(RNS) — Jesus was not a Christian. He was a Jew at odds with the official representatives of Jewish religious tradition. In his experience, the temple rituals of purification were defiling. Sacrificing birds and lambs, which had to be purchased with a special currency in a market run by the priesthood, was not the problem.

The problem was the priesthood itself, which was employed to do Roman bidding. In a tradition reaching as far back as Cyrus the Great, religious officials in the temple served an imperial overlord who had taken control of Palestine by force.

Many Jews opposed Roman rule and opposed the religious apparatus through which it managed Palestinian affairs. Among these was John the Baptist, who called the temple apparatus a “generation of vipers” and denounced the corruptions of the Roman governor, Herod the Great, who had him beheaded.

The Romans and their temple staff had reason to fear such indigenous movements, which were widespread and took many forms under many leaders. Some called themselves dagger men (sicarii), who carried weapons under their robes and cut the throats of collaborators. The scribes and priests and tax collectors that John denounced had every reason to fear them.

Jesus was more eloquent than John. He denounced Roman tyranny, but under an imperative to encounter oppressed and oppressors with love, as part of a program of love that was directed at human beings generally, as opposed to singling out those of a particular ethnicity. He told parables and coined unforgettable maxims to explain the “good news.”

Crucifixion was a punishment reserved for enemies of Rome. It was an instrument of state terror, meant to intimidate the subject population by making a public display of extreme degradation and suffering. After Jesus disrupted the work of the “moneychangers” at the temple — who served the process of making approved sacrifices — he was identified not only as a threat to the temple staff, but to Rome itself.

Jesus was crucified at the hands of a ruthless oppressor whose terrorist activities were dressed up in a religious garb that perverted deep and valid traditions of religious teaching that Jesus had absorbed, partly from John, partly elsewhere. Jesus suffered because he exemplified those Jewish traditions, at the hands of people performing the masquerade.

Jesus’ followers continued to respond after his death to the powerful impression he had made on them. A presence arises from the biblical texts, as from many other great texts, and indeed from individual people who have braided themselves into our lives; and this presence does not depend upon living persons in order to be felt, and for its teachings to thrive.

For me, Jesus becomes the bearer of a truth that sets me free from a bondage imposed by confusion, where obedience to the imperatives of love is mixed up with obedience to the imperatives of hatred, as directed toward those who threaten despotic power. 

He makes the sacrifice and confers the healing that is converted into a parody by the pieties subservient to despotism. Those pieties pervade our common life. They pervade the selfhoods we become, and the lives we live as individuals within our communities. As times change, there are accordingly new domains of truth to be reckoned with, and new maladies that call out for healing. 

Truth has come alive in a new way, amid the terrible state of American public affairs, where religious corruption is fostered by those who rely on the use of force to gain compliance, who attempt to subvert the consent of the governed, and who rain hellfire on enemies with whom friendship should be cultivated.

I learned to articulate these things over many years, but absorbed them long before schooling began. The gospel traditions of my boyhood contained instruction in Jesus-movement spirituality, and invited me to commune with the teacher who remains alive because of the wisdom he provided and the fate that he suffered. 

None of my Sunday-school devotion was more telling than this old gospel hymn.

Just as I am, without one plea

But that you bid me come to thee

And that you shed your blood for me,

Oh lamb of God, I come.

I come.

(Walt Herbert was a teacher and research scholar at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he specialized in American cultural history with a strong interest in religious issues. Now retired, he is a member of the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s Kennett Advocacy Team in Pennsylvania. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)