This is certainly an accurate description of
the beginning of the Christian movement. I doubt that any of us would have
devised God's invasion of human history the way he did.
Jesus was born as an apparently illegitimate
child to an unmarried couple who were obscure members of a small nation on the
outskirts of the Roman Empire. He lived in such obscurity that apart from the
New Testament we know very little about him (although the Roman and Jewish
historical references corroborate the New Testament). His brief three-year
public ministry ended apparently in complete failure: rejected by his people,
betrayed by one of his disciples, deserted by the rest, condemned by Rome, and
erased in the most ignominious form of execution.
Even though his disciples claimed he
was the Messiah who was raised from the dead, they were hardly the kind of
people you would expect to start a worldwide movement. They were blue-collar
workers who came from the wrong part of Israel and had no formal education,
military might, or political clout. This movement should have evaporated like
hundreds of other small religious sects.
