Essays

The Gospels tell the religious story of Jesus. There exists virtually no other historical evidence for Jesus. Some people even doubt the historical existence of Jesus, but important points can be extracted from the Gospels about how Jesus represented a crucial paradigm shift in economic history. That paradigm shift reflects the historical importance of Jesus.

Recognizing and understanding a paradigm shift presents a significant cognitive problem. Myron T. Tribus, the former director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT, explained in 2001:

"If you try to introduce people to a paradigm shift, they will hear what you have to say and then interpret your words in terms of their old paradigm. What does not fit, they will not hear."

To comprehend the true significance of Jesus requires the recognition and understanding of a historical paradigm shift that transformed the western world in ancient times. Jesus lived when the Roman Empire controlled geographical areas around the Mediterranean. The empire imposed an unprecedented unification among disparate cultures and kingdoms that historians refer to as the Pax Romana.

The so-called Pax Romana meant freedom from piracy, extortion, and interference for a high level of economic trade that existed within this geographical area for caravans and shipping. But these endeavors involved the economic integration of many different cultures and kingdoms. The nature of an empire is that it indulges local kingdoms and cultures while primarily protecting strategic trade routes.

Trade thrives by moving highly desired objects from where they are plentiful to where they are scarce. Carthage, for example, existed in the ancient Mediterranean by virtue of its proximity to Timbuktu in the interior of Africa on the Niger River. The huge herds of animals on the plains of central Africa meant hides and furs were plentiful. Metal ores in Africa were less common, particularly in west Africa. Iron goods made from plentiful ores in the mountainous interior of Europe were exchanged in Timbuktu for animal hides through the intermediary of Carthage.

Similarly, silks and spices plentiful in Asia traveled on caravans across the deserts and mountains of the Middle East to the traders in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, who set up enclaves throughout the Mediterranean to market these valuable commodities. Rome itself began as a trade center for Ionian Greek enclaves in the western Mediterranean.

Valuable commodities did not simply move by themselves. They were moved by people in cultures that developed ways to exchange them for wealth. Commodities were transported from cultural origins to destination enclaves established by that source culture to facilitate the trade. During the Roman era Jews played an important role in the trade from the Middle East and thus developed numerous enclaves around the Mediterranean.

Together, these enclaves functioned very much like divisions of modern corporations: they were separate outlets for the Jewish brands involved in the logistics of integrating goods and services from a source to a market. This trade moved by Jews from Jewish enclaves to Jewish enclaves so that the enclaves coordinated with each other as extensions of the Temple authorities in Jerusalem. That coordination created a logistical operations center among the enclaves.

At the time of the Pax Romana virtually all cultures around the western world conducted these logistical operations as extensions of a Temple headquarters controlled by religious authorities. There was no separation of church and state: all cultures existed within a social context of villages where the individuals belonged to families that were extensions of clans belonging to tribes of similar clans.

Whereas today Jews are considered almost an ethnic anomaly with religion and identity representing the same thing, this mixture reflected all cultures in Roman times: individuals were born into a specific family with a particular identity and culture which existed as part of an extended family of similar relatives that formed a clan that had affiliations and affinities with other clans within the same tribe. All people lived within the context of their family social orders that included religious functions and authorities.

Which meant that the enclaves of Jews around the Mediterranean lived separately from the surrounding population where they conducted their commerce. They raised families and lived their lives culturally segregated as Jews in foreign lands with different cultures that had distinctly different religious and familial practices of their own. Unlike a modern corporation that could increase its activities by simply hiring from the local population, ancient Jews found economic expansion to be a difficult proposition.

To live and function in a Jewish enclave, you had to be a Jew, and you became a Jew by birth. As a consequence, when commercial activities blossomed in a region of the Mediterranean, the Jews essentially served within their enclaves as wholesale operations providing goods and services to the local population. The local cultures could then expand their operations into other channels, such as interior regions. This limited and complicated the lives of the enclave Jews both for commercial and domestic activities.

The existence of Jewish enclaves within cultures around the Mediterranean meant that young Jews were limited to marrying each other. The existence of friends and colleagues among the local population undoubtedly resulted in a repeated enactment of Romeo and Juliet where forbidden love blossomed between Jews and local inhabitants. Marriage between individuals of different cultures in the paradigm of that age created conflict because a Jew had to be born a Jew.

This reflected a common problem to Jews everywhere outside of Israel, and to a certain extent even within Israel. To be a Jew required that you were born a Jew. They could not incorporate local people into their society. Additionally, Israel itself represented a land with many neighbors and many caravans from other lands. The interactions between these many cultures remained separated by language and custom and by the inability of one individual to socially belong to a society without a birthright.

However, this same problem existed for all cultures throughout the geographical region: everybody lived in clans and tribes. This problem only became acute among a culture like the Jews that engaged in widespread commerce. Thus Jews of that era became particularly susceptible to a crucial cultural development espoused in the Bible by John the Baptist: that one could transform a person of culture A into a person of culture B through a process called Baptism.

In the Bible the figure of John the Baptist makes little sense: he went around transforming Jews into Jews. Understanding why John the Baptist has such a crucial role in the Gospels is necessary to understand the historical role of Jesus. It is highly likely that there arose a widespread recognition among enclave Jews that the ability of a non-Jew to become a Jew through Baptism provided the solution to the persistent problem confronting the Jews in enclaves all over the Mediterranean.

This likely resulted in a common effort among the religious and political leadership of the Jews in the enclaves to achieve official recognition by the Temple in Jerusalem for the process of Baptism. As a consequence, they undoubtedly engendered a coalition among the enclave Jews to demand the recognition of Baptism by the Temple authorities. Thus Jesus, whose biography in the Gospels includes an unexplained time gap, likely was involved in the Mediterranean trade and served primarily as an ambassador sent from the enclave Jews to the Temple in Israel to seek approval of this conception of Baptism.

In other words, the role that Jesus played in history reflected the historical circumstances that confronted not just the Jews but all cultures of that time. Jesus likely represented a social leader chosen by a coalition of enclave Jews to advocate in Jerusalem for non-Jews to become Jews by adopting the Baptism already invoked by John the Baptist. This readily explains the crucial importance in the Bible of Jesus being Baptized, why he organized a band of disciples to approach the Temple in Jerusalem, and why he argued in his crusade that the status of a Jew primarily meant believing and practicing the worship of the Jewish god: John 3:16 establishes that whomever believed in that god would achieve everlasting life.

The concept that Jesus presented to the Temple authorities required a paradigm shift in social organization. The Temple authorities were embroiled in their own conflicts mentioned in the Gospels over the use of magic and the development of written scriptures. They interpreted the concept that Jesus advocated in terms of their existing paradigm. Instead of accepting this concept, the Temple authorities in Jerusalem had Jesus executed by the Romans.

Pontius Pilate makes it clear in the Gospels that he does not want to execute Jesus but the Temple leaders are adamant. So the crucifixion of Jesus represented the official Temple repudiation of the effort by the enclave Jews to resolve their dilemma. If Jesus had been the singular preacher that is portrayed in the Gospels, his death in Jerusalem would have ended the endeavor, leaving only a few disciples without leadership to continue. But Jesus was not an individual with only a few disciples: he carried the mission of the enclave Jews to confront and resolve the problem that severely restricted their lives.

The death of Jesus became a crucial rallying cry among the enclave Jews to ensure that Jesus, who died on behalf of their advocacy for Baptism, did not die in vain. Jesus was their envoy to the Temple in Jerusalem and thus when he was killed he became a martyr to their cause. Which is why Jerusalem did not become the center of Christianity, but rather why Christianity developed throughout the Mediterranean outside of Israel.

The Gospels tell how leaders of the enclave Jews realized that they could independently proclaim and adopt the process of Baptism to integrate their enclaves into the populations in which they were embedded. But this required both a paradigm shift and a schism from the existing Temple authorities who denied them this accommodation. The operational leadership of the enclave Jews necessarily had to proclaim an independence from Jerusalem to coordinate their independent social and cultural activities.

The founders of Christianity, after all, were Jews who proselytized this new conception of Baptism with the understanding that they owed no allegiance to the Temple structure in Jerusalem because the Temple authorities had killed their envoy attempting to reconcile with them. The enclave leaders therefore developed the "Pope" as their equivalent central "Temple" authorities for administering this new paradigm. The rest, as they say, is modern history.

Baptism became a dynamic economic growth mechanism that broke down barriers between ancient people and cultures. The Jewish enclaves were, fundamentally, economic creations of trade. Christianity arose primarily outside Israel when those enclave Jews invoked the process by which a Judeo-Christian culture could rapidly "convert" and absorb the individuals of other cultures. Indeed, there are historical narratives of entire kingdoms converting to Christianity in order to avail themselves of the commercial vitality that followed.

Using the Latin language to bridge cultural differences, and in the process adapt to the Roman Empire's social and legal strictures, Christianity vastly increased the economic growth within the interior of the geographic region surrounding the Mediterranean to the point that the entirety of Europe eventually formed a Holy Roman Empire.

Ironically, this paradigmatic role of Jesus in expanding economic power later became emulated by Mohammed after he married a woman who owned a large caravan trade, thus creating Islam. The essential transformation of these religions into economic empires resulted from their ability to allow individuals in a granular world defined by birth within economically inert families-clans-tribes to transform themselves into individuals affiliated by commitments to a centralized common cause.

Jesus therefore played the crucial role in solving an economic conundrum in ancient history beyond any religious considerations. In essence, Baptism, as promulgated by the enclave Jews championed by Jesus, became the bridge between the ancient polyglot social structures comprised of individuals-families-clans-tribes into the modern social structure of religious affiliation. Indeed, it inadvertently transformed religious affiliation from one of birth to one of intellectual promulgation.

The crucial economic transformation of the entire Mediterranean region occurred because Jesus represented an organized initiative among the Jewish enclaves that continued on his behalf after he was killed. The Gospels were then subsequently written to demonize the Temple authorities with stories to provoke outrage among the enclave Jews. The Gospels served to formally explicate the reason for the schism between the Jews of that time into Christians with antipathy toward the Temple.

The Gospels told how Lazarus lay unconscious and his family appealed to Jesus to prevent the religious authorities from embalming him until he regained consciousness. They told how Jesus chased the corrupt moneychangers from the temple. They told how Jesus proclaimed that Jews owed allegiance to the Roman authorities in everything except religion: "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, render unto God that which is God's."

Perhaps more importantly, this transformation of people from a birth cog in a culture into an individual self-asserting intellectual determination gave rise to the very conception of individual freedom and intellectual thought. Whereas the Greeks had established an intellectual tradition involving logical thought, they remained within a rigid Greek culture. Christianity and Islam promulgated the idea of liberated individuals existing in a larger matrix of economic activity affiliated through a common faith.

Even today you will hear people talk of the "Jewish faith," but Jews are not simply a faith: they are born Jews, continuing their ancient tradition within that paradigm. However, the ability of Christianity to absorb vast numbers of people into a widespread economic organization gave it a transformational role in world history. That is the fundamental story of the historical Jesus.