i'm not christian so i apologize if this is a gross overgeneralization but it's weird how Certain Types of christians seem to exclusively prefer to depict and refer to jesus as a baby or a dying/dead martyr... almost like Alive Adult Jesus might have some opinions that don't gel with their lifestyles lmao
You are definitely not alone in observing this, anon! In fact itās a perennial discussion both among academic theologians and in the pastoral community.
If youāre into Christian history, there are definitely periodic trends in terms of which aspect(s) of Jesus are most emphasized, and they are unsurprisingly very much related to the social and cultural context of the people ādoing theology.ā
So for example, Iām personally most familiar with early/classical and early medieval Christian history. The earliest Christology was focused primarily on the resurrection (with Jesusā death seen as an important step on the road to resurrection, but the emphasis always being on resurrection, not the death in and of itself), and the language used by the early church was explicitly the language of liberation. Salvation meant freedom from sin and death, and crucially, sin included what we might now call āsocial sinā: that is, the sin of inequality in this life. The first Christians preached resurrection, and as a direct result of that, they also preached communal living and a welfare system that would see every member of the Body of Christ taken care of.
They certainly didnāt get everything right. St. Paul encouraged Christian slave owners to free their Christian slaves and consider them siblings, but he never actually called for an end to the institution of slavery or acknowledged it as inherently evil. But we have historical records of Christian communities where the common social divisions of classical Rome were more or less completely broken down, where slaves and free, men and women, people of different cultural and class backgrounds all interacted as equals. In fact, the oldest versions of Christian baptismal creeds we have (which can be found as quoted bits of poetry in a couple of Paulās letters) make explicit reference to egalitarianism as the greatest hallmark of Christian life.
And that was what worried the Romans. If you grow up in almost any Christian tradition, youāll hear stories of the martyrs. Christians love our martyrdom stories, youāre absolutely right about that, anon. But all too often we miss the actual reason for the early martyrsā deaths. They werenāt killed for being āfollowers of Christā in the kind of generic, near-meaningless sense of ābeliefā that so many American Christians often consider to be āfollowing Christ.ā The Roman imperial authority, as a rule, did not particularly care who its subjects worshiped, so long as they paid their taxes, didnāt rebel against Rome, and didnāt rock the social boat. The majority of early Christian martyrs were killed for things like refusing to sacrifice to the emperor (which was seen as a symbolic act of rebellion against Rome, as making sacrifices to the emperor was a pledge of political loyalty), refusing to serve in the Roman military, rejecting the authority of Roman governors, upsetting the social order (with all that egalitarianism), and, in the case of the vast majority of women martyrs, refusing to get married (which is another form of upsetting the social order, and a particularly dangerous one because it represented a statement of female independence, both socially and financially).
In the early church there was a heavy emphasis on the the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that doesnāt actually mean that his life was overlooked. It would be truer to say that, for those early martyrs, his life and teachings were intimately tied up with his death and resurrection.
Because hereās the thing that we American Christians, in particular, often either gloss over or entirely forget: Jesus, too, was killed by the Romans. He lived as a second class non-citizen in an occupied country, and he was killed by the occupying authority because he was seen as a threat to that occupation. Thatās a historical fact that gets covered over for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the gospels themselves actively attempt to disguise it. (Why? Because the gospels were written by and for people who were still living under that occupying authority, and who were therefore concerned to make it clear that they were not, in fact, an existential threat to Roman power and did not need to be eliminated.)
And, of course, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was also in a position to benefit from the privilege of imperial power.
Jesusā life - and his death - were profoundly anti-imperial. Thatāsā¦a really awkward fact for a religion that has become the backbone of empire to reckon with. So the emphasis of Christology changed. The emphasis now was on Christ as heavenly king, conqueror, ruler of a kingdom of God which looked, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a heavenly version of the Roman Empire.
And American Christians are very much in the position of those imperial Roman Christians. America is an empire. We have vast wealth and resources, much of which weāve obtained through war and colonial exploitation. We are literally a country built on the backs of slaves, and we used the Christian scriptures to justify that slavery. We use it to justify slavery still. We have a thousand metaphorical explanations for what Jesus may have meant by āsell all you have and give it to the poor, then come and follow me,ā because we are terrified of taking him literally. We are profoundly concerned with policing sexuality and gender because that early message of Christian egalitarianism, where there is in Christ no slave or free, no male or female, but all are one is every bit as threatening to the American social order as it was to the Roman order two thousand years ago. We donāt like to talk about Jesusā cry for justice, about his eager anticipation of the toppling of empire, because we are that empire.
But thatās conservative white American theology. The liberation theology of Latin American, the post-colonial theology of Africa, the womanist theology and the poor peopleās campaign arising out of the African American experience of Christianity - itās no accident that these theologies are far more focused on the life and teachings of Jesus. Because any attentive reading of the gospels cannot fail to notice that, more than any other topic - practically to the exclusion of any other topic - Jesus is profoundly concerned with the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
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