Titans of History

As well as performing miracles, Jesus preached and his main message was the imminence of the kingdom of God, the Apocalypse and Judgment Day in which eternal life awaited those who repented and believed in him. He approved of poverty as a state of grace and chose to surround himself with sinners and the deprived, asserting that he was sent to preach not to the righteous but to those who had strayed. Jesus also taught the forgiveness of enemies and the observance of a humble and pious moral code.

According to some of the Gospels, he saw himself as the Messiah (or Christ), others claimed he used instead the vaguer “Son of Man.” A student of the Jewish prophets, his every act was a conscious fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel and others. But he mocked the Temple’s priestly aristocracy and Herodian princelings and that, coupled with his apocalyptic message, made him a threat to the Romans too. Judaea was disturbed by a constant succession of Jewish “pseudo-prophets” and self-declared Messiahs, all of whom were ruthlessly suppressed by the Romans. Jesus remained a practicing Jew and as such he knew that a Jewish prophet had to live and die in Jerusalem. So when, around AD 30, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover, he was a source of considerable concern to the city’s governors.

Roman troops were usually stationed in Jerusalem for Passover, as the crowds present spelled trouble. Soldiers would have watched Jesus’ triumphant entry into the city, mounted on a donkey. But he created far greater concern when he entered the city’s Temple, turning over tables as people convened to pay the temple tax and buy sacrificial pigeons.

The Jewish authorities were understandably aggrieved at the disruption, but the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate had already crushed a Galilean rebellion in the city. Pilate—notorious for his clumsy violence, tactless blunders and brutal repressions—would not tolerate any Jewish threats, particularly one connected to messianic expectations. Pilate encouraged the high priest to ensure Jesus was silenced. The high priest suborned one of Jesus’ disciples, Judas Iscariot, to betray him. After a final meal with his disciples—the Last Supper—at which they shared bread and wine, Jesus led his disciples to the Mount of Olives for prayer. Here, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was identified by Judas, arrested and taken before Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, who adjudged him guilty of blasphemy. Brought before Pontius Pilate, Jesus was sentenced to death. He was flogged, forced to drag a cross through the streets of Jerusalem, and crucified outside the city in the company of two thieves. It was clear from his crucifixion that his trial and execution were the acts of the Romans: had it been the act of the Jewish high priests, he would have been stoned.

Three days after Jesus’ death, sightings of him began to be reported. He did not reappear as a ghost, nor as a reanimated corpse, but was transformed in some mysterious way. After visiting a number of his acquaintances and friends, Jesus ascended to heaven, leaving his followers the task of establishing the Christian Church.

After centuries of persecution, the Christian Church eventually became the dominant religious force in the Western world. While Catholics, Protestants and others have at times been responsible for appalling excesses in the name of their particular denomination or viewpoint, Jesus’ philosophy of pacifism, humility, charity and kindness has endured through the ages. Judeo-Christian ideas provide the inspiration for, and foundation of, much of Western political thought, government and law, morals, art, architecture, music and literature.

Yet there is an irony in the story of Christianity: Jesus left no writings; the Gospels were mostly written forty years later, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in AD 70. Until then, the Christians, led by members of Jesus’s family, had prayed as Jews in the Temple. The destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of the Jews led to the final separation of Christianity from the mother-religion. However it is clear that Jesus saw himself as a Jew and not the founder of a new religion, but certainly a prophet, a reformer and the Son of Man, if not the actual Messiah. It was the dynamic visionary Saul of Tarsus, a Jew converted on the road to Damascus, who as Saint Paul forged Christianity as a universal religion based not so much on Jesus’s teachings, but on his sacrificial crucifixion and resurrection and the achievement of grace through faith in Jesus the savior of all mankind. It was Paul—keen to convert Gentiles, not just Jews—who made Christianity a world religion.

CALIGULA

AD 12–41

Make him feel that he is dying.

Caligula’s order when any of his victims was being executed, according to Suetonius