Is it possible that the religion which Jesus had in mind was not what it has turned out to be? This question seems often to have a clear answer...no. Jesus was a reformer but not a religious revolutionary. If one looks at the texts and the subtexts, it is possible to read the narrative of the gospels and the attitude of Jesus as one of a man 1850 years ahead of his time.

This is not, by the way, to defend the existence of Christianity, nor to advocate that one reconsider religious beliefs. This is also not to be construed as a scholarly understanding of the rift between the Jerusalem and Roman (Paulican) churches. Once the gospels were preached to the Gentiles, the original intent was lost (sort of...more later) and what developed over the years ends up being a new and different religion regardless of the initial plan.

There seem to be two separate threads in the message of Jesus -- the first is the literal attempt to reform Judaism by stressing a search for spirituality and a movement away from the literalism and stricture of Torah law. The second is the psychological impetus behind that reformation, and how that psychologically driven change manifested itself in the specifics of the new iteration of the faith.

The first aspect of what Jesus was doing is fairly straightforward. By looking towards an increase of spirituality and an eschewing of empty ritual, Jesus was doing what was done in the 19th century -- give Jews who do not feel engaged by practice a firm grip on their religion by allowing them, via variant interpretations, to be fulfilling the demands of the religion through a focus on the self and the soul, not on the body and the deeds. The Reform movement in Judaism, especially as it has developed with its "tikkun olam" (repairing the world through acts of kindness, not necessarily through the performance of or adherence to religious edict) credo has looked less at the food that is eaten than with the way people deal with each other and find a way to relate to the divine. Jesus reminds people that they have to keep "the law" and that he has not come to abolish any rules. Instead, he comes to recontextualize them -- he takes the "v'chai bahem" (and you should LIVE by them – thus losing the quality of life due to observance becomes counter to the entire purpose of the law and the law loses out) to an extreme because his stress is on the living the proper life. Breaking Sabbath laws is not forbidden because the laws might impinge on the individual's right to life. The intensification of the 6 antitheses might seem to fly in the face of this because it seems to put more stress on performance but in fact, the intensification takes the performance from the realm of the physical and into the mental -- if we want to follow the laws then we can't focus on what our bodies do, but must on what we think and feel. So it could be said that all Jesus was doing was looking at how stringent observance was not bringing people closer to their religion. In an effort to bring people back in, he re-presents Judaism as a religion which embraces a person's intent to be good, not just a person's successfully completing a specific set of tasks. He ties the biblical laws to the specific generation then and since the current generation is not that group (and would be able to see the notion of “temple” as body and not building or place, thus see the law as metaphor not literal) it is bound to those laws only in the figurative sense. Any later exegesis is man-made and not divine. In fact, he relaxes the concept of "being Jewish" in a way which mirrors modern Reform's laxness in conversion and descent rules. By allowing people to come in based simply on the wishes of their hearts and not their living up to a performative standard, Jesus paved the way for the later Paulican notion of "grafting in" of others -- a conversion of the heart by professing a basic belief in the underlying spirituality.

But what drove Jesus to this particular reformation? This is the psychological aspect which seems to show itself in the language and actions in the gospels. It could be that the entire reformation is an incarnation of a large generation gap -- the standard son-rebels-against-father's-rules division. Jesus sees an essential hypocrisy in the father figures in traditional Judaism - the Pharisaic rabbis who say one thing but do another, much like the child who asks the parent about drugs and the parent says, "I did them but you can't." This frustration drove Jesus to reassess the essential commandment of honoring parents. He knew that the classical interpretation of the verse includes a reference to honoring God and he saw that it would be more honest to honor the real parent (an idea not at all alien to Judaism as liturgically, Jews refer to God as "our father"). By cutting the Pharisaic-fathers out he also invalidates their performative demands and tells his followers that they can get to the real father through his methods, not by trying to adhere to the Rabbinic tradition. This is not, then a claim to divinity on his own part, but an insight about the most effective way to reach the divine. He does come with a sword to separate families because the slavish obedience to the human family unit and the Rabbinic notion of guarding the traditions of the earthly parent is what he is de-emphasizing.

Could this come from a trauma or some other sense of distance from his own father and a need to compensate by establishing a father figure in whom he can trust (whether his mother was impregnated by God or someone else, his actual connection to his Joseph-father would have been severed and his success would have to be attributable to another father figure). Maybe it came as an extension of the standard "don't trust anyone over 33" or a straightforward rebelling against religion which claims to be the boss of him, but regardless, his language which stresses God as the father and the human familial bond as unnecessary allows for a liberation of the whole younger generation. They now have permission to claim that they openly reject the actions of the previous generation and yet still claim an avenue to the divine, something previously monopolized by their elders.

But then why would he still tell people to listen to what the Pharisees say and that they sit on Moses' seat? Because their teachings were heavily imbued with morality and spirituality. What good would their teaching be if it was tied to their practice? And what use would it be to tell people to listen to their teachings if one were not to follow the laws that they taught? The teachings seem to be of the type that he, himself, coopted and quoted frequently -- those moralistic sayings from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers. These, combined with the pre-Rabbinic understanding (Moses' literal seat, not the extension of post-Mosaic interpretation) would be more in-line with the version of the religion which Jesus was pushing.