Jesus, the Poet
TL;DR: A lyrical, secular road trip from Bronze Age gods to a Galilean street-poet whose gentle comma survives crosses, Roman PR, and cathedral paperwork — all of it told by a Brazilian kid (aka me) once put on a warehouse-church stage to fake “possessions,” now an atheist trying to steal Jesus back from the ruins of decadent empires. Long, tender, feral… if that hums, it’s probably your kind of read.
One day, on the outskirts of an empire, an ordinary man made himself into a poem so beautiful that no one and nothing could kill it.
This modest peasant became a dignified apocalyptic poet, deeply attuned to beauty and endings.
He was made, by the crowds, into a spiritual leader through the inspired words he shared with his fellow humans.
Even in death — as a symbol — he refused to let even the worst threats and tortures erase the gentleness of his verse.
In death, and in the thousand distortions that followed, people tried to silence or twist him. No one succeeded for long.
This is his story in a poetic, secular retelling.
Here, I want to recover him from yet another layer of historical erasure and make him, again, free, present, and alive. Free of the monopolizing claims of any institution that pretends to own him.
Jesus belongs to everyone and is for everyone.
And in that sense, he is also mine, and no one has the right to steal him from me, nor to silence him within me.
Therefore, I will write about him as I please, and I owe no apology to anyone.
Still — given the subject — I begin with two important notes.
First: this text is a poetic essay, an artistic manifesto exploring literary perspectives. It does so by taking inspiration from the historical Jesus (from what little can be known with certainty about him, from his historical context, and from what the lives of people like him were like then). But even while drawing on all of that, this text is not, strictly speaking, history itself.
It is a romanticized retelling based on specific historical readings. At the end, I will include a list of books and references from which my views sprang. Many of them are academic, and anyone who reads the text will notice that I drew more on them than on theology or on the versions upheld by famous religious institutions.
As for technical details, I will take the liberty of simplifying (and even distorting) various elements for narrative or aesthetic reasons. This text is already quite long, and doing justice to all the research would destroy its rhythm, smother its spirit in bureaucratic detail, and quintuple its already immodest length.
Second: it’s very important to make clear that this is not a text written by a religious believer. I am an atheist, and I am starting from the historical Jesus precisely because of that.
For someone religious, it may be interesting to read something written by an atheist who admires Jesus deeply as an artistic and historical figure.
But the fact that I am an atheist affects exactly which Jesus I’m talking about and admire so much.
It’s a Jesus different from the one held by believers.
To begin with, it is the Jesus constructed and informed by historical research, archaeology, and comparative academic literature, much more than by theology, dogma, or faith.
Furthermore, it is a pragmatic Jesus, for whom everything impossible is read as metaphor and symbol.
It is, therefore, a Jesus who is not born of a virgin. Nor does he multiply fish, heal the blind, or rise from the dead and ascend to heaven three days after being crucified.
But he is a Jesus whom I find even more beautiful for doing none of those things.
One who is, in his own way, still a beautiful miracle.
Perhaps the most beautiful miracle of all.
As an atheist, this is my favorite Jesus. He is the Jesus I love.
And I want to present him with dignity, in the beautiful and just way I believe he deserves.
1. Before Jesus
This beginning will be dense — fair warning.
If I’m going to spend an entire chapter later to cover Jesus’s whole life in thirty years, this chapter will cover millennia in the same amount of space.
Millennia of many people from many civilizations doing many things.
Until all those things they did, whether they worked or failed, changed over time, gestated and birthed consequences, which then birthed other consequences, which then established a linear chain of causes and consequences.
The last of all these consequences we’re going to look at is Jesus.
Who, in turn, will cease to be a consequence and become the cause of so many other things.
Yay!
Gods and peoples bubbling in a little bronze cauldron
The first cities developed. As they connected with (or were dominated by) one another, they formed the first empires.
At the civilizational height of the Bronze Age, there was a mind-boggling diversity of everything.
Of peoples, languages, scripts, cities, ways of existing, bureaucracies, nascent technologies, mythologies, cultures, gods and goddesses, goods being exchanged, versions of stories, different kinds of art, alliances, regional conflicts.
Among all these diverse peoples, these interlinked and conflict-ridden peoples, you could trade amiably with your wall-sharing neighbor while militarily invading the next-door neighbor on the other side. And the wall of trade and the wall of war could swap places tomorrow.
Or the two could join forces to invade your house together…
There was a particularly effervescent basin of people, cultures, and conflicts that covered much of the Middle East and some nearby regions.
There lived the Semitic peoples.
All of them similar in some ways — hence “Semitic”.
Languages with connections and cross-influences.
Similar scripts.
Similar mythologies, when not outright syncretized under a broader pantheon. Sometimes they unified. Sometimes one split into two, or several.
The Jews were one of those peoples in the region that would later correspond to Palestine. At the time, they managed to stabilize a handful of cities, then a handful of kingdoms.
When the biblical texts began to be written (within the courts of these kingdoms, from oral traditions that probably existed since long before the shift to agriculture), no one had unified the region yet.
The Jews held these different kingdoms instead of a single great one because they felt linked by language and culture, but not identical.
The story of the twelve tribes, symbolic in the ancient biblical texts, springs from this autonomous variety.
Through their many ancient cycles of ups and downs, the Jews shifted roles.
In that, from the start they were more resilient than many neighbors. The common fate of a conquered people wasn’t to spend some time marginalized and then stage a comeback. The most common fate was to disappear forever.
The Carthaginians, for example, didn’t forge a myth that survived the end of their empire, nor did they remain even minimally cohesive in cultural identity when dispersed around the world. They simply vanished. One day, calling anyone “Carthaginian” just stopped making sense.
Calling someone “Jewish” made as much sense in the Bronze Age as it does today. Among the peoples and identities of that time, few still exist in any number today to say the same.
The Jews, therefore, weathered change. They rigidly carried certain fundamentals that structured their belonging while adapting and making pragmatic concessions around that core.
Depending on the period, they were always one thing or another. With success or failure in conflicts and wars, they shifted in class; they alternated between having aristocratic courts with scribes composing mythic texts and being a people of slaves sleeping piled on the floor.
Over the course of history, Jews could go from scribes to slaves, passing through being soldiers, or farmers, shepherds, or bureaucrat-priests.
Culturally, little distinguished them from their neighbors. The religions were the same. The system of cities built around temples (thus tied to the deity of their principal temple) was similar. The relations between temples and the economy, politics, and even tourism were likewise similar.
What varied just a bit was their way of having gods in the plural. In a region of so many polytheisms, ancient Jews seem to have moved earlier toward a henotheistic religion.
One could argue whether that’s quite right, given that every city tended to have its favorite gods as the most important anyway. Perhaps the Jews simply learned to consolidate certain franchises of faith more effectively.
Their religion also differed in that its system was more rigid in hierarchies, more closely linked to writing as an important mechanism.
All peoples produced religious texts.
For the Jews, however, religion was not merely a written endorsement of the pragmatic powers of a king whom their scribes would fear not to praise.
At a certain point, probably after being knocked from the saddle by the fall of David’s kingdom, Judaism made its religious writing cease to be merely a ruse to justify a king’s divinity. If it were only that, it would be disposable and of little use once the king died.
For the Jews, then, religion was perhaps more frequent, more useful, more woven into day-to-day bureaucracies. It served not only moments of power but also the maintenance of cultural identity even under periods of domination.
Their texts in general and their religion in particular (because they were the same library, with no clear separation of scrolls or tablets by genre) were made to be useful not only to leaders.
They were designed to resist erasure even under pressure from conquering peoples.
Beyond the (debatable) particulars, it’s relatively safe to assume a few more things about the Jews of that time.
Even if the pantheon was leaner, at the very beginning they resembled their neighbors as a people with more than one god. They resembled them in having a mythology that rhymed quite a lot with that of all their regional neighbors.
It makes sense. Neighbors gossip. They end up influencing each other’s ideas. Religious exchanges accompanied the trade networks of goods.
Prominent cities composed variations of mythic origins that gave a bigger role to the gods of their cities’ temples.
In the city of Baal’s temple, perhaps the storm god had been the one who defeated a great monster to save the world.
The same story could be told with Baal as secondary and Yahweh as protagonist if told in the city where Yahweh’s temple stood.
These disputes remained open for generations and then closed as if they had never existed when a city fell and a library burned.
For posterity, what remained was the story of the city (and its temple) that lasted longer. And of those that did not last, it eventually became almost as if they had never existed.
In everyday life, in these disputes and variations over the “lore,” paganism was as a rule a looser system, in which different interpretations could be made under the same mythic story for political reasons.
Over time and depending on the place, a god could go from hero to villain, or change names, or blend their trove of tales with that of a similar god from a nearby conquered empire.
All this dynamic, these exchanges and flows, these variations in who is or isn’t part of the “official” family, was no different in the earlier mythology from which Semitic monotheism would soon emerge.
The same pantheons of dysfunctional families. The same associations of gods with elements of nature.
The same interweavings with entities from elsewhere — influences from other gods deemed similar enough to suggest syncretism in the case of cultural rapprochement (or conquest), etc. Inanna, Astarte, Aphrodite. That whole thing. Yahweh, Zeus, and… God?
Being henotheists — perhaps because they didn’t like carrying such heavy backpacks, or to reduce the number of different little figurines they needed to manufacture to sell in front of their temples — the Canaanites stood out mainly for having fewer gods, as noted.
It may have been due to a series of small regional conflicts, perhaps also due to a cultural preference, that the Canaanites already here began moving toward that minimalism.
In a region of religiosities made up of pantheons of many, many gods, the gods the Canaanites kept were few, very few.
And soon they would keep only one.
A Babylonian monotheism of exiles
The most likely version of the story says that the Jews were still polytheists when they became a conquered people, migrating in search of less hostile places among nearby empires.
With the Babylonian Empire, the Jews found themselves in a situation much like the one they would later have under the Romans —
that is, a disproportion in military power, domination, hostilities.
But it was an exchange that nevertheless stabilized into long-term dynamics.
Stable enough to endure.
It was while they were subject to the Babylonians, in one of the periods of exile after the fall of one of their kingdoms, that Jewish polytheism transmuted into a monotheism that became the origin of what we know today.
A situation influenced, yes, by cultural and religious preferences themselves — but also by historical circumstances and bureaucracy.
It came about through many small decisions made by lots of ordinary people over many, many years.
It was a chaotic, long, complex process.
But to simplify, I like to imagine it like this: in a somewhat underground Jewish temple in a remote Babylonian corner, there was probably a very cynical, pragmatic priest who saw monotheism as a good choice because it simplified the organization and management of cultural identity in exile. And, in the same temple, there must have been another priest totally detached from earthly reality, who was in love with the monotheism idea in the most poetic and fervent way possible. The two probably argued about everything. Only on this did they agree.
Whatever the reason, it was that very standardized homogenization of monotheistic minimalism — raised like an ethereal siege around traditional texts, forged in fire and iron in the times and places where they lived under domination — that allowed Jewish identity to remain alive for so long.
This is how the idea of “being Jewish” could survive without being dissolved, passed along — hidden when necessary — through all the empires across which the Jews were dispersed.
And because the surrounding pressure was massive, and this was the only tool strong enough to contain it, the Jews who were not assimilated and erased by the history of their rulers tended to be among the most rigidly attached to their traditional identities.
(Which means — and this is an irony we’ll return to — that they were also the most resistant to change, including and especially to any stance of open, critical questioning of the ancient bases of their identity. To preserve everything, they kept what remained strong along with what was ramshackle.)
Stubbornly, the Jews insisted on being Jews even when they were tossed into a civilizational ping-pong of changes back and forth across the historical stage of the region’s empires.
Empires rose and vanished.
The Jews arose and never disappeared…
Iliad, Old Testament, Gilgamesh: how to write bestsellers in antiquity
Successive generations of biased, exacting editors kept giving little pats to millennia-old texts to make them fit their wishes.
Every biblical text was like a Google Doc with edit access for hundreds of people over different generations.
Even more chaotic than that, because it didn’t even have a prior version history.
Texts were edited to erase gods and goddesses.
Pagan stories were abandoned.
The consort-goddess Asherah, for example, disappeared. She had a rich record of cultural exchanges that linked her to the neighboring goddess Astarte.
Up to a certain point, before that muffled divorce, she was the companion of that storm god (akin to a Zeus) who would soon become the single God of the monotheists.
Why this god in particular?
The story involves political disagreements and coincidences in a long chain of cultural and historical accidents.
The Jews’ polytheistic pantheon was the only one in the region that irreversibly became monotheistic. The brief Egyptian experiment is the only near example of something similar, and even that was far less significant for having been reversed so quickly.
There are a number of theories that try to explain which particular features of the Jews led to this strange development that didn’t repeat in the same way with anyone else’s pantheon.
The small starting pantheon we mentioned is already a clue.
It’s easier to go from the plural to the singular when your plural is already reduced.
And exile and life among the Babylonians are also usually read as important factors.
Some of the texts older than what became the Old Testament were written even before monotheism.
They were edited later. Some contextual hints slipped through. Older versions of the texts, from when they were still polytheistic, have been found in the last few centuries.
Because the development of the academic world made possible enough freedom of research and thought, we know today far more about the transition from polytheism to monotheism than at any other time in history.
Researchers around the world can pore over comparative analysis to propose a wide range of influences among different ancient texts that are more or less “related” to each other.
Comparative mythology does the same, seeking possible symbolic links among stories and myths of gods that are close in traits, space, or time. Slices of study like: all the gods in the Levant. Or all the storm gods in the Bronze Age.
A whole genealogy can be proposed for the gods and religious developments of the Bronze Age religions.
And every now and then, when new stories are unearthed from some ruin, we recover context that strengthens some theories while weakening others.
The region is particularly favorable to this, as are the oldest materials.
Things keep well in the desert.
Especially clay tablets.
The history of the world is usually written through erasures by institutions that win.
For institutions in history, winning meant controlling some flow of information and rewriting history by defining their own role.
So for millennia, everything we could hear about ancient religions was what had survived.
And what had survived had been curated and selected in a biased way by generations of more-or-less lucid choices on the part of the official doctrine of established religious monopolies.
If some bishop in 750 BCE decided to rewrite a manuscript, swapping “gods” for “god,” that would affect the entire future stream of interpretations of that text —
until all those millennia of efforts became futile in the face of the discovery, in ruins, of the original text by some inconvenient archaeologist.
Two thousand years of institutions trying to edit and consolidate the “correct” version of a text, or of a curated set of texts.
And then boom, someone digs up from some backwater something like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And you discover entire libraries of apocryphal texts that, for one reason or another, someone at some point thought better left behind. Silenced. Erased from the record.
The history of the losers in some conflict for hegemony and symbolic monopoly millennia ago: erased, until the archaeologists.
The uncomfortable history of different variations of texts (sometimes in the details, sometimes drastically different) buried, by accidents mixed with deliberate acts, until dug up by archaeologists.
And with that, millennia of censorship and narrative control crumble.
Thanks to the doggedness (and, yes, the peskiness) of archaeologists poking around caves and ruins.
All the major biblical texts of the Old Testament have complicated genealogies with countless versions changing from copy to copy.
There are hypotheses (articulated in dense academese) about likely authors at specific historical moments, to explain different versions depending on which city or period.
To give an example I find amusing: a now-discredited theory circulated sotto voce in academic corridors for a few generations (mainly thanks to Harold Bloom, the pop literary critic who spread it).
In it, one argued that one of the first people to write the monotheistic god might have been a woman — an author the theory labels “J.”
It’s hard to know, not least because she may have written a polytheistic text later turned monotheistic. But that there are several authors for certain ancient biblical books — each anonymous author represented by a letter — that is academic consensus to this day.
Sometimes what distinguishes one author from another is calling their god El or Yahweh. The theory is that the texts were written when these may still have been different gods. The terms became synonyms once the divinity became a single one.
When the J-author theory lost steam, the power of gossip kept it running anyway — just because it sounded cool.
I like the gossip and don’t mind if it’s wrong. I think it’s fair to mention this symbolic idea, describing this possible priestess who lived in the palace of one of the Jewish kingdoms. Since we can’t know for sure, either way. So everything’s possible.
What we do know is that, for a hierarchical and patriarchal Semitic people, there are a lot of women in the Old Testament. Miriam, Esther, Ruth. For each of those who remained, many others must have been erased. J may not be real, but some woman author of some biblical passage certainly is — she just wasn’t properly credited.
So one of the first authors of God, then, may have been a woman — a priestess at Solomon’s court. At court, women sometimes read and wrote.
That wouldn’t prevent much else in this religion’s story with women over the centuries to come.
Theories (the more plausible or the more outlandish) exist because scholars never stop prodding the texts with every possible methodology from every possible angle.
For each paragraph of the Old Testament, for each scene and each comma, there’s a question about authorship, about editing, distortion, origin, influence, inspiration.
Anyone reading the Old Testament as a secular scholar is hunting for seams and stitches.
Or for echoes of similar myths (the famous likeness between the Jews’ flood and the floods in the mythologies of several nearby peoples).
Or else the “from/to” mapping between a text’s final version and the early versions we find in ruins.
Scholars discovered that Old Testament texts were adapted from earlier polytheisms because they found traces of those earlier texts in ruins. Prayers later sedimented as traditionally monotheistic were found on polytheistic amulets older than the One God.
By the time of Jesus, Jewish civilizations had already arisen, developed, reached their height, and fallen.
More than once.
More than twice.
More than three times.
And each had developed entire libraries that they carried forward, as best they could, to hand on to the next.
The Jewish people, now without a place of their own, lugged around this legacy of their vanished kingdoms, even as servants of new empires that kept them under domination.
At least once they must have thought something like what I think when I look at all the books on my shelf every time I move: is there anything here that can be left behind?
What remained through so many moves, what was always deemed essential to take along when they asked that question: this is the legacy of earlier kingdoms, kept in text.
This is the library that over time consolidated into the Torah.
The Old Testament of the Bible.
The Jews’ mythological and cultural library, developed and adapted from an earlier polytheistic mythology.
What had once been the religion of kingdoms , filling whole libraries in great temples…
Was now the religion of a conquered people, carried in pocket editions to the most random places where Jews would try to live and work.
At the time of Jesus’s birth, it was the pocket library and religion of a people conquered by the Romans.
The voice-in-text of a Bronze Age civilization, with all the fury, intensity, violence, and conviction that life in that world carried.
The only kind of intensity capable of surviving the fall of empires (more than one).
A stubborn resilience, even in its most expansionist and imperial promises — proud as a court of warrior princes, like Solomon’s excesses — even in its lowest moments of subjugation.
The Old Testament, then, stands to the Jews much as the classic mythological texts — perhaps the Odyssey and the Iliad in particular — stand to the Greeks; as Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, and the poems of Enheduanna stand to the Sumerians.
With the difference, perhaps, that these other peoples over time let their mythologies drift into a more purely artistic place of literature.
And that in those other classics, even when there was religious reading of the texts, it was always decentralized.
Homer established a reading of Zeus that must have guided much of Greek religion. But no caste of Homeric priests was instituted to enforce fidelity to Homer’s portrayal of Zeus. It wasn’t even necessary, since that was the Zeus of common sense anyway.
But for the Jews’ hierarchical and diasporic society, no amount of control was too much.
Only thus could they avoid dissolving . Avoid disappearing.
An oral tradition from millennia earlier, converted to text when writing developed.
A text that survived wars, fires, domination, because a sufficiently large group of people chose to become a minority anywhere in the world, just to remain — both in identity and in spiritual and poetic appreciation — bound to those stories and words.
For me, as an atheist, what makes a text sacred is not some whimsical breath from above.
It’s the miraculous inspiration that, somewhere in the backlands of history, leads someone to write something beautiful.
And the miraculous choice of readers, also in the backlands of history, determined to be inspired by that beautiful thing that was written and to make — against all odds — that written beauty endure and thrive.
And in that sense, what reached Jesus was already a beautiful tradition around sacred texts.
A tradition that, as a Jew of his time — as an indignant man left on the outskirts of an empire — he would engage both passionately and critically.
And to which he would make a new contribution.
A contribution that would inspire an entire new library.
The millennia-old world into which a gentle Jesus was born
Right out of the gate, the poor Jesus born in this ‘third world’ of Antiquity comes with contradictions.
This boy was born under the shadow of a giant empire — an empire that, though still powerful at the time, already bore the signs and sores of its decay.
The sickness and the rot were already there; they just hadn’t started to blot the skin so much yet. That it was sick was clear. No one knew how long it would agonize before dying.
The Jesus under the Romans carries the lowly conditions of a subjugated people with nostalgic memories of having once been the dominator.
In the sunlight, the humiliation and the yoke of the Roman whip.
Behind closed doors and in their temples, in the priests’ whispers in Hebrew (the high language of the religious tradition) and the people’s whispers in Aramaic in the streets: they bore the ancient inheritance that no one had managed to kill.
The Romans tried hard. They religiously assimilated peoples through openness. They claimed the pantheon had expanded to take in the newcomers. The newcomers were syncretized with the older, more popular, more institutionally endorsed gods. End of problem.
Any conciliatory measure that seemed sensible in the short term would have been disastrous for Jewish identity in the long term. Those who yielded were erased. But enough of them were too radical to make peace.
Some were too attached to a book/cultural library, with the forceful conviction of a pulsing, visceral kingdom of David. And they were in no mood to dissolve that force into the Roman web of thousands of divinities.
The Jesus born under the Romans also lived under a whispered-from-below myth promising — against all circumstances — to rule again.
One day, before cities existed, before the Jews were Jews, or the Hebrews were Hebrews, or the Canaanites were Canaanites, there was a hunter-gatherer and his son.
The hunter told his child a story about the moon being divine to explain the world. He had heard the same story from his father, who in turn had heard a similar version from his grandfather.
Fifteen generations later, this story was oral tradition among farmers and goatherds — families descended from what had once been that hunter’s clan.
A few generations after that, when writing arrived, they decided to make a fair copy of the telephone game of so many stories.
And from then on, they kept making editorial adjustments here and there for pragmatic reasons.
The threat of one king.
The sycophancy toward a different king.
A scribe’s aesthetic preference.
The fall of a city.
The rise of another city.
A new temple being raised.
One more temple being torn down.
By the time the boy Jesus was first introduced, in childhood, to his religious context, he already had all of this behind it.
Jesus was born already a child of millennia.
And he would become father to an entirely new story that would last millennia more.
(Perhaps unintentionally. Perhaps only because he inspired followers who were far too inspired, passionate, articulate, and competent.)
Among all the characters in this story — kings, military leaders, erudite scribes, poets, miracle workers…
It was Jesus, a nobody, who defined all that as having happened “before” him.
We, in countries marked by Christendom, do not date our calendar by a king’s birth or by some great general’s victory.
We date the world from the birth of a poor man.
What’s even funnier is that the same context that produced this particular poor man also produced several others practically identical to him.
In the time Jesus lived, you could lift a stone in any city in the Roman-ruled region and find under it a dozen-odd apocalyptic prophets crawling about and professing feverish hallucinations about the end of the world (and of Rome).
There are traces of the historical Jesus scattered through Jewish and Roman records, and it’s impossible to be sure they were speaking about the same guy — because it could just as well have been another similar apocalyptic prophet, equally poor, equally inconsequential, who also ended up on a cross.
There was no shortage of Roman crosses raising up prophets, rebels, dissidents, or just people meant to send a message by being crucified.
Among them all, why Jesus? Why Christianity and not “some other crucified-prophet-ism”?
No one knows for sure.
My opinion is that it wasn’t only because what Jesus did on arrival turned everything and everyone before him into mere prefaces to his reformist radicalism.
He was more a symptom of his time than such an exceptional revolutionary.
But perhaps his radicalism was of something other than words. Of worldview. Of the first impression he made on anyone who stopped to hear him in a marketplace. Of principles. Of poetic timbre.
Maybe it was just a vibe he never fully articulated.
Maybe he simply had disproportionately “nice guy” energy.
Maybe the truly good ones were the dramatic, over-the-top writers and poets of a later generation of Hellenistic Jews — the passionate ones who realized what a blockbuster story they had on their hands, ripe to go viral.
Or perhaps, rather than merely representative or merely reformer, he was truly revolutionary. Revolutionary-revolutionary. Stirring up commotion in the streets. Disrupting the foot traffic of people just trying to get to work.
Maybe he inflamed the masses to the brink of a slave revolt, a civil war, or something of the sort.
Maybe it was because of this risk of political instability that the Romans got rid of him so quickly — and so publicly and cruelly.
(Though, it’s worth saying, that was the same public, cruel treatment they meted out to any random nobody who annoyed them, which makes it hard even to say Jesus was in any way exceptional at the moment he was crucified. The Romans were so cruel in their tortures that I once read an academic theory suggesting the water they drank might have been polluted in a way that reduced empathy. Yes, that theory exists — you can look it up.)
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Hard to say, hard to say.
Hard to say because later generations decided to make these certainties harder.
If Jesus was too peaceful, in the soft, “turn-the-other-cheek” register, someone more bellicose (probably some revolutionary apocalyptic Jew) thought it was overdone and decided to edit the text to give him a more active edge with his “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”
And if Jesus was fierce and unsubmissive, someone (probably some worried ruler) decided to make him more “peace and love,” docile and domesticated, bringing in forgiveness, the parable of the prodigal son, etc.
It’s hard to reconcile the anti-punitive Jesus who says we cannot judge a woman and stone her — who invites only whoever has not sinned (no one) to punish her…
…with this other Jesus who is very sharply judging the stall-keepers whose booths he goes around smashing in the streets.
But what is certain is this: what Jesus proposed amounted to a threefold project of politics, religion, and poetry.
It was a project of these three things because those three things were not at all separate at the time.
No one could say, “I’ll do just politics without getting involved in culture,” or “I’ll write pretty poetry that has nothing to do with religion,” or “I’ll be a secular politician.”
None of that. It was all the same thing.
Jesus was political because he proposed a not-very-pragmatic utopia after the fall of the decadent Roman Empire.
And he was religious because he suggested an “update to the terms of use” for the tradition of Jewish sacred texts which, however impressive they already were, Jesus thought needed a makeover.
And he was also the author of a poetic project, because his method consisted in existing and communicating through parables —
parables crafted as beautifully as possible, as cryptic and hermetic as possible, and, paradoxically, as comprehensible and accessible as possible.
It consisted in speaking about compassion and the internalization of virtues —
and he spoke about all these virtues in explicit contrast to the bureaucratic, complacent conformism then in vogue among the Jewish “Pharisees,” and sedimented for centuries by the Romans, of merely performing empty rituals for others to see.
(The truth is the Pharisees were actually quite modern. Jesus’s impatience with them is more a consequence of his own radicalism. Against the Pharisees, Jesus functions more or less like a radical, far-left anarchist frustrated with the concessions and hesitations of a moderate left. Editors of later generations — especially once Gentiles entered the picture — also liked to unfairly emphasize the Pharisees as antagonists, so we don’t know how much of the quarrel was exaggerated in later gossip.)
The project advocated ideas of compassion as alien as possible to his context, while being absolutely possessed by a vision (anachronistically classifiable as perhaps psychotic) of himself as part of the last living generation before a coming apocalypse.
But if it was psychosis, it wasn’t just his. It was a collective delusion.
Jesus wasn’t the first or the last to believe that. And he made people who hadn’t believed it on their own start believing when they were around him.
But what he had that was perhaps most different — what was truly uniquely his beyond any comparison — I think may have been his proposal in the face of the end.
In the face of the apocalypse, for Jesus only gentleness remained.
It was this gentle comma that Jesus would add to the story about the world.
This comma would come into a story that one of his ancestors began to sketch millennia earlier, before the first cities were even raised.
The Jews had built and lost cities and civilizations before this gentle addendum arrived.
Carrying the resilience of that people’s ideas to a new unstoppable, immortal, expansionist potency, this gentle addendum would survive any attempt to trouble it. It became a generational landmark. The tone of this entire text — our expectation about how much dignity ordinary people deserve — wouldn’t make sense before Jesus. The one who finally lodged in history the idea that ordinary people deserve dignity was, above all, him.
It survived all the whims, the urges to erase him or distort him, that may have seized more imperial, impatient editors throughout the long centuries that followed.
Despite all of them — so many people and so many attempts to neutralize him — the essence of Jesus’s voice resisted and was carried with something of itself still intact to this day.
Such a resistant, insistent innovation was not going to be warmly welcomed by everyone at once.
Before the more refined strategies that so many would later try, the first bet to erase Jesus’s gentle comma would be violence.
2. During Jesus
Small and midsized towns.
Galilee, a province of little importance.
Intense trade networks.
Manual laborers in little shops.
Sheep, horses, and camels.
Sand. Sea. Olive trees. Oases here and there with palm trees.
Beggars asking for food in the streets.
Romans strutting snobbishly through crowds of the rabble.
It was in a world like this that Jesus was born and raised.
Now, what comes next will be an educated guess trying to answer the following:
What might it have been like for Jesus to live in that world?
(It’ll be a bit less dense from here on out.)
The linguistic profile of a typical Jew of the time
The Jesus who was born was a lot like an average Brazilian.
Seriously:
A Brazilian has their own language (Brazilian Portuguese), an insular, peripheral dialect with little weight on the global stage. Jesus had something similar in Aramaic, a popular tongue without political power.
If Jesus were born in Brazil today, he’d never bother learning English. He’d keep speaking Portuguese — let everyone else be the ones stuck trying to translate it afterward.
A Brazilian Catholic is tied to a church that treats an ancient, out-of-fashion language as the sacred base of its religion. And although most Brazilians are Catholic, very few speak Latin. Jesus had the same situation with Hebrew — the temple’s religious language that was barely heard in the streets anymore.
If Jesus were born in Brazil today, he might learn a thing or two of Latin for being very Catholic, the religion of most around him. But he almost certainly wouldn’t be a Latin expert — far from it.
So he probably knew a thing or two in Hebrew.
I think he could read a bit, which was already a differentiator for the time. But he probably couldn’t read the Torah on his own. That point is debated — no hypothesis stands out. He could have been literate, or not…
In Brazil today, French is a fading lingua franca (whose greatest legacy is the term “lingua franca” itself). Jesus had something similar in Greek — the language of the previous empire, still respected and seen as elegant.
I imagine he probably didn’t speak Greek — just as an average Brazilian would hardly speak French — but the echoes of an earlier heyday of that language were still present in his culture.
Maybe he knew a smattering if he spent time with Hellenistic Jews…
But Jesus certainly wasn’t spinning out learned parables in Greek to the illiterate fishermen he lived among.
And if, in Brazil today, a Brazilian would have some awareness of English — because it’s the language of the decaying empire seeking to dominate us, casting its shadow over our “third-world,” “peripheral” reality…
Jesus would have the same with Latin.
Latin was the conqueror’s language in Jesus’s world. If his parents had been rich (they weren’t), maybe Jesus would have taken a Latin course equivalent to what a middle-class São Paulo teen does at Cultura Inglesa (something as English Culture School). “Cultura Latina” — the Latin Culture School?
Jesus spoke Aramaic.
He had some connection, for cultural and religious reasons, to Hebrew.
The most ardent will say he was fluent in Hebrew, that he read the Torah alone and debated theological challenges with temple masters.
Hard to know if that was really the case.
(I don’t think so. He probably scraped by with just a bit.)
I prefer to think he could read the Torah — that he was just a little better than an average peasant at Hebrew at it.
Enough for some elder to tell Mamma Mary that her boy was quite intelligent — praise young Jesus overheard, which may or may not have gone to his head enough to underpin his journey toward becoming a messiah.
There’s a story in the New Testament in which Jesus appears writing.
It doesn’t say what he was writing.
Maybe some later Christian editor thought it best to toss that text out. Maybe the writing itself, in that scene as described, was an editor’s invention layered onto the original story he’d heard through the telephone game.
We can’t know.
Jesus didn’t speak the language in which his New Testament would be written.
The first time the world read his story, then, it was already translated (and distorted) from Aramaic into Greek.
And Jesus definitely didn’t speak Latin — the language of the decaying empire he absolutely despised.
Amid all the unknowns, I state with certainty — backed by poetic conviction only — that Jesus deeply detested the Roman Empire.
He preferred to believe the world was ending right then.
He chose to think so because he found it more beautiful than believing that cruel, decaying empire would keep on existing for another generation.
And it was at the Roman imperial core, in Latin, that Christianity developed, survived, and spread.
Latin: the very language that should have sent shivers down his spine (a Roman officer speaking Latin was never going to be saying, “nice cute Jew, what a sweet man you are”) is now the language a Brazilian will hear in a traditional Catholic Mass.
The ironies start there.
A simple life before the public life
The historical Jesus was probably from Nazareth.
His birth and childhood were distorted and edited in every possible way after his death, all to try to fit him better into the role expected of a messianic leader.
The “messiah” position already came with requirements. When the followers of early Christianity realized Jesus didn’t fit all of them neatly, they lied on the résumé and got the job anyway.
So he wasn’t from Bethlehem.
He didn’t receive gifts from magi kings.
His mother probably didn’t sneak off to Egypt when he was a baby.
And his mother was probably not a virgin.
The fascination with Jesus’s childhood was so great that the Church itself had to pump the brakes on the fables.
A considerable portion of the apocryphal texts left out of the New Testament’s curation were tales of the child Jesus playing at working miracles with his little friends on dusty streets.
In the version most accepted today, what remains is only the story of him, as a boy, discussing religious texts in depth with the temple priests.
It’s a fable that carries a seed of truth if taken as metaphor. Jesus really did represent a youth arriving to re-open and refurbish old ideas.
But before all that, he was just a child.
My favorite non-canonical story tells of an occasion when Jesus supposedly, by accident, killed a child who touched him from behind during a street game.
Touched — died.
Then he raised the child as if it were just part of the game. Another ordinary day in Nazareth childhood with Little Jesus-miracles.
The Jews in the world where Jesus was a child were oppressed and unhappy under the Romans’ fist, but at least they were not slaves.
So I imagine they could see the horrible situation as having once been worse.
The Romans liked taxes and corruption.
At that time, they were less concerned than they had been in other moments with assimilating the Jews religiously by erasing their faith.
Not that it had vanished from the Roman mind. It had only slipped down the priority list.
After a series of persecutions and massacres, they’d seen the effort wasn’t worth it. It would be hard because the Jews were stubborn.
Other thorny problems were more urgent — like trying to keep their decaying empire from fully collapsing. Priority number one, already wobbly by then.
Jews under this Roman Empire worked in all sorts of trades:
fishermen, manual laborers, and many artisanal professions — like carpentry.
Joseph, Mary’s husband, may really have been a carpenter. It isn’t certain; scholars debate that perhaps he practiced some similar middling craft — very common for Jews of his class in the region.
It amounts to the same thing, so I prefer to think of him as a carpenter.
Jesus likely worked at the trade for a good stretch in his youth before getting it into his head — the poetic idea — of becoming a prophet.
Jesus’s mother, Mary, was probably from a middle-class Jewish family. She certainly wasn’t as destitute as later traditions painted her, but she wasn’t rich either.
Her class (and her marriage to Joseph, who probably married out of compassion) protected her from scandal and ostracism over a child without a father.
(Jesus.)
The mystery of Jesus’s father is one no scholar dares to solve.
But there are theories.
One says it may have been a Roman soldier named Panthera.
I’m very fond of this theory and I get why it’s popular —
not because it’s more plausible (it’s as impossible to corroborate as any other), but because of the symbolism of the whole thing.
It’s pleasing to think that Jesus, with all he became, might have been the hidden bastard of a Roman — that the Jew who would become the empire’s religious center already carried that empire in his blood in some way.
But this is really academic fanfic.
We can’t know.
We do know that Jesus was born and raised with Mary and Joseph; that he lived the life of a Jew of his region in what must have been the most ordinary way possible.
He must have accompanied his mother to temple visits.
He must have chatted with boys in the town squares.
He must have gotten nervous after a scolding from his adoptive father for messing something up in the workshop.
He must have skipped along the streets talking with his friends.
He must have gone to the sea on hot days.
He must have learned to fish.
He must have been moved by hearing the stories of his people.
He must have been bored at a family wedding he was obliged to attend.
He must have seen Romans humiliating Jews in the streets.
He must have seen the bodies of prophets and dissidents displayed to rot as warnings.
And he must have heard from his very worried mother to always keep his head down when a Roman addressed him.
He must have been told not to get involved in those discussions that brought trouble.
He must have learned and sung melodies —
the religious ones, certainly, and probably the popular tunes he heard at street festivals.
The Bible itself says Jesus had brothers.
Editors tried to erase that, but a few mentions remain — without any depth. Remnants of Jesus’s family life scattered among the Gospels.
He must have had games and quarrels with his siblings.
Did Jesus date? We don’t know.
Maybe yes. I think probably.
The Jesus I like to imagine is one who lived a simple, ordinary life until around twenty-nine. Who was well integrated in his community — known by the aunt on the corner, by the baker down the street, by the kid in the little square playing with the dog.
Who greeted the fishermen by name when he passed them on the beach, and heard back from them, smiling, something like, “hey, Jesus! How’s Mary?” to which he’d answer she was doing very well, yes — perhaps asking after the fisherman’s wife too.
Of the historical Jesus we only know: he was born.
And at thirty he appeared in public life.
From then on, we know quite a bit.
When he stepped into public life, Joseph had already vanished from the story —
probably dead by then. Given that death, Jesus likely felt responsible for his mother, along with his brothers.
One of the lingering family references in the New Testament tells of Mary going with his brothers to try to rescue him when he started playing the prophet, because they feared he was going mad.
Was Jesus going mad? Falling in love with poetry? With the lyricism he heard in the sung phrases of prophets in the streets? Was Jesus losing his sense of risk, of danger?
If Jesus had earlier ambitions for public life — to make his mouth the spiritual and political poetry of his time, to use parables to throw indirect jabs at Romans and Pharisees — he seems to have set all that aside until thirty.
Maybe because of his brothers.
Maybe because of his mother.
What changed him was John the Baptist.
That’s scholarly consensus. The religion that would become Christianity actually begins not with Jesus, but with John.
John was the original leader of the movement Jesus would inherit. He was friends with Jesus’s relatives, and they had seen each other a few times over their lives.
Jesus was the more rural boy, from a small town.
John the Baptist had all those feverish, effervescent ideas of someone coming from the big city —
the guy who shows up at Aunt Ruth’s wedding telling all the wild wonders being discussed far away.
At some point, Jesus decided to join John the Baptist’s movement.
The historical Jesus as an ordinary human, an average Jew from Nazareth living a simple carpenter’s life, died.
His death was on the same day the baptized Jesus, the future messiah who would join John’s apocalyptic movement, was born.
John himself carried all the era’s contradictions.
Contrary to the wild way he’s habitually depicted, he was more urban than Jesus. Despite his inflamed apocalyptic-prophet rhetoric, the ritual he insisted on was of the simplest, most modest beauty: a purification bath in waters blessed by words.
Simple moments of cleansing.
The Bible’s editors once again let slip another of those accidents of Christianity’s primitive origins when they kept Jesus’s line that John was “the greatest of men born of women.”
For a religious reader, you might argue that excludes Jesus himself (though he too was born of Mary, but would God be a “man” in the same category for comparison)?
For me, a faithless reading allows an interpretive path that’s still beautiful:
in this path, being a man and human, also born of a mother, Jesus looks at his mentor and says he admires him — that he perceives him as greater than himself.
The baptized Jesus didn’t go back to chit-chatting with fishermen on the shore about how their daughters and wives were doing. Something everyday and human was lost in him when he surrendered to the intense poetry of parables that would lead him to fame and to death. If he hadn’t been radical at his core before, at that moment he radicalized.
Without John, I like to think Jesus might have gone on living to grow old as any ordinary Jew — working as a carpenter, going to the bakery, caring for his mother in old age, perhaps having children, chatting on the waterfront with fishermen about an overcast day that wasn’t, literally, a day for fish.
I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether this banal Jesus — whom history would have forgotten among so many — would have been more or less happy.
But I’m sure he would have been less of a poet.
Taking up the Baptist’s mantle
Jesus began to hear beautiful words.
In the streets, at baptisms, at late-night gatherings to drink wine.
Perhaps even before getting involved with the Baptist he already knew he had this gift.
One day he may have let slip some particularly lovely insight at the lunch table, talking with his mother or one of his brothers. Maybe, now and then, he’d drop a bit of poetry for a good customer at the carpentry shop.
But it was at John’s side that he seems to have truly fallen in love with the whole poetry of the thing —
with speaking to crowds,
with crafting powerful, accessible parables,
with describing feelings and wisdom in ways so simple and beautiful they could move fishermen to tears.
Maybe that melodic passion also had a militant side. With Jesus, as we’ve seen, you can never tell where the line lies between peace and the sword. The Jesus who discovered his gift for poetry may have felt in it a kind of power — that warm flutter of someone thinking about writing revolutionary pamphlets.
Whatever the intentions, the truth is that Jesus, like any good street poet, was probably making a lot of people cry or think revolutionary thoughts.
Perhaps both at the same time…
At the beginning, Jesus must have been more or less a prophet’s assistant to the Baptist.
He must have felt admiration watching his mentor baptize people and say beautiful things.
How much of Jesus’s beautiful sayings were influenced by, or directly referenced, the Baptist — we don’t know.
(That doesn’t stop a lot of scholars and theologians from trying to figure it out.)
Perhaps the Baptist radicalized the apocalyptic prophecies of a Jesus who arrived gentle and warm, with the aura of the neighborhood favorite.
Perhaps Jesus arrived radicalized, hot with activist zeal, and it was John who humanized and softened him.
Perhaps he was both from the start.
Perhaps he was only one and never the other (and we think he was both thanks to some later editor’s sleight of hand).
Again, we don’t know.
At some point, in some way, Jesus was seduced into the world of street-prophet activities (a class unto itself in Jewish culture, the nabis, a mix of town eccentric, popular theater actor, and prophet shouting in the city center).
I take it his mother can’t have liked this “living off prophetic poetry, parables, and apocalyptic visions” business — especially given the punishments Roman-dictatorship censors meted out.
It must have felt like what a Brazilian mother would feel, under a dictatorship, when her middle-class son wanted to quit a perfectly stable civil-service job to make political-poetic independent music.
Maybe Jesus himself felt fear at some point.
Dread.
The urge to go back to being just a carpenter before it was too late.
I’m tempted to believe in this more cautious, melancholy Jesus — one who never surrendered to a feverish fanaticism strong enough to blind him to the risks.
It seems a lucid Jesus spoke in metaphors many times as a way to “slip like soap,” as Brazilians say, considering we know well how to do the same. He was a sly one, able to slide past his censors.
The double meanings in Chico Buarque’s Brazilian song “Cálice,” used to dodge the dictatorship, aren’t so different from the double meanings in Jesus’s parables to slip past the Romans.
There’s a famous story of Jesus healing a blind man — and asking him to keep it under wraps. Not to go around spreading it.
As a metaphor, it makes perfect sense that a lucid, poet-Jesus, aware of Roman danger, would want to stay below the radar.
This Jesus lobbed indirect critiques at powers that could exterminate him if he spoke too openly. He spoke against the Pharisees (whom he saw as rigid defenders of the Jewish text), while in a certain way being part of their camp himself.
While others were rigid about words and customs, Jesus was radical in suggesting an inner, introspective rigor.
He argued for internalizing the word rather than merely performing it.
Jesus argued for authentic, profound respect — not superficial conformity to the social laws of what “looks good.”
Jesus believed the world was about to end —
not as a metaphor, but literally. Maybe next week. Or the week after.
And in the face of this constant imminence of an ending, in the face of the Judgment it would bring, everything that wasn’t gentleness and a dignified internalization of truth, beauty, and poetry… Everything else became futile.
Jesus spoke as if the world were going to end.
He loved as if the world were going to end —
because he believed it really was.
Other prophets did the same. Many matched Jesus in urgency.
What seems to have been his peculiar stamp was the idea that urgency demanded gentleness.
That the urgent way to deal with the end of the world was to turn the other cheek, to love one another, to outgrow the corrupt little theater of gossip and petty spats in the temples.
Jesus’s temple wasn’t a physical place.
The Kingdom of God he proposed wasn’t a place like Jerusalem.
It was something both internal (at our core and the ground of our life in this world ) and also linked to, even synonymous with, something transcendental, beyond the borders of our reality.
Jesus proposed that link — that near-synonymy — between our innermost depths and the most transcendental “out there.”
For him, there was no inside and outside.
We were all — even the most ordinary — equally transcendental.
We all carried the seed of divine beauty and poetry.
We were all children of God.
Jesus’s public life lasted roughly three years, from thirty to thirty-three.
Everything we have that’s most secure about his life, historically speaking, comes from those thirty-odd months.
Everything before is invisible — when Jesus was just another ordinary man.
Everything after is saturated with the power of dogma and myth.
In those thirty-some months, Jesus walked with the poor, beggars, prostitutes, merchants, tax collectors, fishermen.
He drew crowds in the middle of the street to sing his poetry in parables.
I imagine hearing him was unforgettable for anyone who had the chance.
At some point in this career, his mentor was captured and killed.
And it seems, according to scholars, a quick discussion among the followers decided to pass the mantle and leadership to Jesus.
This was the point of no return.
And I like to imagine that Jesus took up his leader’s mantle fully clear-eyed about what he was doing.
Maybe he wasn’t. Some more cynical scholars might say he was so steeped in feverish apocalyptic radicalism that he no longer feared death. I don’t think that makes much sense — not only because I aesthetically prefer another view, but also because of what we know about Jesus himself.
I prefer the hesitant, melancholy, vulnerable Jesus.
Compared to other prophets, for instance, he was less inclined to visions, epiphanies, intense visual hallucinations (things common among the nabis).
What he said, even when transcendental, never lost its “down-to-earth” element.
So I prefer — and find more plausible — the Jesus who looked at the mantle being offered, knew it was dangerous, and accepted it anyway.
Who accepted it not because he didn’t fear death, but because he loved too much the poetry of what he was doing — the hope and dignity his journey brought to his people — and was willing to risk and sacrifice himself for it.
Jesus alone in the desert, introspective as he pondered his future, pondered the Baptist’s severed head — and his own, next in line.
Jesus alone in the desert, rising to return to his apostles with his next batch of beautiful words —
beautiful words he hoped could soothe the hearts of a suffering people.
Even if he had to die for it.
The Jesus who surrenders to the uncertainty and beauty of his mission does so fully aware that his rival leaders among the Pharisees — and even more so the Romans — were not people much given to poetry.
On returning from the desert and taking his leader’s mantle, something else in Jesus is lost.
He seems more resigned and intense.
If there is an all-or-nothing Jesus — the Jesus who brings the sword, the Jesus who overturns the merchants’ tables in the temple — it’s this one:
the Jesus who, after his leader’s death and after accepting the risk of ending the same way, speaks with a poetic voice that has nothing left to lose, aflame with the promise of dignity for himself and for everyone.
Absolutely everyone. No exceptions.
Poetry, beauty, and dignity for all!
Because the world is going to end, we have nothing left to lose — and in the end only poetry, beauty, and dignity matter.
Yes, Jesus went around talking about these things. To everyone. Loudly. With plenty of people listening and applauding.
In other words, the most dangerous voice in the world —
except that it was still “only” a voice speaking in beautiful metaphors,
speaking of love and kindness interleaved with the promise of a post-apocalypse.
Those damned Romans will fall — oh, they will — but we’ll keep smiling until that day comes
Grace belongs to us even now, for the dignity we are due today — and for how much we can smile, tomorrow, at the fall of the unjust.
That was his thrust.
That is the inescapable force of his work.
Why have you forsaken me?
We don’t know whether Jesus was self-martyring or not.
We don’t know if he was truly willing to sacrifice himself for others, or if it sort of just happened because the circumstances closed in on him.
I like to think resignation was an ambivalent meeting of both things:
between feeling he’d backed himself into a dead end by keeping on speaking so beautifully after the Baptist’s head rolled…
and feeling he now had to see it through to try to prevent worse outcomes for his passionate followers.
Perhaps the Jesus who promised his loved ones that, if he were killed, he would go to heaven… Perhaps he really believed that. Literally.
But perhaps he only invented that version, presenting it as poetically as possible, to try to console and calm his deeply worried mother.
More or less like we do when we say something like “he’s in a better place,” or “hang on, soon everything will get better,” to comfort those we love in contexts where we absolutely don’t know if there is a better place, or whether things will improve.
Cynics — and strict academics — will say Jesus deliberately insisted on going up to Jerusalem during a crowded festival, aware that his presence would be a political event displeasing to Pharisees, Romans, and the “common order.”
They’ll say he went there feverish with apocalyptic conviction, already willing to offer his flesh as a sacrificial lamb to the movement — hoping to be caught and made a martyr, if he was politically shrewd; or simply believing that being caught would bring heaven down to earth, if he was radically, deliriously prophetic.
The Jesus in my version is not that.
And Jesus’s deep doubt on the cross is a clue that points me toward the version I like and most believe.
I believe Jesus chose to remain radically loyal to his dignity, to the promise of dignity for his followers, to love, kindness, and poetry.
I believe any apocalyptic fever that may have led this thirty-three-year-old man to walk to his cross after being tortured coexisted with the lucid, human insecurity of doubt.
The vulnerable Jesus being tortured is not a Jesus full of conviction.
That is what makes him sad. His hell, not only physical, is a hell of uncertainty.
The crucified Jesus does not laugh at the Romans saying, “ha-ha, you’re toast, my Father will be here any minute and you’ll answer to Him!”
He is not stoic or serene on the cross, shrugging and saying, “well then, that’s that, apocalypse coming soon… see you on the other side, heh, let’s see what’s next, all right?”
None of that.
The crucified Jesus cries out, in anguish, a doubt:
“My God, why have you forsaken me?”
I believe that was the most vulnerable moment of Jesus’s life, when he wasn’t speaking to someone but for himself.
His most human moment.
When the speaker wasn’t a public figure, nor a prophet, nor a Messiah, but the carpenter’s son —
the one who, only a few years earlier, had walked the shore chatting with fishermen,
and who now suffered torture for daring to dream too high.
Any comfort in promises of resurrection he may have left to his followers and family stayed down below, before he was raised on the cross.
Alone up there, bleeding and agonizing, he did not ask this to comfort anyone, nor thinking about how his poetry in saying it would affect the emotional health of those who loved him.
Jesus’s moment of doubt is his one passage of confessional poetry —
of absolute vulnerability,
of surrender to doubt,
haunted by the consequences and feeling all their pain in his flesh.
Jesus must have felt indignant.
How could he be punished with so undignified a fate merely for seeking dignity and poetry?
Jesus’s cry of doubt and uncertain lament sealed his historical work.
The question “why have you forsaken me?” is the last thing a secular reading of the historical man can consider — without a resurrection ahead.
The Jesus I see is one who cemented his legacy by that uncertainty he screamed in agony in his final moments.
His doubt infected everyone who knew him. It installed the intensity of his trauma in the flesh of all who had seen him alive.
It made it unbearable, unsustainable, unthinkable to accept the stark fact — the death and the abandonment — without poetry.
It forced the people who had listened to him for comfort to begin echoing him in order to comfort themselves.
The Romans lifted Jesus on a cross to send a message, in the most pragmatic, cruel way possible, that the whole business of dreaming of dignity and poetry was nonsense —
that it was better to keep your head down, stay quiet, obey, and conform without complaint.
The submissive don’t end up skewered on a stake.
From Jesus, both the immortal dignifying poetry and the pain infected his followers.
They became inescapable.
They became the Christians’ immortal dignifying poetry. And also, Christians’ unbearable suffering that only poetry could heal. A closed, vicious cycle with no place left for the Roman threat.
To be a Christian was to choose that it was better to die tortured on a stake than to let go of the meaning, poetry, beauty, and dignity Jesus had shown.
Many other Christians died crucified — and in other terrible ways — according to that choice.
To be a Christian was to live so haunted by Jesus’s “why have you forsaken me?” that leaving it unanswered — without a “I have not forsaken you!” — would be terrifying.
More terrifying than anything any Roman could dream up to do.
To be a Christian was, faced with that haunting, to live motivated to create poetry and community —
to install the collective poetic delirium of the resurrection that preserves meaning.
Jesus’s dignity was so strong, so fundamental, so necessary to his listeners that he could not die — not as a symbol, not as a metaphor.
They sacrificed any reason to keep him alive in the resurrection because that hope was the only alternative to despair.
Jesus was not special for having been a prophet, for having been considered by his own a messiah, nor for having been crucified. Several similar prophets were called messiahs and ended up crucified before, during, and after him. The same circumstances that produced him were producing many.
What truly sets Jesus apart from any other was the indignant reaction of his audience —
an audience so in love with poetry that it simply refused to yield.
How much of that was the result of something extraordinary in Jesus himself, or of something extraordinary in those followers, we will never know.
I like to see the extraordinary in the bond, more than in either part.
What was extraordinary was the specific bond between that Jesus and those followers.
The same followers, with a less inspiring prophet, might have been just another audience for the ancient prophets of the region.
The same Jesus, with less inspired followers, might have been just another of the region’s ancient prophets before a mere audience.
When Jesus died on the cross, his followers refused to let his dignifying poetry die with him.
They dragged him back from the dead — against everything and everyone — disregarding common sense, reason, fear, risks, threats.
And they were killed in droves protecting the same hope Jesus first promised —
ensuring that, as far as it depended on them, Jesus would never be forsaken.
Only the most beautiful poetry in the world, made by someone like Jesus, could generate a trauma so unbearable when its artist was tortured and killed.
Only a trauma as unbearable as Jesus’s death could generate so visceral a demand for such beautiful poetry.
An entire part of the world was so haunted by Jesus’s doubt that it committed itself wholly to a millennia-long project to answer him and comfort him. Christians were the first whom we might criticize for “romanticizing suffering” or “aestheticizing trauma,” but they did it in the absence of psychologists — choosing between that and going mad.
For the maintenance of their own spirit, for their own sanity, they had to say: no, Jesus. You were not abandoned. We are here. Look at everything we have built for you and your beautiful poetry…
This was the dynamic that set the Christian foundations.
To this day, there is no trauma in a Christian’s life for which prayers and pretty words of comfort are not offered — which are, essentially, beautiful poetry.
Someone said to Mary, “he’s in a better place,” giving her a hug or little pats on her shoulder, while she screamed in tears watching her dead son lowered from the cross.
She chose to believe it because the alternative was far too unbearable —
far too painful.
And in the poetry of that faith she found a dignity no Roman could destroy —
a despair so dignified for poetry that no cross could silence it.
Fishermen’s tales
Mary’s boy from down the way?
Yeah, man. The Romans got him. It was ugly, you hear?
But did you know I’d seen the kid before that?
Yeah — Mary’s son. Name’s Jesus.
Since he was little he’d show up here now and then. He really was different. Did some crazy stuff. We climbed into the boat to head out and fish, and the guy came walking on the water. On the water! Crazy thing.
Andrew’s brother — Simon — ran around with him everywhere.
Andrew himself, who used to be more in the Baptist’s crowd, joined up with them. He said there was this one time when everyone was supposed to drink only water and Jesus somehow made wine show up.
Heh, there are all kinds of rumors going around about the guy.
Gossip, right?
But there’s so much talk that there’s gotta be some truth in there somewhere.
That walking-on-water one! I was there, I saw it!
His mother’s still around. Mama Mary. A woman who suffered, poor thing. She and the followers are the ones keeping the group alive. And they’re swearing up and down that Jesus didn’t die at all. Actually — stranger yet — they’re saying he died and came back. And then left again.
Who knows, right?
If the guy already walks on water, already turns water into wine, maybe he also found a way not to die?
Oh, and there’s the gossip about Judas.
Yeah, Judas…
Seems like he really did betray him. A bastard, you know. Damn, it’s rough knowing there are people like that… He doesn’t run with anyone now, obviously. They put a kid named Matthias in his place. Good kid, that Matthias.
The other day I took these big old fish I’d hauled in off the point down to the market. A fella named Lazarus bought one. Oh, so you known him already? Yeah, him. He was with his sisters.
Those three were real close with Jesus, and he spoke all moon-eyed. One sister said she washed his feet with oil, dried them with her hair — which sounded a bit weird to me. Did that with her brother right there watching? I don’t know, man. Every family’s got its things.
Lazarus himself seems a bit touched, too. Not only did he say Jesus really came back, he said that he himself once died and Jesus brought him back too. I heard later from my wife that he’s been telling that same crazy story for years.
Crazy stuff, crazy stuff.
But who knows, right? Who knows?
I hope that Jesus guy really did come back. That’s the kind of thing we deserve. The Romans wouldn’t like it… and well, to hell with them anyway.
But that the whole thing is strange — that it is.
I saw the guy walk on water right here, I swear to you, so it’s even easier to take the rest into account… but who knows.
Crazy times we’re living in.
People walking on water, dying and coming back, Romans doing all their Roman shenanigans.
End-of-the-world stuff, really.
If you run into Mary, tell her I sent my condolences for her boy — and a hug. Tell her I’ll give her a better price on whatever fish she wants.
And ask when the group meeting is, please.
If the fish aren’t biting that day, I’ll show up there. My wife’s been wanting to go for months. Everyone’s been saying good things about those meetings. I want to go see what it’s about.
You taking this one?
Ah, perfect.
Fresh and big — came in from the sea just now.
Same price as always, please. Ah, no discount — you’ll break me…
All right then. Just a little cheaper, but only because it’s you.
Thanks, Alfeu. Say hi to the family.
Have a good weekend!
Go with God!
3. After Jesus
Let’s play alternate history.
Imagine that a decaying South Africa, at the most conflict-ridden moment of the struggle to end Apartheid, had the indecency to kill Mandela —
a public execution.
After that, the regime somehow held things together and didn’t fall.
But the popular indignation was so great, especially when gathered under the symbol of the martyred Mandela, that the situation became untenable.
Desperate for a solution to all this political instability, this South Africa later “promotes” Mandela to a public symbol.
From then on he’s in portraits in government buildings, in the lyrics of the national anthem, in statues everywhere.
He becomes the national symbol of a “retooled” South Africa making a symbolic mea culpa.
To appropriate Mandela as a symbol distorts him.
But also enlarges him.
The people, suspicious as they are, still feel some victory in that.
Mandela was killed — and now there he is, look, in that beautiful, towering statue in the city center.
Political instability improves a little for a time, the government consolidates itself, and that symbolic contradiction of the distorted, appropriated hero remains alive in the nation’s heart.
You can distort, appropriate, and reframe Mandela as much as you like; you can abstract him and hollow him out; but in him there will still resist, through all that time and against every effort, the same bond of the people to that promise of dignity —
a dignity your government, using his symbol as a promise of the future, continues to deny in the present.
This decaying South Africa does not overcome Apartheid.
And the crystallized Mandela at its center keeps crying out: the end of this rotten order will come, will come.
A bit dystopian, right? Sounds absurd?
You must have realized I didn’t start talking about South Africa to pivot this text into an alternative history of the twentieth century.
It’s an analogy about Jesus.
About the Romans.
Because what the Romans did with Jesus was exactly this.
What they did with Jesus’s legacy , once it escaped the lower classes, the slaves, the Jews, once Jesus reached the palaces of the aristocracy…
… was to appropriate him, distort him, expand and amplify him as the last gambit of a decaying empire trying to resolve political instability.
A rebranding move designed to try to avoid civil wars and slave revolts.
Did it work?
Who won in the end, Jesus or the Romans?
Both, a bit.
And, a bit, neither.
It’s on that tension that the whole history of our world has teetered since Christianity emerged.
The empire of the day always proudly stamps its hollowed-out, harmless Jesus onto the atrocities of realpolitik.
The empire of the day always falls.
Some Jesus always keeps going, only to be reappropriated by the next.
A philosophical Jesus
Jesus’s legacy is always ambivalent.
Every victory carries a defeat as well.
The first victory for Jesus’s legacy — thanks to Paul — was that it expanded to become a common treasure for Gentiles too.
Jesus as a brand went on to expand his markets as an international, translated poet. He was heard by those who were not Jews.
The first defeat for Jesus’s legacy was that, in the process, it became detached from the Judaism he had promised, somehow, to reform.
That means the Jesus who moved forward was always reappropriated.
Always a stateless foreigner.
Made important in contexts alien to his own —
by people who had no way to understand, intimately, what Jesus’s experience with the Torah was like, or his frustration with the Pharisees.
The historical Jesus is, for the world, an immigrant —
always translated.
Not a single word of what he said in Aramaic survives in the original language.
On the other hand, I feel Jesus would be left with the (poetically exaggerated) impression that Judaism’s abandoning of his words prevented those he criticized as Pharisees from leaving their comfort zone.
Through his own biased perspective, Jesus would have seen in the Judaism he was born the same bureaucracies still.
The same rigidity of conformity, the same (contextually justified) survivor’s syndrome that clings to a solid identity without allowing much room for fluidity — because any reform risks erasure.
That isn’t true of all Jews. In their rhetorical tradition — in the comments added in dynamic debates over every text, in developments and adaptations of thought according to each nation they lived in, in Judaism’s entry into the secular sphere — there is ample counterexample.
But that seems to have been Jesus’s bias in his critiques of his own culture while he was alive. He didn’t live to see all the examples I’m mentioning of fluid Jews; perhaps he was unlucky with the ones he knew in his time.
Or perhaps he was just a bit rebellious. As a poet’s soul, maybe he was a rebellious adolescent —
intransigent.
Judaism, Jesus would say — if he knew he’d been set aside — remained rigid and solid for millennia, despite him.
In some of its major groups, it reached the twenty-first century with a lot from the ancient foundations and ideas it had carried since the Bronze Age.
In no other group in today’s world does there persist so tightly interwoven this idea — one that seems so odd to us — that an identity must be national, ethnic, religious, secular, and political all at once, ambivalent and blended, refusing separation.
(Or better: part of this group. Being Israeli or Zionist is not the same as being Jewish. Even so, it’s a representative identity, if for nothing else, then because there’s an entire project by a nation-state around it. What that project seeks is precisely to structure a synonymy between this national project and the identity “Jewish.” I hope they don’t win the struggle over meanings. If history has taught anything, it’s that Jewish identity goes beyond any border or empire…)
Because it is these conservatives who most “preserve” those roots, the expansionist state project of Israel comes from those who see it as natural to act today in the same way expanding kingdoms (and the extermination of their neighbors) acted in the Bronze Age.
Every dissenting Jewish voice that proposed changing any detail of the doctrine was erased, or diminished, or dissolved by assimilation into the majority in whatever empire they lived.
Judaism survived — despite so often being the culture of a fragile minority — more often in its more rigid variant of nature.
Christianity, despite what some may think, was born with the proposal of being the opposite — fluid to a fault. Light as water. Ready to be appropriated, distorted, twisted, and reinterpreted by anyone, according to any whim, to justify any desire.
(Yes, it’s a metaphor. Jews have been fluid in some contexts; Christians have been rigid in others. I thought this addendum was important so my lyricism wouldn’t betray me into a stereotyping generalization. Christianity’s “liquid” state led to various theological dead ends under the bureaucratic, dogmatic rigidity of the centuries of Catholic monopoly.)
Jesus, always the foreigner, had to reshape himself in order to travel.
He had to become more handsome in some places.
Whiter, in others.
Blacker, in some.
To please the Gentiles, the first place he prospered was in the Hellenistic world, the cultural fringes of old Greek influence.
The fishermen’s informal stories about Jesus — their popular yarns — were turned into written word by Greek authors fond of the classical philosophers.
Out of aesthetic preference, they also made Jesus more of a philosopher.
Suddenly the simple man who spoke in parables began to articulate abstract metaphysical dilemmas.
I was recently given a book of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the Bible. It’s gorgeous and it symbolizes very well this rift between Jewish stone and Christian water.
The Old Testament illustrations are, as a rule, visceral. “Then God killed fifteen thousand children for being from the wrong tribe,” “then David led an army that expanded the borders of his sacred kingdom,” and, in general, the warlike tone of any Bronze Age mythology.
Then the New Testament illustrations arrive and they are… light.
A story focused on a few acts and a few people. No kings, no military leaders, no great battles — just a poor Jew talking in the market square with other poor people.
Being French, Doré still adapts and distorts, as a good representative of Christian malleability. His drawings follow European aesthetics. And his gentle Jesus is a philosopher — Socrates, more specifically. Only beautiful.
The historical Jesus, like the historical Socrates, probably was not handsome.
Back then, everything was mixed together — religion, politics, poetry, literature, erudition.
Jesus’s legacy caught the trailing edge of that diversity, but already at a time when things were splitting into different institutions.
So there were different versions of him that survived longer or shorter depending on the institution that projected them.
The Hellenists’ philosopher Jesus didn’t live long on his own.
Philosophy, erudition, and Hellenism were later swallowed by the institution of the Church. In primitive Christianity there were a few early attempts to propose a more secular, philosopher Jesus.
They didn’t go very far; the secular force would still take time to catch on.
The philosopher Jesus needed to exist to cater to the “good taste” of a certain more privileged class that would be the bridge connecting fishermen to emperors.
He served as the transitional Jesus of the educated classes.
But if he lost the religious element and surrendered to being only poetry — or only philosophy — he would lose the fishermen in the process.
And with that he would become fragile and wither.
Zeus, and everything Homer did, carried the aura of something coming top-down: the upper classes imposing, with a cudgel, the poetry they preferred — the reinterpretation they favored.
Jesus came bottom-up.
People always felt — rightly — that they owned Jesus enough to talk back when someone above started to feel too comfortable trying to monopolize the story.
The primitive Jesus, the one who came out of the circles of Jews around the apostles and Mary, even learned to speak Greek and to resemble Socrates.
He did philosophy.
In the Bible itself he becomes that kind of elegant articulator, especially in Luke (later than the earlier “down-to-earth” reports of Jesus).
But he does not break with the poetic faith —
with the fish tale about walking on water,
with the idea that he came back alive after three days.
The Hellenists took advantage of the lyrical, metaphorical richness to reflect inwardly and philosophize — the same process they used with pagan stories, now shifting over to a new selection of folk tales.
They could do that as much as they liked, but they did not do with Jesus’s yarns what they had done with the Greek ones: they were not able to reduce them to mere aesthetics and literature. At least not there. Not yet.
The fishermen wouldn’t allow it.
An imperial Jesus
It’s common to tell the history of Christianity with a turning point and triumph at the moment — more than three centuries after Jesus’s death — when emperors like Constantine and Theodosius stopped persecuting Christians and “promoted” them to a central place in the empire.
Again: in Jesus’s legacy, every victory is also a defeat.
The most ridiculous appropriation of Jesus in history was probably the one run by Emperor Constantine.
By then, the religion of the common folk had already climbed every wall of the palace.
A generalized Christian revolt (in numbers) was imminent in a weakened empire.
History won’t let this be said outright, but I can be biased as a poet: from the bottom of my heart, I have no doubt that Constantine’s opening to Christians was cynical — a sneaky, cowardly maneuver to gain some political support and stay on the fence a few more months.
(Scholars say it’s ambivalent. Anyway. I’ll be willful and lean into the caricature because it serves — and spices up — the argument.)
As Christianity gained clout, politicians began to make concessions.
First, they stopped killing them — for a while.
Second, they allowed their temples.
Then, they even sponsored some temples.
Split funds between pagan temples and Christian ones.
Erect a few monuments — at first far away,
then closer,
then closer still.
They had to do all that to try to contain the popular force of a poet dead for centuries.
A poet!
In the secular world, the clash endures: an empire versus the memory of a peripheral peasant and poet.
Scoreboard: a kind of tie.
Then you look at the terms of the game and…
Wait. A poet tied with an empire?
Even if it’s a draw, given the scale of the thing, that’s already pretty impressive for the poet.
And when the empire’s team dissolves, the peasant poet is still in the tournament — against other empires, true, but still.
And he keeps. Always. On. Drawing.
And so, as the season opener for all these matches:
the Arch of Constantine.
It’s the emblematic work of early Roman Christianity.
It’s also cynical, ridiculous, and stupid.
(Beautifully made, despite that.)
Starting with the myth attached to it.
The fable tells of a Constantine who dreamed of Jesus on the battlefield. He raised a variation of the Christian cross as a standard.
He won the battle. Miracle!
(Except he lost successive battles after that. And he had to make do by hiring half his battalions as paid mercenaries.)
It’s a crude appropriation —
the lowest way to plug Jesus into the mythological and credal structures of Roman expansionist militarism. There are copy-and-paste versions of this story — with battles and standards — for every god of every pantheon.
The entire Iliad is a more refined variation on that kind of narrative structure.
For Constantine’s story, it’s as if they did a Ctrl+F in a text where “Saturn appeared in a dream” and simply replaced every mention with “Jesus appeared.”
I can’t imagine anyone in this world whom a dream-visiting Jesus would be less willing to help.
Would Jesus grant victory to an emperor of the decaying Roman Empire — the one that killed the Baptist? That crucified him?
The Romans’ Jesus — the one that moved up to aristocrats and palaces — had to mute and hide a great deal of his “render unto Caesar” side, his “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” side.
To this day, every empire that appropriates Jesus struggles with that side of him…
But the distorted appropriation, however incongruent and hypocritical it was, worked.
The story stuck — so much so that here I am citing it.
Some see in this Roman-Jesus tale the ultimate victory of Christianity.
I see the Romans’ final sneer at the already cold corpse of the Jesus they crucified.
There were, I’m sure, many Romans who genuinely bonded with Jesus — who were moved by his story.
But the view from the empire’s heart necessarily carried its biases.
And beyond individuals — however well-intentioned — the empire’s rotten, decaying cynicism was structural, widespread, cultural.
Systemic.
It makes sense to me that, in Roman Christianity, that whole business of guilt blossomed —
a massive guilt, everyone’s, tied to the hypocrisy of an expansionist project.
The Christian empire went on doing everything the same way to conquered peoples — as before.
As it had done with Jesus.
The only difference was now the religion scolded it.
The empire didn’t stop torturing people, killing the poor, or waging wars of territorial expansion because it became Christian.
There were Christian empires with slaves.
Many slaves — often worse off than Jesus.
Nor did the Roman Empire cease to be decadent because it turned Christian.
Constantine’s monument is a military arch —
built to exalt an emperor’s battlefield conquests.
The bit that mentions Jesus and the dream is vague — deliberately crafted to stay on the fence. Pagans still had their clout back then — their temples and money — so you couldn’t be too disruptive.
True to the tradition of pleasing neither Greeks nor Trojans, that fence-sitting arch pleased neither Christians nor pagans overly much.
Today it sits rather obscurely off to the side in Rome — a B-list tourist attraction. Not a religious landmark, a curiosity for the curious like me.
(I want to visit it someday.)
The Roman military institution didn’t last long.
Even so, the Christian empire still refashioned Jesus in its own way.
The emphasis on “Jesus with a sword” is likely a Roman contribution.
The feeling of “triumph of the formerly downtrodden” took hold with them — even though the triumphs were the same as before, increasingly less triumphant on the way to bankruptcy, and the downtrodden were also the same as before, still humiliated under the empire’s boot for as long as the Romans could squeeze out taxes.
The national, warlike, militarist Jesus receded when the Western Roman Empire fell.
Unfortunately, I think it left behind the cross as a symbol of guilt.
I don’t much like the cross as a symbol, nor do I much like referring to Jesus as Jesus Christ. I feel that if someone died impaled, it would be in poor taste to make impalement a totem of guilt — and the image of the impaled fellow part of his remembrance. To walk around with a little silver pendant of a tiny impaled man…
There is no dignity and no justification in the suffering empires cause.
There was no justification for the Romans crucifying Jesus.
There would be no justification for all the Christians killed afterward.
Nor for all the “pagans” of conquered peoples whom the Christian Roman Empire — its expansionism — killed as well.
Down fell the military Jesus, dressed in a soldier’s clothes.
Good.
Without political Jesus, without intellectual Jesus.
At the heart of this empire’s ruin, the only Jesus still alive was the one that would survive the end of Antiquity — after the literary-classical death of the Greek, philosophical, erudite Jesus, and after the military-pragmatic death of the Roman, cynical, imperial Jesus.
Without Roman Jesus.
The barbarian invaders, the popular revolts, the slaves, the fishermen — didn’t allow it.
When new kingdoms arose, they didn’t bother much to resurrect those fallen versions of Jesus that circulated through the empire that had collapsed. Nor did they have the institutional grandeur of what had fallen, to try to repeat the national project.
A continent-wide institutional warmonger Jesus like that could only survive under an empire bestriding the entire Mediterranean.
Stripped of his philosophical and political dimensions, the Jesus that remained was the religious one. That one could circulate freely — go international.
That one became immortal.
That it was he is, again, as much a victory as a defeat.
A doctrinal Jesus
The Christian church that became the Catholic Church was not only the last of Antiquity’s great institutions to preserve Jesus;
it was also one of the last ancient institutions to survive.
It grew into the power vacuum left by the others.
It reshaped the European continent in its own image and to its own liking.
It embedded itself as fundamental to the political stability of every kingdom.
It franchised its presence, following a more or less standardized pattern, in every direction.
It was the most extensive, interconnected international network of its time — the true cultural and communicational structure orchestrating and organizing a world.
Within this gigantic church there were worries of every sort:
geopolitical concerns, concerns with minor local powers, with the preservation of collections, with the continuity of literary education, with the training of literate monks.
This church fostered scholasticism, then universities, then the Renaissance, and, from there, the Enlightenment.
It did all this later and half unwittingly — almost against its own will — because it wanted to preserve Christian things; and Christian things were occasionally dynamic; and when those preserved dynamic Christian things were kept alive long enough, they gave birth to new offspring.
The atheism I profess today is a grandchild of the Enlightenment, a great-great-grandchild of the Renaissance — thus linked to the preservation networks promoted by Catholics since the deep Middle Ages.
Of course, all that preservation did not come free of charge.
Catholics afforded themselves the luxury of preserving “more” of their favorite readings of Jesus. They kept some others, fondly or fearfully, on deep library shelves under the hesitant label “blasphemies.”
They distorted much else. Burned much more.
They tried to give absolute rigidity to something that was bound to move again sooner or later — and that did move in every direction when the Protestantisms prospered.
I like the Christians’ Jesus — and the Catholics’, bureaucratic though he may be.
With their pantheon of saints.
Their theological treatises.
With Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
With Christendom’s tentative enlightenments from the early thinkers of science.
With the paintings of Da Vinci.
With the Virgin Mary.
And the cathedrals.
And the blue-eyed Jesus, austere or gentle, stern or smiling, joyful or suffering.
This religious Jesus kept intertwining with variations of a political Jesus.
Each fief with its petty quarrels. Each distortion tugging the blanket toward some rich family.
The Medici. The bishops of feudal courts. The priests sent on the conquerors’ ships.
Accompanying the bandeirantes on their adventures, spreading deadly pandemics across new continents.
In all these catastrophes — hypocritical, or offering aid to the wretched struck by disaster or war — there was always an ambivalent cross.
One day, a Christian had a beautiful poetic idea.
He articulated it without much fear, protected and preserved by his church’s mission of safeguarding the scholarly tradition of the universities.
He said Jesus and God would not have created a world so beautiful and complex for us to pass through it dishonestly.
He said that legitimate curiosity — the search for scientific truth, even when uncomfortable or contrary to our dogmas — was a way to honor and beautify God’s plan.
He said humanity’s mission was not to blind itself with ancient poetry, but to marvel poetically in the eternal search for newer, deeper truths.
That stance — so idealistic as to be ridiculous — was the basis for the Enlightenment, which would give birth to the coldest, most serious of Western sciences.
Inspired by a loving gaze.
From there, they began digging into the ruins of stories on all sides.
Science developed technology, which developed the printing press, which developed the communicational arena in which the Protestantisms would sprout.
Scholasticism developed science, which produced archaeologists and scholars of religion who now pull from the desert relics inconvenient to the canon — things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, an apocryphal gospel with a kindly Judas instead of a traitor, and all those fabulous gospels of little Jesus’s childhood adventures.
It’s almost as if they were continually hacking the development files of a big studio’s video game — finding beta versions of characters, older variations of the script, changes in story development, tiffs among the production team, scenes that were cut wholesale…
This Jesus of mine, for instance, is the self-taught Jesus of an atheist. Built with PDFs, academic essays on YouTube, and books I waited to buy on sale at a Book Fair or in Amazon’s end-of-year deals.
Progressive Protestantism tied to humor, under a reading of religious fields by Bourdieu combined with a study of the communicational phenomenon of mediatization — this absurd phrase, niche of the niche of the niche, was my Master’s thesis in Communication.
(It wasn’t all that — and I earned a tidy 9.5.)
Today’s Jesus is diverse, multiple, vast, personalized, individual, niche-ified. For every ambitious religious institution that shows up with a radical Jesus promising hegemonic strength, another fifteen variations appear — and twenty more “de-churched” Christians.
Or secular atheists in love with Jesus, like me.
How many different Jesuses have you heard of?
Do you know the Catholics’ Jesus? The Lutherans’? The Jews’? The following of Jews who think Jesus is the Messiah but not the Son of God? The Muslims’ Jesus? The Japanese one? Had you met the scholars’ historical Jesus? The political Jesus of social-media fights? The Romans’ imperial Jesus? The Jesuits’ Jesus? Mexico’s Jesus? Leminski’s Jesus? The beautiful Black Jesus in Janet McKenzie’s paintings? The meme Jesus?
Had you met this crazy poets’ Jesus I’m so fond of?
Have you heard of the Brazilians’ Jesus?
Today, Jesus is especially popular in Latin America and Africa.
He arrived in Brazil through the expansionist networks of a naval empire trying to play Roman in a new world.
This Jesus is one of those who suffer most. They try to turn him into a tasteless parody in every way, every day.
It’s profitable in the short term.
It doesn’t last long.
People don’t like it.
The Roman Jesus of a decaying Portuguese empire. The paradox: he gets confused with the people’s Jesus walking the dirty sidewalks.
When they try to ridicule him — when they make this Jesus’s memory suffer too much —
Brazilians don’t allow it.
Some of the Brazilian Jesuses
Brazil is a bit like what Jesus would have liked as a national project.
It’s diverse and doesn’t hide behind the identity structure of an ethno-state.
It’s a country of poetry and authenticity.
For many people, the Brazilian Jesus is the one in which you internalize Christian rules (the famous “non-practicing Christian” of the Brazilian who’s too lazy to go to church). Brazilians often bond with Jesus in the first person, above performative conformity.
The Brazilian’s Jesus is personalized by individualism, neoliberalism, capitalism, secularism, religious deinstitutionalization — hence the dechurched. He’s an intimate phenomenon as much as he is a social facet.
The comfort Jesus brought to oppressed Jews under the Roman boot is no different from what he brings to Brazilian favela-dwellers and the formerly enslaved under the unequal boot and above the ruins of the failed Portuguese empire.
Nor is it different from a neighboring Jesus who today draws strength and hope to accompany Africa’s population boom.
Africa — the continent of Christianity’s future.
Brazil — the country with the most Christians in the world.
The Brazilians’ Jesus I first met was the one at the Lutheran school where I went to study at eight years old.
Before that, I’d had minimal contact with Christianity at home.
My grandmother, German, had taught me some Christian songs in German. We prayed before bedtime.
The Lutherans I knew were dogmatic, rigid, and ill-prepared to deal with my family’s chaos.
They were moralistic about issues of mental suffering and were not very understanding when I decided to detach from conformity to their faith.
They ostracized me in an environment I continued to frequent for a few more school years.
It wasn’t a positive introduction to Christians.
In every religion class, not even once was anything mentioned about the archaeologists’ Jesus I mention here.
The religious discourse seemed bureaucratic. Procedural, mechanical, uninspired.
Even while being so intolerant in protecting him, no one seemed to like Jesus all that much — at least not enough to engage directly with him.
Everything always had to be mediated by the Church’s bureaucracy which, by nature, made the whole matter very dense and dull.
When my family left Lutheranism, in a desperate phase we turned to the more miracle-working neopentecostalism.
I started attending a neighborhood evangelical church set up in a warehouse.
There I met a peripheral Jesus from Campo Limpo (a poor neighborhood on São Paulo’s periphery).
In its geopolitical place relative to the expansionist tentacles of decaying empires, Campo Limpo — and any similar Brazilian periphery — doesn’t differ much from what Nazareth must have been in Jesus’s time.
My family, in a shattering crisis, would often leave me at the church.
I became friends with the pastor, who started taking me here and there.
He’d set up a home styled like a TV soap-opera set. It sat behind the church, with a shop window so the faithful could walk past and peer in. A humble little house.
Despite the performative Christianity of living there, he actually lived in a house in a nearby gated community. I found out almost by accident around the same time he started putting me on stage during evening services to perform a ridiculous little “possession” skit.
With me as a child, the one who cast the devil out of me and stopped me from saying odd glossolalia things, supposedly, was Jesus. He charged tithes for it. And miracle weeks. And healing Sundays. And that extra little bit of faith to make sure auntie’s surgery went well…
(Everything I can say about him will sound caricatured. If it were fiction, I’d tone it down to make it more believable.)
At some point, my mother, in a bipolar crisis, realized that Jesus wasn’t going to work a miracle — and that the best way to get better was psychiatric and psychological treatment and medication. The family stabilized.
Without the desperation to go chasing new churches, with our family ostracized from the old ones, I took my spiritual life into my own hands. I became an atheist.
So went my first contacts with some of the kinds of Jesus who walk through Brazil.
They weren’t very positive.
The vulture institutions that drag their claws through Brazil’s dry, miserable corners owe a lot, in their cynicism, to what the corrupt temples must have been trying to con the precarious in the time of the historical Jesus.
The poet Jesus would probably demolish the little stage-set church — or the tent selling “miracle week” booklets — with a fury similar to the one he employed when he went wild smashing the trinkets sold near the temples.
Rescuing my atheist Jesus
The internet of atheist teenagers I grew up with was pretty hostile to Christianity.
I wanted to be rebellious.
I was outraged at the exploitation my vulnerable family suffered in religious institutions.
So I decided to be hostile too.
It was around age eleven that I declared myself an atheist. That level of freedom for a middle-class Brazilian teenager living in the periphery would have been unthinkable a generation earlier, in a dictatorship-era Brazil — extremely religious and without the internet.
Today’s Brazil is still extremely religious.
Now there are more and more infinite variations of Jesus in this country — some cretinous, others beautiful. The opportunistic and the charitable. Those that promise to cure depression with tithes, and those that bring hot meals to the homeless.
Online, to contest the Christianity around me, “Rodlucifer666” was my MSN handle, my email, and my nickname in Habbo Hotel. My T-shirts were of rock bands. On Orkut, I got a kick out of offensive and edgy communities like the one that declared “Jesus should have gotten beaten more.”
In the distorted ignorance of Brazilian parody, the symbolic injustice of equating Jesus with the Romans —
thinking that disrespecting his image was somehow an attack on the institutions that distorted him, not realizing that the distorted Jesus was, in fact, distorted.
A community gathering the “ironic” humor of the same authoritarianisms that crucified then — and that crucify now.
There’s nothing rebellious or clever in taking their side… in echoing the Romans’ graffiti…
I regret the silly views of that time, but I’m understanding of my context back then.
I thought that way before I had found this poet Jesus who, peripheral like me, poetic like me, is more hidden — but seems to speak to me directly.
He wasn’t easy to find, with so few editors interested amid the loud volume of so many other versions.
But his afterlife is easy because, poetry being the only institution he fits into, the only criterion he needs to keep living up to is lyricism.
The encounter with and symbolic recovery of Jesus is a project — and a process — of generations.
Anyone hostile to Jesus out of cynicism or trauma is turning their back on the legacy of a poor man tortured and killed for not shutting up before a cynical authority.
For anyone seeking material or political dignity, the historical Jesus is a cornerstone of inspiration for all the martyrs who followed him —
persecuted and/or killed —
still feverishly, resolutely in love with their own causes.
Everyone in world history who said something because it was beautiful and true, overriding their fear of death, was echoing Jesus.
This Jesus of ours, whom out of admiration I’m trying to write here to the utmost and limit of my ability… this is just one more crumb.
Just a dot on the long, winding line attempting to restore the reputation of the one whose words were distorted to project and justify cruel empires —
empires built up against everything that Jesus believed.
I love deeply the Jesus I’ve come to know.
He’s one of the most inspiring figures ever to pass through this world.
I’m glad I went beyond the cruel, petty, mediocre superficiality of the cheap versions of Jesus I was sold earlier in life;
that beyond the opportunistic Christianities that deceived and betrayed me, I later found decent Christian people in life —
as well as I’m glad that I found, through autodidact paths, this rediscovery and reconnection with the poetry Jesus I’ve explained here.
As the tightening intensifies — the chokehold that today’s decaying empires are clamping more and more around all our necks…
(around all of us, first the vulnerable, then the peripheral, then the dissident, then…),
as it intensifies, our circumstances will more closely resemble those that tried to erase all dignity from those under the Roman boot.
For two millennia, the idea of dignity for all has resisted every chokehold —
resisted regardless of the greatest monstrosities done, in distorted fashion, in the name of Christianity — or against Christianity.
By one of the bitterest, cruelest rhymes, the chokehold of today’s decaying Romans is happening, once again, in Palestine —
and this time carried out by a people-crushing machine built by so-called Jews and so-called Christians.
The boot tries at last to take on the very names of those it has trampled so much…
In every corpse under the rubble, an imperial attempt to erase — in Jesus’s name — the dignity of human life.
The dignity Jesus defended.
Some of the most undignified things in the world were perpetrated by people who justified themselves with appropriated, parodied, “Christian” rhetoric.
And none of that erased Jesus’s dignity.
Nor could it erase the dignity of all who, before, during, and after him, were, are, and will continue to be massacred by empires —
massacred as he was —
until the empire of the day falls,
and poetry goes on.
I will not, as long as I live, allow them to twist or warp for me again this poet Jesus I found.
And let this serve to strengthen him within the literary institution under the feverish, forceful passion of lyricism.
I commit his dignity to protection under my words and values.
Seed of contradiction at the bottom of our empires’ decadence, finding your own Jesus is discovering in yourself the will
to invent
your own
and
collective,
intimate, ancient
and new
poetry of solace for the poets’ Jesus (mission, 16x)
before
your raw doubt
on the cross,
Jesus,and before
the rage
in the loud cry
of Mary’s
weeping,before
both of you,
weweep,
lament,
comfort, learn,
and
answer;even if it kills us,
beauty and poetry
against the boot’s power
we will protect;the dignity of all
was Jesus’s
deep concern;now the dignity of Jesus
is everyone’s
deep concern;to rescue him from the distortions,
recover him,
and do justice
to the poetic force
of his legacy:mission of us all;
to go on in life seeking and finding
beauty,
even in the face of threats that raise
crosses
to scare us into giving up:mission
of
us all;to be willing to carry
the sound of one’s own voice,
even along a path
that might lead
to censorship,to persist
in an impenetrable
commitment
to the most
lyrical truth:mission
of us all;to have empathy for the sisters
and the brothers
crushed
under the boot’s weight,
to refuse to take part
in any cruel dynamic
that inflicts this pain
on others,to believe that art can resist,
or be reborn,to speak of poetry with
humble modesty
and intense passion,without fear,
with
urgent
gentleness,(urgentleness)
as if the world were ending
(because it is):
mission of us all,
mission of us all,mission
of
us
all;to profess vulnerable
doubts
so as to summon the collective
comfort
of those who reply,with comfort,
to give responses
to the doubts professed
by the vulnerable at our side:mission of us all,
mission of us all;to listen to and believe
in the people’s hopes —
in the promise
that there will one day
be dignity
for the poorest:mission of us all;
to hear
the fire of the apocalypse
in the lovely echo
softened over millennia,
hidden:mission of us all;
to dream
some utopia,
some optimistic
revolution
we can
sing about,
and we can
walk toward,
bringing along
as many people as possible
from the fair, the street,
the bus, the market, the bar;when
the next chokehold
comes(today),
to resist erasure
as Jesus resisted;to feel
worthy enough
to deserve
to live
and
to die
being who you are:mission of us all;
legacies of all of us
for Jesus,of Jesus
for all of us,made a poet,
resolute,
insistent
in the cry,to sing
“in the next apocalypse,
Rome will fall again!”(for good!)
and
to hear, to feel,
to believe
in the deep truth
of fantastic folk stories
from the fishermen:mission
of us
all;Jesus, not abandoning you in doubt
is the mission of us all;your Kingdom
will come
to us on earth!it is our mission
to reply
the
amen.
FURTHER READING
Some of the works and authors that inspired this text:
- LEMINSKI, Paulo; VIDA. Companhia das Letras, 2013. Available at: https://www.companhiadasletras.com.br/livro/9788535923278/vida. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(This essay I made owes everything to Leminski’s book — and above all to Leminski’s version of Jesus. Leminski’s mini-biography of Jesus is so good, and so close to what I wished this essay could be, that I almost gave up writing anything when my research led me to his text. If you want to read another piece about Jesus similar to this one — but better — read Leminski’s Jesus.) - MEIER, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Yale University Press, 2002. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300140185. Accessed on: Jul 24, 2025.
(The big, ambitious academic reference on the historical Jesus. It’s dense. In multiple volumes.) - DAY, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002. Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/yahweh-and-the-gods-and-goddesses-of-canaan-9780826468307/. Accessed on: Jul 24, 2025.
(Serious academic reference that clearly explains how monotheism emerged from earlier pantheons and came to relate to “competing” entities. In English.) - SMITH, Mark S. The Early History of God. Eerdmans, 2002. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X. Accessed on: Jul 24, 2025.
(Another dense book on the development of monotheism that informed Chapter 1 of this essay. As important a field reference as Day’s.) - SANDERS, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Fortress Press, 1985. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Judaism-P-Sanders/dp/0800620615. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(Another major academic source. This one is the best at locating Jesus within the cultural and religious context of the Jews of his time.) - EHRMAN, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne, 2013. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Historical-Argument/dp/0062206443. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(Perhaps the most accessible popularizer on the topic. A more critical, essayistic tone — like this — but far better grounded academically than I am.) - CROSSAN, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. HarperCollins, 2010. Available at: https://www.amazon.com.br/Historical-Jesus-Mediterranean-Jewish-Peasant/dp/0060616075. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(Of the academic sources, this is the most essayistic, the most controversial, and my favorite.) - LEMINSKI, Paulo. “O ‘Jesus jacobino’ de Paulo Leminski.” Jacobin, 2020. Available at: https://jacobin.com.br/2020/12/o-jesus-jacobino-de-paulo-leminski/. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(A free excerpt of Leminski’s Jesus available online.) - FERRAZ, Salma. “O Cristo de Paulo Leminski e José Saramago.” Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2005. Available at: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/cerrados/article/view/1194. Accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(A very good article by a Brazilian professor offering a comparative literary analysis between Leminski’s literary Jesus and Saramago’s.) - SLEDGE, Justin. “Who was the Historical Jesus?” ESOTERICA, 2025. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vxOBbYSzk. And from the same channel, “Why the Historical Jesus Matters — Conversation with @JamesTaborVideos,” 2025. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwr7tN4L8z8. Both accessed on: Oct 22, 2025.
(Yes, they’re YouTube videos — but by scholars in the field. The second one in particular, the conversation that goes deeper with James Tabor, is excellent.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rodrigo (b. 1995) is a writer, copywriter, UX writer, and university lecturer. He holds a master’s degree in Communication and has nearly a decade of copywriting experience. He writes across formats — from essays and poems to scripts, app UI, ads, and fiction (novels and short stories).
In June 2022, he released his first printed book with Editora Casatrês, titled NFTs, influencers e a música ࿃ूੂ࿃ूੂੂ࿃ूੂOOOOOOOOOOOO ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ ooooooooo do artista ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ (something like NFTs, Influencers and the Music ࿃ूੂ࿃ूੂੂ࿃ूੂOOOOOOOOOOOO ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ ooooooooo of the Artist ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ), a work exploring the creation and burnout cycles of digital trends and their connection to user experience — particularly in contexts where that experience is deliberately restricted, a concept he’s been developing under the name “Anti-UX.”
He also has three fiction books available on Amazon. Eu Só Existo às Terças-feiras (I Only Exist on Tuesdays, 2022) was a finalist among over a thousand entries in the first Brazilian Amazon Young Literature Award and because of that was adapted into an audiobook by Audible. In 2023, he published Verde Verdade (The Green Truth), a deconstruction of the wandering-romance genre. In 2024, he released a work of philosophical science fiction, Éramos Deuses (We Were Gods).
A FINAL NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATION
This essay was originally written and published in Brazilian Portuguese. It remains available in its original language here:
This is only the second time in my life that I’ve tried to translate my own work into English. The first experiment was a few months ago, with another essay similar to this one (about Enheduanna, available here). In both that previous essay and this one, the translation feels like a shot in the dark — something I’m still learning to do — so I’m open to and grateful for any suggestions, corrections, or improvements.
While I’m at it, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this text — whether you liked it or hated it. And if this essay resonated with you in any way, I’d be very thankful if you shared it and helped it reach others. My only motivation with these English-translation projects is to reach as many people as possible.
