What If Jesus Had Come To Other Times And Places?

What If Jesus Had Come To Other Times And Places?

Ever since the Mel Gibson blockbuster The Passion was first announced, there has been a great to-do about it being ’anti-Semitic’. Which is a crock. However, the stark fact is that Jesus was put to death after a verdict of guilty of the crime of blasphemy and sentence of death was handed down by a quorum of the supreme religious body in Israel at the time, the Sanhedrin.

Pilate rubber-stamped the verdict and sentence because he feared these religious zealots would start a riot, which would make the Emperor in Rome look upon him with acute disfavor. The actual execution was carried out by a detail of Roman legionaries, as is documented by the Bible.

Therefore, the responsibility for Jesus’ execution by crucifixion must be shared equally between Jews and Gentiles. So what if the Sanhedrin was Jewish? Mankind—Jew, Gentile, whatever—is the same depraved and evil scum we have always been since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, as one Bible scholar has said, if God does not judge the United States for it’s descent into spiritual wickedness, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Therefore, I wish to offer up a rather likely scenario about what would have happened had Jesus chosen other times and places to come to Earth.

Spain:
Fathers Loyola and Torquemada would have burned Him at the stake for heresy and blasphemy for proclaiming Himself to be the Son of God, forgiving sins, and other assorted reasons.

England:
Oliver Cromwell would have hanged or burned Him at the stake on heresy and blasphemy charges as well. And He would have suffered a similar fate at the hands of the king—before and after Cromwell’s time.

The United States:
Had He appeared here in pre-Revolutionary War America, I am confident the ‘good’ and ‘godly’ Puritans would have hanged Him or burned Him at the stake. Cotton and Increase Mather would have promptly declared Him guilty of blasphemy and sentenced Him to death. And so would any other judge at the time. Recall how the courts conducted themselves at places such as Salem, Massachusetts?

If Jesus had appeared in the USA during 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy would have hauled Him before his committee and accused Him of being a notorious Communist for advocating such radical notions as selling all you have and giving your money to the poor.

J. Edgar Hoover would have tapped every telephone in the country and sent his agents on black-bag job break-ins to try and find out what He was up to; and when those didn’t work, he’d have paid Judas Iscariot considerably more than thirty pieces of silver to set Him up for a COINTELPRO sting operation.

Had He appeared in the USA in 1993, I have little doubt that the ATF and the FBI under command of Janet Reno would have killed Him—either with a hail of bullets or by fire—we all remember how Waco turned out, don’t we? If that’s how threatened Reno and Co. felt by the existence of a false ‘messiah’, just imagine how far up the wall she and her jackbooted stormtrooper thugs have gone when dealing with the real McCoy. I can just hear the justifications now…

“He was the leader of a heavily-armed cult! He told his followers to sell their clothes to buy paramilitary assault weapons!” (Luke 22:36)

“He was undoubtedly a child molester! He told his followers to ‘suffer the little children to come unto Me.’ And we had intelligence that he was slapping the babies! We had to attack!” (“Spare the rod and spoil the child.”)

“The only way we could save the children was to burn down the buildings with them in it!” (Remember that old ‘Nam-era saying—“The only way we could save the village was to destroy it.”?)

No; the death of Jesus at the hands of venal men concerned more for their own power, prestige, prerogatives and perquisites than anything else—including such trivialities as truth and justice—cannot be blamed on just one ethnic group or sect; we must all bear equal responsibility for putting Him to death.

And why did He come, knowing full well such would be His fate—no matter what era and locale He would come to? Because He loved us. All of us. Jew, Gentile, Greek, whatever and whoever. How can that be anti-anything?

The End