What Did Jesus Do?: The Revolutionary Jesus

Jesus led an armed insurrection against the Temple in Jerusalem on the day before he was executed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. The evidence presented in this book that supports this hypothesis is obtained chiefly from the gospels of Matthew Mark Luke and John, our main sources concerning the life of Jesus.

That Jesus was a militant Jew, a "lion" rather than a "lamb" is not a new idea. A novel aspect of this book is that the evidence that supports this contention is derived from the gospel accounts of his life which set out to present him in an entirely different light, as a divine willing sacrifice who came into this world with the sole intention of offering his life on the cross to enable mankind to access heaven. Indeed those who wrote the gospels went to great lengths to disguise the real Jesus, and we have to read between the lines to decode the real story. Yet for those who have "ears to hear" the real story is there to be heard, and that story tells us of a Jesus who had very different objectives to those that were posthumously attributed to him by his devoted followers.

The first century CE was a time of great messianic expectancy. Prophecy had predicted that the long awaited messiah who had been promised by God would establish and rule over a temporal kingdom that would exceed in magnificence and extent the kingdom ruled over by David nearly a thousand years before. The Jews would, with God's help, become rulers of the world and would reciprocate by ensuring that their new Kingdom would be ruled in strict accordance with Jewish law. Jesus expected, as messiah, to rule over this Kingdom. He was not the first to believe that he had been selected by God for this purpose nor was he to be the last.

The events of the last week of Jesus' life provide a central framework to the storyline but the book also explores other aspects of his life that help us to place him in the context of his time including the many messianic prophecies that he supposedly fulfilled during his lifetime, and his relationships with John the Baptist, his siblings, disciples and Mary Magdalene.

Finally we will see how his followers were reluctant in the aftermath of the crucifixion to believe that he had failed in his mission. They constructed a new philosophy in which Jesus was deemed not to have failed but rather to have successfully completed part one of a two part messianic mission. He was expected to return imminently to finish his task. His followers came to believe that although Jesus had certainly died, his spirit was still alive as a guiding force in their lives as they awaited his return. The resurrection stories of the gospels were devised to formalize this belief and, although intended to be allegorical, belief in a physical resurrection has become a central one for Christians.

The earliest gospels were not written for nearly three decades after the crucifixion and we can only speculate concerning the beliefs that were held by his followers in the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death. The gospel accounts reflect their final consensus. It is clear that the version of events that finally made its way into the official gospels was not universally agreed by all of Jesus' disciples; many parted company with the new movement rather than subscribe to it.

The expectation that Jesus would return within a short period of time was obviously not fulfilled. Undaunted, his followers, accepting the inevitable, modified their earlier estimates as to the date of the "second coming". He is now expected to return at some unspecified time in the future. As the world enters the third millennium CE many still await his return.