Last month was April, when the Christian celebration of Easter and the Jewish commemoration of Passover occur. On Good Friday, which was also the first evening of Passover, I was thinking about Jesus. If you know me or have read what I’ve said on this site about Jesus, you know that I subscribe to the view embraced by a number of important scholars that Jesus was an innovative, apocalyptic First Century Jew who gained a following based upon his belief that he had discovered God’s plan to redeem the tribes of Israel from the foreign domination and oppression that it had been living under for many centuries (during Jesus’ life, under the Roman Emperor Augustus).

According to Jesus, God was looking for a Jew who would inspire the commoners around him (and maybe even some of the Gentiles in the area) to live a highly ethical life involving the sharing of resources and equality; in return God would sweep away the Romans and even the corrupt upper-class Jews who were collaborating with them (including the Temple establishment, in which the Sauducees were prominent but even the Pharisees were represented). Once the oppressors were gone, God would appoint an earthly representative, a “Son of Man”, who would possess heavenly powers along with the authority to justly rule the good people who had earned their place. Jesus probably had an idea as to who could be appointed to the “Son of Man” role once the Kingdom had arrived — namely, himself.

I wondered that Friday evening, how did this fit in with the messianic expectations of the Jews, how did this relate to the Passover story of freedom from Egyptian oppression and slavery? OK, under Jesus’s plan, the Jews of Palestine would be set free from Roman oppression and taxation (and also from an overbearing and corrupt Temple establishment, the subject of Jesus’s demonstration outside the Temple against the coin traders). But Jesus’s theory was unlike the Exodus under Moses, as it did not involve the Jews rallying around a human leader as to start a secular nation, harking back to the kingships of Saul, David and Solomon. Under the messianic wishes of most Jews at the time, especially the rural traditionalist Jews, a day would come when they would once more rule themselves  »  continue reading …