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What threw the Romans and nearly everybody else off kilter was the contention that Jesus had done these things after being crucified.
For them, crucifixion was the ultimate bad news about Jesus. The scandal of death by crucifixion was almost beyond our ability to comprehend. It was a state execution carried out by public, humiliating torture, reserved for rebellious slaves and the worst criminal dregs.
Roman society was all about empire: about winning, conquering, dominating. It idolized the strong, the heroic. People perceived as losers — slaves, the poor, prisoners, the sickly, the conquered — were fit only for contempt and abuse.
Jesus came along teaching unprecedented things about such outcasts: blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sick. The last will be first, and the first last.
Then he was crucified. And resurrected. Then he was raised into heaven as the rightful heir of God, as if he were God himself, or as if, you might say, he was the cosmic Caesar.
The idea that a crucified person could do this was simply madness. It made a hero of victims. It implied that God is closer to the weak than to the mighty. That any beggar might be divine. That the slave had triumphed over the master. That the tortured had bested the torturer.
Yet this new faith stuck, for multiple reasons beyond my limited space here. People who weren’t atop the cultural hierarchy found Christianity appealing, obviously.
St. Paul soon expanded the message, making it universal rather than local. Everyone is equal in God’s sight, Paul proclaimed. There’s neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Jew nor Greek. God loves everyone and will accept you regardless of your station in life.
These, too, were staggering concepts. Within four centuries of Jesus’ death, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, as Weiss observes in her introduction to the podcast. By then, Christianity had 30 million followers — half the empire.
The Christian message proved inherently subversive. Kings were no more important to God than any given beggar. Every human deserved to be treated with dignity.
As the centuries rolled along, such teachings sowed the seeds of revolutions, as I mentioned. They eventually led to the rights of free speech and religious practice — everyone, being made in God’s image, could keep her own conscience and speak her own mind, up to and including denying God’s existence.
Because Christianity began with Jesus, the ultimate victim of misused power, it bestowed “an inherent virtue within victimhood,” Holland said.
“The idea that to be oppressed is the source of power. I mean it’s a very radical idea that Christianity weaponizes and has weaponized again and again and again. It would seem mad to the Romans that to be a victim would be something that you could weaponize. … (But) that is still going very, very strong.”
Today we encounter such ideas in the air we breathe, not to mention the news we consume. We take them for granted. Nevertheless they, and our way of life, wouldn’t exist without Jesus and the religion he inspired.
Christianity has never managed to fully embody all the lofty ideals it proclaimed. It’s taken a sadly circuitous path in its quest for equality, justice and mercy, with countless failures. But it is undeniably the source for much of what is best about our way of life.