Historical Jesus
Jesus’ status as a religious figure, that is to say, as the namesake of Christianity, perhaps occludes some of the import of his contribution to the development of modern society.
A significant contribution that Jesus as a historical figure bequeathed to mankind adheres in his act of recognizing the legitimacy of the state while not relinquishing his religious beliefs.
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew from a society with theocratic origins, and that theocracy was a key background feature in respect of which many of his actions in Judea were oriented.
On the basis of his presumed knowledge of scripture, it can be assumed that Jesus was literate, and considering that the literature and thought of Ancient Greece had been introduced into Jewish society at least 200 years before he was born, it is probably safe to assume that Jesus was familiar with Hellenic culture and society.
As Ancient Greek society was not a theocracy, having been founded and sustained by the institution of democracy as a collective decision making process, thereby prioritizing reason in the political decision making process, the people in the city states of Ancient Greece had no need to articulate in an explicit manner the necessity that religion and the state be separated.
That is to say, given the preeminence of reason in the collective decision making process, the political system in Ancient Greece presumed such a separation, even though the religious culture of Ancient Greece was profound, widespread, and diverse. Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that even democracy in the polis did not stop the persecutors of Socrates from citing his communing with strange gods as one of the reasons for his being brought before the court. Perhaps this is evidence of the political influence of the demagogic sophists of whom Socrates was highly critical.
At any rate, Jesus was born into a Jewish society under Roman administration. Jesus was born into a somewhat conflicted society which the historian Josephus characterized an earlier period as beset with the conflict between Hellenism (in the time of Jesus represented by the Roman Republic) and Judaism.
In coping with the conflicted social situation, as portrayed in the Bible with respect to the story of Jesus confronting the moneychangers in the temple, on the one hand, and of being accosted by agents of the priest caste, on the other hand, Jesus manages to call attention to key tensions inherent in the relationship between collective government and individual rights, including the freedom of conscience/religion, the relationship between religion and the state (and politics), economics and religion, and economics and the state.
These issues would subsequently inform the articulation of the concept of public and private spheres of human activity, a prevalent concept of modern political philosophy and social theory.
Economic activity:
The Bible contains a dramatic description of Jesus being appalled at finding the temple, an institution for public religious practice, being used for private economic gain. It goes without saying that Jesus was not opposed to economic activity in general, but to the activities of the moneychangers and the sellers of sacrificial animals in the precincts of a “house of prayer”. This incident would appear to indicate that Jesus perceived a conflict of interest between the normative goal of promoting the public interest through facilitating religious practice, on the one hand, and the acquisitive goal of exploiting religion for private gain.
I’m not aware of a temporally define sequential relationship between these two incidents depicting in the Bible, not having read that volume recently, but who were the agents that accosted Jesus with the taxation related questions? The relevant passages of the Bible indicate that they were “Pharisees and Herodians”, and “spies” sent by “teachers of the law and the chief priests”. That “Pharisees and Herodians” would be collaborating would appear to be somewhat remarkable, considering that they were mutually antagonistic factions of the priest caste, with what can be generally characterized as mutually opposite goals vis-à-vis religion and the state.
Wikipedia has the following quote on a related page:
Henry David Thoreau writes in Civil Disobedience:
Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. “Show me the tribute-money,” said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket; — If you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; “Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God those things which are God’s” — leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.
Use of the currency of the state (i.e., the republic/empire) indicates a public dimension to economic activity insofar as transactions are conducted in the recognized medium of exchange, the public currency established by the state. The state had established a mechanism of exchange for use throughout the empire, which is a form of social infrastructure, and which requires continual expenditure on the part of the state to maintain. The use a taxes for supporting social infrastructure is a commonplace today, but perhaps a relatively modern concept.
Considering that Rome had not objected to Herod’s refurbishing and building the Jewish temple to a substantially more grandiose scale, and that the temple subsequently flourished for many years under the Romans, it must be assumed that some factions of the priest caste must have profited from temple activity.
So that begs the question as to why they would be engaged in conspiratorial activities targeting a teacher like Jesus. Was it because of the confrontation with the moneychangers? Or was it perhaps related to a more widespread issue relating to underlying social tensions that Jesus had sensed and was addressing, resulting in insecurity on the part of various factions of the priest caste with respect to their position in an evolving society.
The agents of the priest class chided Jesus about being a servant of the truth, and so on, and this can only be because he was a teacher renowned among the people across the social strata, probably the foremost Jewish luminary of his time. In that regard, the greater his reputation and following among the general populous, the more likely he would have been perceived as a threat to priestly authority that claimed an exclusive privileged relationship to the truth.
If Jesus was attempting to “save”, or liberate his people, the Jews, it may well have been in the capacity of a pious intellectual exerting himself for the purpose of guiding the people toward a degree of enlightened self-emancipation from en exploitive, corrupt, and conspiratorial priest caste.
Theocracy
Though the confrontation with the moneychangers is charged and physical, Jesus is generally depicted as being compassionate, considerate to others, and of moderate demeanor.
The Bible quotes Jesus as answering the Roman magistrate that his “Kingdom was not of this world”, which would seem to further support the notion that Jesus was not in favor of theocracy.
The Christian missionaries to East Asia espousing and disseminating the teachings of Jesus and the church formed in his name would use the Bible in a manner that placed them in a privileged position with respect to the truth in the world at large. Truth was thereby equated with the province of the established Christian church, which had ascended to a mantel of privileged access to the truth and as final arbiter of the truth, was in effect elevated above the state by its missionaries.
The state—any state—could be equated with that of Rome depicted in the Bible, and portrayed as persecutor of the people in many ways, one of which could even be the denying the people access to the privileged truth of the teachings of the Bible.
Accordingly, if the leaders of any of a state, such as Japan, that had once permitted Christian missionaries the privilege of disseminating their teachings in their state then subsequently revoked that privilege in response to negative effects on social cohesion in that state, which may have been brought about by the successful instilling of an entitlement mentality in the newly cultivated followers of the church vis-à-vis the state, then you arrive at a scenario in which the teachings disseminated by the missionaries become a self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort.
Such a scenario is easy to represent accurately as an attempt to usurp legitimate political authority by deceiving segments of the population of a country lacking a degree of education that would enable them to have adequate scope to evaluate such teachings with respect to other religious teachings, as well as political philosophy. It clearly represents a threat to the sovereignty of the state.
A mechanism by which such “missions” serve to unravel the social fabric is by circumventing the question of political legitimacy of state authority, replacing such issues of general and universal concern with the introduction of the notion of a completely alien notion of the truth, elevated to a false privileged status.
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