The Undeniable Proof That Jesus Was Political

It’s an uncomfortable fact about history that the rich, mostly white, mostly male people who run Christianity would like you to forget. That’s because it challenges the very foundation of the religion they’ve created to keep us enslaved. But once you know it, it’s hard to go back. It is, like in the movie The Matrix, like taking the red pill.

Because what most Christians don’t know is that the message of Jesus, the historical Jesus, the Palestinian Jewish preacher, healer, and revolutionary was as much political as spiritual, and the clearest evidence lies in how he died.

Jesus was not executed by religious authorities for posing a theological threat. Jesus was murdered by the government for his political and economic program, which fundamentally threatened the status quo: elite, colonial domination of the working class. And the history bears it out.

How We Know

One of the reasons most Christians don’t know this is because the church overwhelmingly presents the Bible as a unified history textbook — an orderly and truthful account of Jesus’s ministry in ancient Palestine some 2,000 years ago. Only — nothing could be further from the truth.

The writings of the Bible were composed decades after Jesus died. Paul’s letters, the earliest Christian writings we have, come some twenty years after the crucifixion; the earliest Gospel, Mark, wasn’t written until roughly forty years after Jesus was killed. (1)

Further, the people who wrote these documents weren’t trying to produce a neutral record for future generations to weigh and judge — what they produced was, in a word, propaganda. Each of them carries a different view of who Jesus was, what his life meant, and what the audience was supposed to think and do about it.

They remain, however, the earliest and most reliable documents we have about the specific details of Jesus’s life and ministry. Academics have spent the last 150 years studying the texts of the New Testament — comparing them against contemporaneous authors, against archeology, against sociological models, and against each other — trying to work out what’s likely true and what isn’t. Authenticity isn’t binary. Any given saying or event is more or less likely to be historical, a spectrum running from almost-certainly-happened to almost-certainly-invented.

If you believe — as the ruling class has propagandized you your entire life to believe — that the Bible is a unified, entirely truthful account, then my argument here will be utterly unconvincing. If, however, you can think beyond a Sunday School understanding, and accept that history is an argument built from evidence and not a decree handed down, then how Jesus died tells a very different story than the one you were raised on.

Jesus’s Execution

There’s little disagreement among New Testament scholars on the basic facts of the case. There is no serious scholar today who doubts that Jesus existed, that he was executed by crucifixion, and that it was the Roman governor Pontius Pilate who gave the final green light. The crucifixion is attested in the Biblical texts themselves and in non-Christian writings from the period. (2)

The passion narratives in the canonical Gospels paint a vivid picture: a reluctant Pilate, fearful of a riot, ordering the execution only to placate the Jewish crowds and their religious leaders. But this narrative is doing something other than just “reporting the facts.”

According to the Biblical account, Jesus angers the religious elite by claiming — to varying degrees, depending on which Gospel you read — to be the messiah (a claim almost hidden in Mark, the earliest Gospel, and unmistakable by John, the latest). Most scholars think it unlikely Jesus went around announcing himself this way, precisely because he doesn’t in the Synoptics the way he does in John. Then as now, a man wandering the countryside declaring himself God or the promised messiah was far more likely to draw scorn than followers.

We know how Rome handled that kind of person because we know Rome handled at least one. In the years after Jesus’s execution, another Jesus, Jesus son of Ananias, showed up. He was eventually arrested for proclaiming doom over Jerusalem, explicitly and repeatedly. The claim got him flogged — and then released. The Romans saw a lunatic, not a threat, and let him go on with his “ministry.” Most Christians have never heard of him. (3)

And even if we believe the Gospel of John to be true — even if Jesus did claim the title, and even if the Jewish authorities had both the will and the power to act on it (and there’s considerable doubt they could) — the punishment for blasphemy was stoning, not crucifixion. That penalty is laid out in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s the one the Book of Acts hands to Stephen for blasphemy committed about Jesus. (4)

Whether Stephen actually died that way or the author of Acts reached for a detail his Jewish-Christian readers would expect, the lesson is the same: blasphemy meant stones.

Crucifixion, however, was a Roman punishment, and it was reserved for the most dangerous kind of criminal: the kind who threatened the order of society itself. Stealing a loaf of bread would not get you crucified. Publicly calling for the overthrow of Roman rule — with a following behind you — would. So would rebelling against your master, if you were enslaved.

And Jesus — with his warning that God was about to turn the whole world upside down — was a threat to the order.

The World Jesus Lived In

Most Christians who read the New Testament never think to place its writings in their historical context. But without that context, it’s easy to miss why Jesus’s message was so threatening.

The Jews of Judea were a fiercely nationalist people, who resented colonial rule and venerated the rare stretches of their history when they had governed themselves. Those stretches were brief.

The Hebrew Bible documents a long succession of foreign powers ruling the land — after King David (who very likely existed, and whom my Hebrew Bible professor once called the first real person to walk into the text), one empire after another. The last real reprieve was the independent kingdom of the Hasmonean era, which lasted less than a hundred years, ending about 60 years before Jesus was born.

That was crushed when Pompey brought Judea under Roman control in 63 BCE. Rome taxed and repressed its Jewish subjects the way it did everyone it conquered, and the longing to be free of the colonial yoke was palpable.

This was the world Jesus was born into: a powder keg of failed revolts and bitter occupation, waiting to go off. The history books are filled with failed revolutions and would-be messiahs, all of whom, to varying degrees, promised to throw off such colonial rule. The region would finally explode a generation after Jesus’s death, in the revolt of 66–73 CE that ended with Rome leveling the Temple — and the city.

In fact, crucifixion would be a crucial punishment in that revolt. As the Romans besieged the city, for months they crucified anybody who tried to escape, including women and children, up to 500 a day. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote they literally ran out of both hillside — and wood — for the crosses. (5)

So when Jesus showed up preaching that God was about to overthrow the rulers and kingdoms of men — ushering in an age where God, not Rome and not any human, would reign over Israel — the Romans took notice. It was a dangerous message. And in true Roman style, it was dealt with in the most horrific way available.

The Threat of Jesus’s Message

At the center of Jesus’s message was the coming Kingdom of God. It’s the through-line of everything he says — the phrase turns up on no fewer than 85 separate occasions across the Synoptic Gospels. (6)

The scholarly agreement on its centrality is about as close to unanimous as this contentious field ever gets. As historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg put it, ask a hundred New Testament scholars what stood at the heart of Jesus’s preaching and very nearly all of them will say the same two words. (7)

But what’s lost on most readers is what that phrase actually meant to Jesus. Most Christians today hear “Kingdom of God” — or Matthew’s reverent “Kingdom of Heaven” — and picture exactly one thing: an other-worldly paradise, the place the saved go when they die.

There is near-unanimous agreement among non-apologist scholars that this is not what a first-century Jewish preacher meant. “Heaven” was a standard Jewish way of avoiding the name of God; the Kingdom of Heaven means the reign of God, and Jesus located that reign not in some afterlife but here — on this earth, on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus saying something like the “Kingdom of God” would be akin to a modern prophet calling it the “United States of God.” If somebody went around saying that was about to arrive — you almost certainly would not mistake it as apolitical.

And Jesus meant it to be an inversion of everything. Not a utopia where everyone is comfortable and gets what they want and you get to play with your childhood dog, but a world turned completely upside down, where the people on the bottom and the people on top trade places. Read his own words, in the bluntest version we have, from Luke:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled… But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. (8)

That is not a beatitude about the spiritually humble. The Gospel of Matthew softened it to “poor in spirit.” Matthew spiritualizes a saying that in Luke’s rawer and — most scholars agree — older version is about the literally poor and the literally hungry, addressed to actually destitute peasants and naming the actually rich as the losers in God’s coming order. The last will be first, and the first last; the powerful pulled down from their thrones, the lowly lifted up.

And notice who Jesus says gets let into this Kingdom. For Jesus, the Kingdom belongs to the poor, the hungry, the merciful, the ones who feed and forgive and take the bottom seat. Admission is by what people do, not by what they believe about him.

Nowhere in the reversal sayings does entry turn on holding the correct doctrine. That came later. The idea that you are saved by believing the right things about Jesus — rather than by living the way he taught — is the work of the church that formed after him, and of Paul, who never met the man and built a religion around his death instead of his teaching.

Scholars divide sharply, however, on how Jesus thought this reversal would arrive. One camp (which includes Bart Ehrman and E.P. Sanders) reads him as an apocalyptic prophet who expected God to intervene catastrophically and soon, smashing the powers that ran the world and installing his Kingdom by force within that very generation.

The other camp (Borg, John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar) reads the Kingdom as something already breaking in, a way of living the reversal now, a grassroots program of shared tables and distributive justice built from the bottom up. The argument between them is real and ongoing.

But notice what the argument does not touch. Whether the Kingdom arrives as God’s violent overthrow of Rome or as a lived subversion of Rome’s entire order, it is in both readings a claim about who runs the world — and the answer, in both, is not Caesar.

The Kingdom of God was never going to be heard as private spirituality, because in the first century there was no such category: religion and politics were the same fabric. “Kingdom” was Rome’s own word. Augustus was already hailed as Son of God, as Lord, as Savior, the one who brought good news and peace through the sword. To stand in an occupied province and announce a different Kingdom, with a different king, where peace came through justice instead of legions, was not a theological opinion. It was treason.

Which is why Jesus was nailed to the cross. Not for your sins, but for the sins of Rome. In fact, the charge nailed above his head said nothing about heaven or salvation or claiming to be God. It said King of the Jews. He told the world it was about to be turned upside down — and the empire heard him perfectly, and answered the only way an empire knows how.

The Message Today

That was the end of the person — but it was not the end of the machine that killed him. Because the same order that nailed a Galilean peasant to a cross for announcing the world’s reversal figured out, within a few centuries, that there was a more durable way to handle him than crucifixion.

They stripped him of his message of revolution and made him the gatekeeper of a heavenly utopia. They turned a program for this world into a password for the next. And they told the poor, for two thousand years, that their reward was coming later, so they had better keep quiet now. (9)

This is the red pill, and it is bitter going down, because once you have seen that the religion about Jesus was built on top of the religion of Jesus — deliberately, by people with every reason to bury what he actually said — you cannot unsee it.

The rich, mostly white, mostly male people who run Christianity would very much like you to forget this. They have a great deal riding on the forgetting. But the words survived anyway, in the bluntest version we have, waiting in plain sight for anyone willing to read them as a first-century peasant would have heard them: blessed are you who are poor.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. The dating of Mark to c. 70 CE rests primarily on the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13, which “predicts” the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and on Mark’s priority as a source for Matthew and Luke (since they copy passages from him outright). Against a crucifixion around 30 CE, this yields a gap of roughly four decades. For a thorough and accessible treatment of the composition, dating, and historical setting of all the New Testament writings, I suggest Raymond E. Brown’s *Introduction to the New Testament* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
2. All four canonical Gospels record the crucifixion (Mark 15:24; Matthew 27:35; Luke 23:33; John 19:18), and Paul, our earliest Christian source, treats it as the center of his message in letters from the 50s CE (1 Corinthians 15:3–4; Galatians 3:13). Outside Christian writing, the Roman historian Tacitus reports that Christ “suffered the extreme penalty” under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius (Annals 15.44), and the Jewish historian Josephus records that Pilate condemned him to the cross (Antiquities 18.63–64).
3. The account comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, Jewish War 6.300–309. In the early 60s CE, this Jesus appeared at the Feast of Tabernacles crying woe over Jerusalem; the authorities had him scourged, but the Roman governor Albinus released him as a harmless madman. He kept up his lament until a Roman siege engine killed him in 70 CE. Scholars use the episode as a control case: Rome did not execute every doom-crying prophet. What separated Jesus of Nazareth was a following and a program — which is precisely what made him, unlike Ananias, a threat worth crucifying.
4. Leviticus 24:16; the full episode at 24:10–23. For Stephen, Acts 7:58–60, with the blasphemy accusation at 6:11–14.
5. Josephus, The Jewish War 5.449–451.
6. *The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus*, Craig A. Evans, editor (New York: Routledge, 2008).
7. Marcus J. Borg, *Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary* (New York: HarperOne, 2006).
8. Luke 6:20–21, 24–25. The Jesus Seminar judged the blessings and woes unlikely to preserve Jesus’s exact words as written, but took them to reflect what he actually preached — the wording shaped by the early tradition, the radical reversal authentic to Jesus himself. For more, see Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, *The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?* (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
9. For an in-depth overview of how the Kingdom of God went from this world to the next, see Bart Ehrman’s *Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).