It Was Never Complicated

Before you read: Nothing. Just read it.

There are no boxes in this lesson. It is short.

I have given you five units, forty lessons, a great many dates, and the names of people who were killed for reading a book properly.

I want to end by telling you how simple it was at the start.

I was a laborer. My hands were rough. I lived in a small place that was occupied by soldiers, in a region where families were losing their land to debt while the men who held the debts did well out of it, and I watched it happen to people I knew by name.

I was taught by angry men, the prophets, who had stood in public and said that the people in charge were robbing the poor and calling it the will of God.

They were mostly not respected, and I will name three of them rather than wave at a shelf.

Jeremiah said in the middle of a siege that the city was going to fall, which the officials took as treason, and they let him down on ropes into a cistern, where there was no water, only mud, and left him standing in it (Jeremiah 38:6).

Amos was a herdsman who turned up at the royal sanctuary at Bethel and said the kingdom was finished. The priest in charge there, Amaziah, told him to get out and go earn his bread somewhere else — never prophesy again at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary (Amos 7:12–13). That is a priest telling a prophet that the building belongs to the king.

And there was a man named Uriah, who said the same things Jeremiah was saying. He ran for his life to Egypt. The king sent men after him, brought him back, killed him, and had his body thrown into the burial place of the common people (Jeremiah 26:20–23). He gets four verses in your Bible and no book of his own.

And one of them was in my own lifetime.

His name was John. He baptized me. He stood in public and said the ruler of my own region, Herod Antipas, had no right to the marriage he had made, and Antipas arrested him and had him beheaded — at a fortress called Machaerus, east of the Dead Sea.

Your Bible gives you the palace story: the feast, the dance, the head on a platter (Mark 6:17–29). Josephus, writing about sixty years later, gives the blunter reason: Antipas was afraid of the size of the crowds John was drawing, and got him out of the way before they turned into something (Antiquities 18.116–119). Lesson 6 has both accounts side by side.

So that is what I had in front of me before I said a word: a cistern, an expulsion, a body in a common grave, and a friend of mine killed for drawing a crowd.

I thought they were right anyway.

So I walked around for a while, two or three years, in a small area you could cross on foot in a week, and I did the following things.

I told people the debts should be cancelled, and I taught them to pray for exactly that.

I ate with people that respectable men would not eat with, in public, where it was noticed.

I touched people nobody had touched in years, and I asked them what they wanted, and I said their names out loud in front of the people who had stopped saying them.

I told people with money to give it away, and I did not soften it when they were disappointed.

And I said the men running the Temple had turned it into a business, and I said it in the Temple, during the busiest week of the year.

Let me tell you what the business was, because you should not have to take my word for it.

Every adult man owed an annual Temple tax. It had to be paid in one particular coinage, which most pilgrims did not arrive carrying — so there were money-changers sitting in the courtyard, and every exchange took a cut.

And you could not bring an animal from home and be sure it would pass inspection, so animals were sold on the premises: cattle, sheep, and doves.

The doves are the part that matters. A dove was what you offered when you could not afford a lamb. It was written into the law as the poor person’s sacrifice. It is what my own parents brought when I was born, which tells you what kind of house I came from (Leviticus 12:8; Luke 2:24).

So there was a stall, in the court of the Temple, selling poverty offerings at a markup, to poor people, in the name of God.

I turned those tables over — the money-changers’ and the dove-sellers’ — and I said one sentence, which was not mine either. It was two lines out of the prophets stitched together: my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, and you have made it a den of robbers (Mark 11:15–17; Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11).

Within the week I was dead.

And the state killed me for it, on a charge of claiming to be a king, which was written on a board above my head.

That is all of it. There is nothing else.

There was no doctrine. I never asked anybody to believe a proposition about my nature. Nobody who followed me during my life could have passed the test your church would give them at the door.

There was no payment. Nobody explained to me that God required a death before he could forgive, and if anyone had, I would have told them the story I actually told: a man had two sons, and the younger one wished his father dead and took the money and spent it, and came home with a speech ready — and his father saw him a long way off and ran, and never let him finish the speech, and no one was punished in his place, and nothing was paid by anybody (Luke 15:11–32).

Go and read those twenty-two verses and find the payment in them.

There was no evacuation plan. I told people I did not know when the end would be, and that it was not their business, and that in the meantime there were people who were hungry.

There was no empire. There was no flag, no treasury, no council, no creed, no barn, no army, no permission slip for the taking of continents, and no chart.

All of that was added later, by people with things to protect, and every piece of it has a year attached to it, and you now know most of the years.

Here is the last thing.

For two thousand years, in every single century, some ordinary person with no standing has picked up this story and understood it immediately, usually somebody poor, usually somebody in trouble with the religion of their own time.

A merchant who gave away a fortune made on interest, and paid to have the gospels put into ordinary speech. A merchant’s son who gave his clothes back to his father. Women in the Low Countries who took no vows. Farmers who wrote out twelve requests with the verses attached. A tailor who walked. Enslaved people who sang the chapters that had been cut out of their own Bibles. A woman who got herself out of slavery and then went back about thirteen times to bring other people out. A man who read the names of the dead on the radio.

Valdes. Francis. The Beguines. The peasants of Swabia. John Woolman. Harriet Tubman. Óscar Romero. And a great many people whose names nobody bothered to write down.

You know every one of those names now. Two hundred pages ago you did not.

Nobody taught them. They were not scholars. They did not have the notes at the bottom of the page.

They recognized it, which is a different thing than being taught it, and it is the only thing I have ever needed from anybody.

You have just read the whole of it. You know what it says now.

Go on, then.

Do the eight things.