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By Root 412 0

are not unlike Messiah Cults, including a first-century one that arose in an eastern province of the Mediterranean surrounding a man who was said to have the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, and preached love, forgiveness, and the worship of the one true God. Roman authorities, fearing that his expanding fellowship might pose a social or political threat, arrested him and had him put to death. Following his execution, his disciples said he rose from the dead, appeared to them to deliver a message, and then ascended to heaven. The messiah was Apollonius of Tyana, who was killed in A.D. 98, six decades after his more famous predecessor, Jesus of Nazareth. As Randel Helms notes: “Readers … may be forgiven their error [confusing Apollonius and Jesus] if they will reflect how readily the human imagination embroiders the careers of notable figures of the past with common mythical and fictional embellishments.”

The common mythical embellishment of the Jesus legend, like that of the Ghost Dance and Cargo Cults, is the now-familiar oppression-redemption or messiah myth. By the first century A.D. the Jews were engulfed within the Roman empire and feared for their very existence as a people. The regions around and including Nazareth were ruled by King Herod, who endured and responded with violence to numerous Jewish revolts against the Romans. By A.D. 6 Judea was under direct Roman rule. A youthful Jesus, who was now ten years old (probably born in 4 B.C.), must have been painfully aware of the tensions between his people and their oppressors, as well as the biblical promise of a Messiah who would drive out the Romans and reestablish the kingdom of God on Earth. By the time of his three-year ministry from A.D. 27 to 30, Jesus had codified a new theology and an ethical system to sustain his followers until the Second Coming. It was a unique theology, as theologian Burton Mack has noted in his identification of three interconnected ideas that arose in the 30s and 40s following Jesus’ death:

1. One was the vague notion of a perfect society conceptualized as a kingdom. The Jesus people latched onto this idea and acted as if the kingdom they imagined was a real possibility despite the Romans. They called it the kingdom of God.

2. A second idea was that any individual, no matter of what extraction, status, or innate capacity, was fit for this kingdom and could act accordingly if only one would.

3 … . the novel notion that a mixture of people was exactly what the kingdom of God should look like.

Mack also observes that belief in a Messiah that would redeem an oppressed people was certainly not unique to first-century Jews: “This was a notion that many groups had used to imagine a better way to live than suffering under the Romans.” Peter Worsley points out that “Christianity itself, of course, as recent interpretations of the Dead Sea scrolls emphasize, originally derived its élan from the millenarist traditions of the Essenes and similar sectaries at the beginning of the Christian era. These people looked for the establishment of an actual earthly Kingdom of the Lord which would free the Jews from Roman oppression. Later this doctrine commended itself as a message of hope to the downtrodden of the Roman Empire.”

Did Jesus and his followers think he was the Messiah? When Jesus asked his disciples “Who do men say that I am?” he was given the answer: “Thou art the Christ” (Matthew 16:15, 16; christos, Greek for messias, from masiah, Hebrew for Messiah). To many early Christians, the Hebrew Bible spoke to them of a returning Messiah: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.” “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots … . But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked