The Resurrection (Dominion)

By enduring the most agonizing fate imaginable, he had conquered death itself. ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

The utter strangeness of all this, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine.

There are similar ideas in Egyptian and Greek stories, and even among the Romans.  But these figures were usually kings or monster-slayers. Even among those who were skeptical of the idea of man having divine origin conceded its social utility. The person who believes that they are divine may go on to accomplish greater deeds and with more energy than those who do not. But in all cases, divinity was associated with triumph; it was reserved for heroes.

Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. The ultimate offensiveness, though, was to one particular people: Jesus’ own.

The Jews did not believe that man might become God (unlike their Roman rulers). Jewish belief was centered around one almighty and eternal deity. The idea that such a God would suffer the fate of slave were stupefying to Jews.

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Related posts:

1. Chapter 4: The Flood (Sapiens)
2. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)
3. Tulip Mania
4. Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue: barter, trust, and rules after 50,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)