Aspirin99

I had an idea this morning that I wanted to run past you folks.

I'm writing a piece that describes how I think Christianity evolved. I believe that Christianity started first more as a moral instruction, similar to the Didakhe, but less defined theologically. This met with some initial success among those looking for strong morality. However, if a religious group is to prosper and grow, it must show why you should believe its message over someone else’s. If the message of Christianity was merely moral instruction, they could get that from a dozen other locations down the street.

This created the need for Jesus to be the Messiah - Whether this developed before or after Christ's death is a question (Yes, for this mental gymnastics, I'm going to assume Jesus was a real person. Just go with me on this part for now. It's not critical to the idea).

The danger of creating a messiah is that you piss off the Romans. So, they create a more gentle messiah. One that even the Romans might want to promote. One who turns the other cheek. One that doesn't rock the boat, so to speak. It was all about marketing Jesus to both the Jews and the Romans.

What do you think?

Sigma

But he did piss off both the Romans and Jews alike.

Consider the fundemental idea of this messiah:
He is sent by God to straighten out the human race (peacefully). He fails and is killed by humans on the cross. He was crap at being a messiah, so cultists create a story whereby he was made to die to save the human race.

Jesus, if true to his description, stood out because he preached love in a world where violence and corruption was the default language. I doubt he was especially unique or one of a kind, but he was just the one who made it into the bible.

neilgodfrey

The timing of Christianity's mass appeal can be a clue for a topic like this. Christianity didn't really really get going till from the latter second century and till then who knows how often it could have fallen into oblivion, let alone when it really started. (It's from the latter second century that the first significant material evidence for it begins to appear with architecture and funerary art.)

Daniel Reff's "Plagues, Priests, & Demons" (2005) is an interesting book that compares the sudden rise of conversions to Christianity in both the Old and New worlds and ties the popularity of the new religion in both places to the devastating sociocultural consequences of unprecedented plagues, beginning 165 in the Roman world. Conversions to the new messiah mushroomed in both worlds with the social devastation wrought by this apocalyptic rider.

Aspirin99

Thanks for the responses. Frankly, I have not thought this through fully. My main question is the real motive in making Jesus the messiah. If Paul was a Roman citizen and a trained theologian, he has the motive and the means. His motivations seem different than the later writers of the Gospels. Paul seems to provide the theological framework that others could build on. I'm just wondering if Paul didn't see Jesus as a way to save the Jews from themselves. He lived during a time of tremendous saber rattling.