No…they killed him because he represented a risk to the standing power structure.
They strung him up next to common criminals to lower his status, to make his whole idea seem insignificant.
No comment on weather he was supernatural.
Yeah and the Romans were always 100% accurate in their historical accounts, right?
air of ‘i’m special’
risk to the standing power structure
These two ideas are arguably very similar. Claiming religious or political standing is both claiming an air of uniqueness and a threat to the status quo, and to my understanding this guy was doing both. ☺️
The argument made is that the Romans saw no threat. The Romans didn’t give a fuck about the religious part. As far as they were concerned he was no threat.
That’s how the story goes at least, a story rewritten over and over by Romans so why would they make themselves look bad?
Absolutely not. He was claiming to be the King of the Jews. He was literally claiming political power. He wasn’t just saying “hey I’m a super cool religious figure.”
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
– Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Immediately after she realized it, the Earth gets destroyed.)
I’ve re-read it many times, along with re-listening to the radio series, the LPs, re-watching the TV series, I can even appreciate the feature film, despite it being the least of the versions. I dearly love Douglas Adams.
The only thing I haven’t done in many, many years is play the INFOCOM game. Too devious.
let’s maybe not push the propagandic idea that humans are inherently bad, humans are in fact inherently extremely friendly (to a fault) and the idea that the opposite is true is part of what’s needed to restrain our inherent need to help others.
Any time a group of humans is placed in a difficult position they start working together, there’s that famous example of a group of kids accidentally ending up basically recreating Lord of the flies except they just got along and eventually had pretty comfortable lives, because as it turns out working together makes things way easier!
Humans mostly help each other. Governments do not like challenges to their authority. Jesus was killed because of the challenge he represented to the Pharisees. Ultimately Rome killed him, but at the demand of the Pharisees and an unruly mob that had been whipped into a frenzy.
They killed him because all he did was preach the apocalypse and the end times to a bunch of poors that began upsetting the power dynamic.