A mistake that modern historians make: “The idea that Jesus, after taking a beating that severe, could lug his cross to Golgotha is unbelievable. I’m pretty sure you go comatose after soldiers tear half your back out. And am I supposed to believe that two revolutionaries would–in their agony–shout insults at someone they’d never met? What about ‘No shoes, no staff’? Had the writers of the Gospels ever stepped foot in Galilee?”
Some of the most startling photographs I’ve seen: old black-and-white pictures with playground equipment. Parents allowing their willing children to hang miles above the ground–that’s hard to imagine happening today, but it apparently did happen then, in part because kids were less coddled, more careful, coordinated, hardy, and just tougher than today’s children.
It’s probable that people living in the time of Jesus were more robust–much more so than bespectacled modern historians such as Bart Ehrman typing out skeptical thoughts in an air-conditioned apartment, munching on fried crispies. Yes, Jesus and his disciples did some superhuman things–when you’re looking at them from modernity, which is to say the frame of reference of the 21st century.
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A relevant section taken from Human, All Too Human, written over a century ago, edited slightly more recently by yours truly:
“Oh, had I but lived in those times!” is the exclamation of frivolous men. At every period of history that we seriously review, even the most belauded era of the past, we shall rather cry out at the end “Anything but a return to that!” The spirit of that age would crush you with the weight of a hundred atmospheres, the “good” and “beautiful” in it you wouldn’t enjoy, its evil you could not bear. Take this to the bank: posterity will pass the same verdict on our own era, saying it was unbearable, that life under such conditions was intolerable.
“And yet everyone can endure his own times?”
Yes, because the spirit of his age not only lies upon him but is in him. The spirit of the age offers resistance to itself and can bear itself.
–Friedrich Nietzsche
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