A person recently came to me about a program she saw that examined a messianic text that predates Jesus. It was about another person who was touted as messiah, died in a city other than Jerusalem, and was proclaimed to have been resurrected. This man predates Jesus. This was not news to me. A great many men were thought to be messiah by various groups, many died early (messiah was a dangerous vocation) and some were said to have been resurrected.
Really, patterns like this are found even in the Old Testament apocryphal texts. The hardest thing for some Christians to face is just how ordinary Jesus was. He was a man for His time. A fairly normal Jew doing what some other Jews had done. Many find their faith shaken or shattered by this realization. For me, the ordinariness of Jesus just raises His significance. It is like Ultimate Reality incarnating in the everyday. Like Joe Blow down the street? The dude who works on your car? Yea, that was God, man. So the fact that Jesus was unoriginal is, paradoxically, the most profound aspect of the Incarnation.
This also brings up the advantage of using an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, framework for talking about God's activity and self-revelation. Evolution is marked by "bushing", where groups of similar forms appear before one becomes dominant. For instance, many hominid species appeared before humanity "broke though" and became ascendant. And in fact very little genetic novelty marks off the human condition from other primates even. Chimps and humans are 98.5% identical. But that litte variation makes all the difference in the world.
In the same way, the great religions of the world all underwent similar changes during the Axial Age, and so several similar religious movements "bushed", until one tradition, the Yahwist tradition, (in my view) really got it right. God pushed through, but He did so in the evolutionary model. So it surprises me not at all that there was a messianic "bushing" surrounding Jesus' coming. This activity is in line with what I believe about God's power being persuasive rather than coercive. A God of Suffering Love will be revealed in just such a way.
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