Jesus stated that his powers to cure and drive out demons were the sign that he was the enigmatic “Son of Man” of Jewish legend who would come “not to replace the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them.” He held that his mission was to purify and prepare only fellow Jews for the imminent end of times and the triumphant return of Yahweh, who would smite Israel’s enemies as the old sagas foretold.
This kingdom would not consist simply of Jews happily freed from foreign oppression, but would see them at last installed in their rightful place “to rule the nations with a rod of iron” as the chosen people of a jealous god who claimed dominion over all humanity. This is the core expectation of the Old Testament in its Messiah myth. It is epitomized in the promises of Psalm Two, of 1 Chronicles 29, Numbers 23, Deuteronomy 33, and in the messages of the blood-and-thunder prophets Ezekiel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, et al., that a worldwide Judaic theocracy was divinely preordained.
This is also the clear message of the synoptic Gospels, but by the time John’s Gospel was composed fifty years later, the tale had become reimagined into something metaphysical and universal, because nothing had happened as Jesus predicted it would. Meanwhile, the Apostle Paul, who never met Jesus, reshaped the dead man’s legend into a new cult that would eventually be called Christianity.
We know today that Jesus’ allegedly great moral principles were not original with him, but were adaptations or paraphrases of contemporary Jewish thought cobbled together for the end times emergency. His unrealistic exhortations to “turn the other cheek”, to love one's enemies, to give away all one’s possessions and so on, clearly show his perspective that this world was about to pass away, so that practical strategies for daily living were no longer important.
Jesus was mistaken in this his unique belief, and he suffered a gruesome fate on a Roman cross for his delusion. As his poignant story was told and retold in the larger world beyond the Galilee, it became mixed with elements of unmistakably pagan theology - divine paternity, virgin birth, a three-day stay in the underworld followed by a universally redeeming return to life, and more. These things had no cognates in Judaism and would have been abominable heresies to the pious Jew who Jesus actually was.
Let us also remember that when Christianity took over the shrunken remnant of the once mighty Roman empire, its male-only priesthood stamped out religious freedom by imperial decree and by mob violence. Their fanatic acolytes destroyed ancient temples, hospitals, theaters, and universities, murdered priests, priestesses, professors and doctors, pillaged centuries of secular and sacred artwork, and burned books everywhere. In the process they demonized women, gays, and nonbelievers, projecting their morbid sexual obsessions onto a people now barely more than slaves to an authoritarian church backed by the unyielding power of an autocratic empire. This was the natural continuation of the ethnocentric intolerance that Christianity inherited from its origin in the nationalist faction of second temple period Judaism.
In their wisdom, our Founders made certain these horrors would not be repeated in their bold new experiment in self-government. It was not accidental that our own United States was the first western government in fourteen centuries that refused to establish Christianity as its official state religion.
