PBS, please use the following as the synopsis for your excellent program “Frontline: From Jesus to Christ.” I don’t think you’re selling it to the nonreligious.



Jesus was an upper middle class, suburban kid who met a man named John. John was a nut job who wandered the country telling people the world was going to end. He convinced Jesus to become a traveling preacher, which Jesus did to some acclaim, especially in the area of healing.

Lots of people did this. It was a profession. Jesus would do things like mix his own spit with dirt and put it on wounds. And, clearly, the healing was to come from the treatment itself because he would, if the first treatment didn’t work, try another.

He also told people about God coming to Earth and “making things right,” which was a political statement that meant God was going to destroy the Roman Empire. Everyone hated the Romans, especially where Jesus grew up, and with good reason. The Romans had crucified thousands of people in the previous twenty-five years. (This means that the Romans crucified someone at least every four and a half days for a quarter century.)

So, what we know is that the Romans were REALLY EVIL.

Jesus kept to the countryside around his home town. The cities were full of Roman soldiers and the people there were of “such a high class” that they wouldn’t have been interested in his abilities. Then, one day, when he was in his mid to late twenties (Jesus was born around 4 AD, and this was between 27 and 33 AD) he decided to go into the city. He probably passed the permanent crucifix on his way into town that the Romans built for the purpose of torturing anyone who caused trouble, and it may well have had a dying or dead person on it who didn’t deserve to be crucified. It’s hard to imagine anyone who did.

This is a holiday and the city is packed with people. And one thing that these people all share is a belief in God. And it’s not just any god. It’s a god who is infinitely more powerful than any god ever conceived, and it’s a god who wipes out whole cities (cities in particular). If you’re in the city at that time, you die a horrible death.

Unless you’re warned.

Packed city. All believers. All don’t want to die. All certainly don’t want to be killed by God.

So Jesus goes to the temple market and starts upturning tables and telling people that God is coming.

From a historical perspective, it is very likely at this point that people went ape shit. And the Roman Empire did not like its people to go ape shit.

So the Romans killed Jesus. This was probably treated like any other crucifixion of the time. People went in and out of the city trying not to look. Nobody crowded around. The End. That is the last thing we know about Jesus from his own time.

Please buy this DVD. It’s really good.

NOTE: The one piece of archeological evidence, the plaque above the cross, that showed that Jesus was known as the King of the Jews at the time of his death, and therefore had a large following, was radiocarbon dated a few years after the program was made and was shown to be fake.



PBS website with full program

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