Jesus wasn’t who I thought
I haven’t been an Evangelical for a while but I held on to a certain view around him. In mainline Protestant circles Jesus is often something like MLK for his times. But now digging into historical Jesus research without a specific religious setting this seems to not be the case. Ehrman makes an extremely compelling case in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium that Jesus was an apocalyptic figure who believed the son of man (who is separate from him and originally from Daniel) would come and create a new kingdom of God on the earth in a relatively short period. Looking into the Historical Jesus academic journal it’s clear this is pretty much the scholarly majority opinion. I’ve been digging into even more scholarship with the book They Suffered Under Pontius Pilate and he makes the point that there is a lot of violent pieces that remain in the text although they seem massaged. Jesus tells his disciples to get swords. They all seem to have swords (wouldn’t a nonviolent group following a nonviolent teacher know by that point not to have swords). There is violence done when he is taken but the retelling in the Gospels is really unbelievable (someone pulls a sword out and cuts an ear off and the Romans don’t do anything???). The whole “live by the sword” line is in Matthew but not Mark (which was the likely older Gospel). There's so much more I could say from the two books.
It's hitting me hard in a weird way and I can't explain why.