The Man with the Smile

L’ uomo del sorriso — Patrizia Poli — Libro — Marchetti Editore — | IBS

For many years Rome remained in peace, many people worked and paid taxes in exchange for stability and modernity. Cities with large buildings arose, the roads crossed the whole Empire, ships reached the most distant ports. Until the city was enlarged, each conquered country had brought new wealth that had been used to pay the soldiers, to build the roads, to maintain order and security. Then the Empire stopped growing, it became difficult to hold together and defend such a large place. Everyone paid taxes but the poor were not happy with it. Then there were also slaves, often considered, though not always, as tools.

Jesus was born in the land of the Jews, he preached addressing himself to the poor, the slaves, the hopeless. Yeshua ’bar Yosef was an observant Jew, who preached the purity of morals, the return to more genuine Judaism, the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, the thorough reading of the Torah. All these are strongly Jewish topics. You don’t understand Jesus if you don’t look at him from a Jewish and non-Christian point of view. Christianity was born long after his death, with Paul of Tarsus, with the importance given to the Resurrection of God incarnate, more than to the life and preaching of man; but the early Christians were not Christians, but Jews, and they remained so throughout the first century. The closer we get to the figure of the Christ we know, the one that emerges from the interpretations of the Catholic Church, the more we move away from what Jesus really was.

“It would not be long, Mary was sure, that people would completely forget Yeshua ‘of Nazareth and only remember his victory over death, creating around him, prophet of the fifth Kingdom, who knows what idolatry, what religion.” (The man with a smile page 270)