#odds are the people who insist that he was Palestinian probably won't try to advocate real Palestinians adhere to his philosophy lol

[germiyahu]

One of the funnier things about Jesus is that he's often described as a "radical" and my classics professor literally said "it doesn't make sense for the Romans to execute him if he wasn't covertly calling for an overthrow of the government." I've spent most of my adult life hearing that Jesus was preaching zany dangerous world-upending ideas and he was just too badass and ~actually leftist the whole time~ to be left alive.

However, he was preaching "pray for your enemies, even if they persecute you," "if a Roman strikes you, turn your cheek and offer the other," "if a Roman soldier forces you to carry his equipment, offer to carry it an extra mile," "do not pray in public like those hypocritical Pharisees, pray in private God likes that better," "who are you to judge the Romans' specks in their eyes, you're actually worse if you think about it," "guys Caesar is the legitimate government of the Empire I think you should show the proper respect just pay your taxes," "hey I know I'm being executed but like let's take a moment to consider that the Roman soldiers feel bad about it, forgive them they know not what they do."

This is bootlicking shitlib cuckery if I've ever seen it. Jesus' philosophy for how Judea and its culture was going to survive Hellenization/Romanization was... "Be polite. Don't cause a scene. Keep your head down. Why be a rabble-rouser and make trouble for the rest of us? You're giving us a bad name. Romans are people too!"

He had some cool ideas like "sex workers deserve dignity," but I don't think he's actually the "role model," and "actually really wise Rabbi," that a lot of non Jews try to tell Jews he is (aka, how they should view him even if they don't think he's the son of God). And to be fair, a lot of his ideas were already held by other Pharisees/early Rabbis. Certainly Maimonides et al. would go on to independently come to some similar conclusions re: forgiveness and whatnot.

But Jesus was not a radical. Most scholars agree he was a member of the Hillel school of the Pharisee "political party." He was definitely not a Zealot. The Romans didn't execute him because he was calling for an overthrow of the government. They executed him because he was becoming too popular, and people were calling him Moshiach, which was an implicit threat to Roman supremacy. But Jesus himself was not telling people to firebomb their local valmartus.

I suspect if Jesus had been alive to see the Bar Kochba revolt, he would've "strongly condemned the violent actions of the rebels," even if he "sympathized with their pain." He was actively preaching, if not assimilationism, then meek submission. Martyrdom. If you suffer in silent dignity then your just reward will come. And I'm not claiming he was a race traitor or anything, this was an individual man's response to the ongoing trauma of his homeland being subjugated and exploited. These were his ideas about what to do about it.

But in essence, Jesus was the original Good Jew, and the Romans still murdered him. He spent all of his time as a public figure arguing that they should be accepted and loved and that their oppression of the Jews should be tolerated, and that one day the Romans would simply lose interest in being colonizers and the Jews would be free by being patient and understanding and not rocking the boat too much. And the Romans killed him anyway. Being a Good Jew will never save you.