It occurred to me last night, watching 'Wallander' on Netflix, that Jesus was a radical.
'Wallander' is a BBC production about a Swedish police inspector, Kurt Wallander, and is set in the district of Ystad, beautiful coastal and rural area of Sweden. It is based on novels by Swedish author, Henning Mankell.
The episode that provoked my thought about Jesus - that he must have been a radical, was 'Before the Frost,' a 2012 BBC show loosely adapting Mankell's 2005 novel of the same title. The show's plot involves a crazy arsonist motivated by Christian fundamentalism, who sets buildings on fire and also animals (swans) and people. The arsonist eventually sets himself ablaze, leaving a video epitaph that says he is atoning for his sins and the sins of others in the name of him who died and rose from death. The book of Revelation particularly figures in his motivation.
This arsonist, who had escaped from psychiatric confinement, had associates of like mind, who exit normal social roles and pool their money to form a commune and cult in protest against Swedish society for its immorality and departure from traditional Christian values. They too eventually commit suicide in dramatic fashion doing violence to social structures simultaneously, leaving the same epitaph mentioned above. A connection to the American cult, Heaven's Gate (which of course was a real phenomenon) leads inspector Wallander to finally end the violence.
So you see the religious theme of the tv show that might naturally lead one to think about Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity.
Was Jesus a radical? This is not a new question or interpretation and has been emphasized in much writing about Jesus through the years. I would mention Albert Schweitzer, whose study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (German editions: 1906-1950) portrayed Jesus as an eschatological preacher at odds with his society, in other words, a radical. I take the noun radical, in relation to persons, to connote protest against society in order to steer it onto a better pathway. This "better pathway" involves values or traditions that have been marginalized in the society. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, his radicalism consisted of protest against the religious laws of his society and the attitude of obedience to laws promulgated by the establishment, i.e., Pharisees and Sadducees. The better way advocated by Jesus is the "narrow way" of Matthew, chapter 7 or the "narrow door" of Luke 13; this path is narrow, not able to accommodate many people; not many find it, it is such a small gateway. The few who find the road are differently directed in comparison to the many of society at large. These few (cf. Lk. 12.32 - "little flock") on the road to "life" (Mt. 7.14) aren't motivated by legal righteousness, but by divine love (see Mk. 12.30).
Is it historically plausible that the man Jesus actually preached a "narrow way" to his contemporaries? Yes, from a historical-critical perspective, it's likely that Jesus taught this. We have the evidence mentioned above, from Mt. and Lk., which probably came into these gospels by means of a source document (called Q by scholars), which would have been written some ten to twenty years after Jesus' death. If one discounts the Q hypothesis, then the "narrow way" sayings of Mt. and Lk probably came to those gospels by means of divergent oral tradition, because of the differences in literary context, which would mean we have two witnesses to a similar teaching of Jesus. (The authors didn't copy from one another.) Besides these verses of Mt. and Lk., there is the Johannine parable of the sheepgate (Jn. 10), which says there is one gate for the sheep, "some other way" is for "robbers." Sheep may go into the pen and out to pasture by one gate. I construe this as corroborating evidence for Q's passage about a "narrow way" or "strait gate" (KJV), but with different imagery. This is enough evidence for the historian to state that Jesus taught a special, limited way to salvation or eternal life, rather than the widespread view of his culture that following the law of Moses in Scripture and tradition was needed. [I don't mean to imply that Jesus repudiated Moses.] Jesus was executed as a lawbreaker, so some Christian radicals in today's world might think little or nothing of breaking the law to accomplish a higher purpose. Would their actions in opposing authority be justified? Religious currents in social history are complicated.
