Fighting the govt would have destroyed the clarity between right & wrong. The sin Jesus died for, that people are supposed to recognize in themselves & guard against, is the tendency to obey or respect arbitrary authority. And if you are familiar with the Stanford prison experiments or the Milgram shock experiments, it would make sense that this is THE most critical lesson for people to learn. An innocent man was killed because people chose govt & human authority over God/reality/truth. If we remember THAT then maybe it prevents the pattern from repeating. If everyone loses the message then we get Assange & Ulbrict & Snowden & countless others until people wake up again.
I think this because it's the only way I see to reconcile all of the contradictions & connect all of the dots both throughout the Bible & across so many other life changing stories & records of history which follow these same patterns.
There are a lot of forces at work on a piece of literature like the Bible. When you make statues of people (both literally or in writing), what is remembered becomes larger than life & as a result becomes disconnected from it. There is also a pressure from both the everyday person, and from authorities to make Jesus into something you can't emulate. The everyday person doesn't want the responsibility of having to speak the truth, & authories don't want the threat of truth from everyday people. A key part of the story is that he was mortal & was killed. Which would be more significant: SuperMan taking a bullet for you or your dad? When you start to deconstruct the story it actually becomes MORE significant, not less.
The way I see things, the miracles are not the point of the story, they are literary representations of the good works he did. Bible stories were written before there was any clear distinction between subjective & objective language, so the feelings they wanted to communicate are all intertwined in the telling. And knowing just a little about language is enough glimpse the massive nightmare that is the translation problem. We have lost 90% of the jokes in Shakespeare's writings, even though we have every word written in the same language we speak today, but still we are no good at 16th century agrarian puns.
We have literary phrases like "it was as if a fire was lit within them," so I don't believe that literal tongues of fire decended from the heavens above the heads of the apostles. I see people today motivated to translate the best bitcoin information into every language because they understand the impact that bitcoin can have. I think the story of an innocent man killed by a supposedly just republic was just as important to the dealings of men at that time & produced a similar motivation, especially among his followers who wanted to see him vindicated.
It is said that we die twice. Once after we breathe our last breath. And again the last time anyone says our name. In that sense, Jesus lives. And it would have been as though he was at every dinner table. But he only lives to the degree that he is made real, IMO delusion has nearly killed him in our time & I think that's part of why so much of the same evil is repeating.
We are all living in a valley of dried bones, all the meaning is gone from all of our stories. We need new life breathed into them. I personally don't think we can do that without reconnecting them to the reality around us. The Bible only ever talks about bringing heaven to earth. The separation is the problem.
