark’s life of Jesus' New Testament Studies)
The Romans 'failed': his memory and words did not die with Him. They both lived on, and are still living today, because a small group of people continued to believe in him and love him above everything basically and were determined to give as an epitaph on paper what he had been denied in stone. And it worked - 2,000 years later, billions of people are still worshipping this guy.
If you think about it
@Rival Jesus
died how he had lived and preached.
His preaching in life had been: "
the least among all of you is the greatest" (
Luke 9:48):
25 But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that among the nations, those who appear to be their kings lord it over them, and their 'great' men are tyrants over them. 26 But it shall not be this way among you, rather whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, 27and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave; 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (
Matthew 20:25-28)
And he died the 'least' among all, at the hands of the kind of tyrannical rulers he so inveighed against (Pilate and Caesar) as examples not to imitate in their exploitation of the weak.
The English historian Tom Holland wrote an excellent article about this very thing on Good Friday this year:
When Christ conquered Caesar - UnHerd
The utter strangeness of Easter does not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine. As Nero well knew, the border between the heavenly and the earthly had always been viewed as permeable. Divinity in the Roman world, however, was understood to be for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and Caesars. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself; to have a person stabbed in the womb, or gelded and made to live forever as a member of the opposite sex, or smeared in pitch and set to serve as a human torch.
That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.
Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim he had come. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.
This Sunday, when billions of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong" (1 Corinthians 1:7).
