Born right in the middle of a war that was as spiritual as it was physical, Jesus’s belief in his own spiritual godhood was born of being a physical no man’s land. He embodied both extremes of Jew and Roman, right in the middle ground between Jew and Roman, precisely where there was no middle ground between Jew and Roman. This was the problem: there was no middle ground. In this savage historical conflict between Jew and Roman, there was no moderate ground with integrity. There was either transcendence, death, or both.
Jesus was thrown right in the middle of a blood feud of generations past. It was precisely by being in the middle, in a biological sense, that he was torn apart spiritually between extremes until nothing was left except a pearl of spiritual enlightenment. By going to the outer limits, and selling everything for this pearl, Jesus found a precarious end point of peace where both extremes cancel each other out.
If Jesus had been either a “pure” Jew or a “pure” Roman in a biological sense, he would not have lived this spiritual conflict within his very being. The Jewish/Roman problem was inescapable and existential for him because the violent conflict in the larger world was the spiritual conflict within his very soul. The clash of the Roman spirit and the Jewish spirit within the soul of Jesus could only find conciliation only on a hitherto unprecedented spiritual level and this was the difference that gave birth to Christianity.
The central insight into Jesus’s difference is not that he was either half-Roman or half-Jewish. The central insight into Jesus is that the mix of being half-Roman and half Jewish, in the context of Roman/Jewish war, resulted in a new creation. It was the combination of Jew and Roman that created Jesus. That Jewish-Roman mix created an integral double vision more than the sum of its parts that would have been exceeding unlikely for either a pure Roman or a pure Jew. With Jews and Romans fighting and hating one another all around him, the world stood still in love within him.
Jesus was different because his soul was different. He was both inside and outside Judaism simultaneously. The secret to fathoming the depths of Christianity is to grasp that Jesus’s soul was half-Jewish-half-Roman. A Tao of interwoven opposites, he was spiritually united only in faith in God. Insider within outsider and outsider within insider, Jesus was a Jew-Roman Jew within Judaism within the Roman Empire within the Kingdom of God within the Kingdom of Caesar within the soul of a Jewish Roman-Jew.
So, was Jesus a Roman or a Jew? Jesus was both and neither at the same time. By being right in the middle he was outside of both, and by being outside of both, he could view himself as being above both. Yet he was inside both by being both. He could only transcend both by encompassing them within himself. This is the meaning of the Kingdom of God within the soul of Jesus. His soul enlarged to encompass the spiritual clash of Jew and Roman at its extreme, a view that could seemingly be contained only within God himself in an ultimate peace found only in death.
Herein lays one of the greatest paradoxes of the phenomenon of Jesus. When one understands why Jesus was not the son of God or born of a virgin in the literal sense, then one can have a true understanding of why he believed he was the son of God in a spiritual sense.
Jews understood something that Romans did not from a supra-political perspective. Romans understood something Jews did not from a more distinctly political perspective. Jesus saw something that neither side saw. The polarization between Jew and Roman in the social world polarized these conflicting identities within Jesus’s soul and this spiritual clash took the conflict to a higher level. Jesus’s belief that he was God in human form arose from the spiritual ascension to a view that neither a natural Roman nor a natural Jew would have wrought independently. His viewpoint was not simply the sum of his Jewish side plus his Roman side. The pressure cooker of a polarized Jewish/Roman identity with a polarized Jewish/Roman war catalyzed a spiritual vantage point that was greater than the sum of his Jewish-Roman parts.
If you take the two incompatible worlds of pagan Roman Empire, and conquered Israelite monotheism, and smash them together, you just might get something like Jesus. Jesus was the most unique product of that world-collision. Rape in smashed revolt was the historical atom smasher that created Jesus. Jesus’s inner peace is the product of an inner war that reflected an outer war. By letting all sides of his being synthesize and reconcile with one another, rather than only fight one another, or rather, by letting all sides of his being fight one another by smashing into one another, he struggled his way into higher consciousness. This synthesis is what produced the unique spirit and soul of Jesus — the bizarre center where both sides converge.
