this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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It's a good bit, I admit.
I do want to note that in the Gospels and really basically everything remotely intended to portray "eye witness" events of regarding Jesus (still stories that copy heavily from one another, hardly multiple accounts), the main message is, over and over again, "Jesus is special, you must believe in him over everything else". Reading these texts, the message is not, "love each other and live in community", it is, "eschew all else if that is what it takes to believe in me, even if that means being kind to your enemies". Just about every parable is just iterations on the theme of, "Jesus is special, he does miracles, you need to believe over all else". The Gospels are written with the exoectation that this would all be wrapped up during their lifetimes, as in Jesus was coming back on Thursday so you better start believing and stop focusing on worldly things.
Which is to say, the figure of Jesus is not exactly socialist, as socialists focus on the material, on community, of creating a better world through the destruction of capitalism. The figure of Jesus is more like a hippie that says, "screw all of that, join my cult, nothing else matters".
Anyways do with this what you will. The "Jesus was socialist" angle is still decent agitprop because most self-proclaimed Christians haven't read The Gospels. Very few people are really engaging with the figure or reading critically, they just learn parables in isolation and a local religious figure tells them what to believe about it.
well yeah, that's because those of us who did have largely either left the religion entirely or reworked a sort of extremely personalized variant of it.
Yes or become more abstract about it, accepting the many faults to try and recover a consistent thread tying it all together. Many modern sects are basically variants on these kinds of attempts trying to square scripture and modern culture and society. There are also many people in that quasi-Christian space between being a hardcore believer and an atheist with Christian biases, especially liberals in the imperial core. Like folks that go to a Unitarian church and identify as Christian and think Jesus did some of that stuff and pray to him but done think about it too much because church is a place for community more than being a cloistering nerd.