Ah, but Jesus was a teacher. Apparently a very brilliant one with unusual philosophical interpretations of the Law.

Had his memory not been used to establish a separate religion and later to attempt to destroy the Hebrew nation, who knows whether his POV might have taken hold? The first Christians were all Jews. It was Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, who made the case for not converting to Judaism before being admitted to the Christian community.

A couple of other things were at work during the time of Jesus which not only affected the way in which he could speak about God, but which also guaranteed that the people to whom he spoke could understand him.

First, the Pax Romana was finally established under Augustus, settling or at least suppressing the kind of warfare that the Jews waged in the earlier books of the Bible. So there was a lot lower return on warfare: start a fight, deal with a Legion or two. Not good. Power had to be built on influence and politics, not brute force. This leads to the sublimated conflict we call debate. Recall the teenaged Jesus in the Temple.

Second, Palestine, Syria, Judea, etc., had all spent a while under the cultural wing of the Greeks, whose influences were evident from at least 600 BCE. After the conquest of the area by Alexander (332 BCE), it was occupied in ping-pong fashion by the Greek Ptolemies of Egypt and the Greek Seleucids of Persia. (Jews around the world remember the Seleucids at this season of Hanukkah in the person of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the villain in the story of the Maccabees.) The conflict between Jewish monotheism and the polytheism of the Greeks and the Hellenized Egyptians and Persians helped the Jews to develop a more complex approach to philosophy among their ruling classes -- which the Ptolemies considered equivalent to the priestly classes. (Cue the rise of the Sadducees and the Pharisees.)

The Jews had a large, independently administered community in Alexandria. The cultural exchange had an effect on literature and on teaching. Just as a fr'instance, as an undergrad I studied the Book of Job in literature. The influences of Greek theater are quite striking, especially if one has never looked at Job as a play before.

Last, we've all heard about the rise of the Eastern Mystery religions during the Roman period: new interest in the Delphic Oracle and others, as well as the Mithric cult from Persia/Parthia. The story of the God/Man who is ritually sacrificed (in Spring, no less) for the sake of mere mortals, and the importance of prophecy, are common threads in these spiritual fabrics. From yet another direction, the historical theologian John Dominic Crossan has, through examination of very early Christian artifacts and writings, identified Jesus with a very different philosophical school: the Cynics.

Imagine a Cynic spin on Jewish monotheism, fed by the Books of Genesis and Exodus, works of literary genius. Then put it in the mouth of a charismatic Galilean carpenter. Chew on that for a while. ;)

Jesus was a revolutionary. His teachings are usually presented to us in their personal and spiritual foci, but they have social and physical applications as well, which we ignore because they tend to break down the structures of authority.

The Jews rebelled against Roman authority, eventually, and suffered a political blow from which they never recovered. Jesus was an intellectual precursor of that physical rebellion. His version of it was more successful, because it turned hearts, and so was more lasting than military conquest, but it also could be turned to make people passively wait for the Second Coming or the next world, and so was less threatening to authority once the Emperor co-opted the Carpenter's legacy.

When Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, he didn't mean it was just around the bend. He meant it's here. Right here. He meant open your eyes and pick it up. Some days I have nerve enough. Those days are rare, but they are also very good days.

Regards--
Mary Anne