Jgnat said- One could say that Windows was pirated ideas from better minds, and I heard a compelling argument that Bob Dylan's lyrics were borrowed. Not original perhaps; human wisdom repeats itself on reoccurring themes.
Except you're forgetting that believers actually think Jesus walked on water, resurrected the dead, and is the one who will judge them on the ultimate fate of their eternal souls. They think Jesus is God's son.
As such, the words, wisdom, and thoughts of Jesus should be heads and shoulders above anything said before and since, and not reflect the ancient Worldview and contain basic scientific errors which point not to God's glory, but to the sentiments and thoughts of a Jewish male who lived in 30CE who was strongly influenced by his own culture (i.e. prior rabbinical thought and sayings, some coming from the oral traditions which later were recorded in the Talmud). Many Xians haven't even read the OT, and hence don't even realize when he was often quoting principles found in the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible).
Jgnat said- The sustaining power of Jesus' message I think, must be the time and place of the message. Before Jesus, Kings were gods. Afterwards, separation of church and state. Eventually this morphed in to personal faith and representative government.
Even after Jesus, Emperors were still considered Gods. It wasn't until Xianity was adopted as the official State religion of the Roman Empire that the situation started to change, and largely due to the smart move of outsourcing the deity role to an iconic image who couldn't reveal his mortal traits by growing old and dying: it's pretty-much impossible for someone who's already been dead for 300 yrs to slip up and reveal their mortal nature (perhaps by having a case of diarrhea)!
I doubt many historians would agree with that assessment of Jesus' influence on the development of representative government; when it comes to Judaism, separation of church and State began long before Jesus walked the Earth (i.e. after the independent Jewish Nation ceased to exist, circa 600 BCE after military defeat by Babylonians). So except for rare periods (eg the period of the Hasmonean Dynasty), Jews were allowed to keep their religious practices intact, but had to use the laws of their overlords (whether Persian, Greek, Roman, etc) when it came to adminstering civil/criminal justice. All the stipulations of stoning etc found in Mosaic Law were often actually just theoretical discussions, only, since the law of the land prevailed (in rare cases, the Jews were allowed to exercise limited form of self-rule, but with severe restrictions placed on the cases, i.e. no death penalty administered, which is why the whole shunning practice emerged since the Jews weren't allowed to stone their own members to death).
Jesus set the cause of separation of church and state back, what, 1,500 years, since it took that long AFTER Jesus and Xianity were adopted by the Holy Roman Empire as the official State religion for the principle of separation of church and State to reemerge; and not without much effort, conflict, and bloodshed, where in the interim monarchies ruled by the concept of a Divine right to rule.
King James separated from the Papal authority in Rome by declaring himself head of the Church of England, but still that was obviously a mix of State and religion. We have to wait until the 17th Century and Age of Enlightenment for John Locke to coin the term, and for America to be founded.
So, as much as it is painful to accept, Xianity actually set the cause of separation BACK, since Judaism would've likely lingered as a blip on the radar had an off-shoot cult not morphed into Xianity we see today. But to credit Jesus with ENCOURAGING separation of church and State (or tolerance, or even basic human rights, when Jesus didn't denounce slavery but endorsed it, etc) is a bit much....
Adam
