Saturday, June 17, 2017
The Essence of Being
I got into a rather metaphysical conversation with my oldest son the other day. I forget how the subject came up; but I said that I wished I had finished college before getting married. It would have been a lot easier when my parents were paying for it, and I didn't have family responsibilities, than it was when I went back to school a lot later. And it certainly would have made things easier financially for us. He said, rather anguished, "But Mom, I wouldn't exist if you had done it that way!" I said, "Of course you would. We would have had kids, it just would have been delayed a bit." Said my son, "You don't understand. That kid that you eventually got around to having wouldn't be me. He or she would have been my alternative reality sibling." I quickly reassured him that of course, if that were the case, I don't regret anything, I was totally glad I had him. My theory had been that if the timing of our conceptions had been different, we would still be the same souls, but in a different body. My son might have been a short blonde male, rather than a tall dark haired one. He said, "I don't think so, Mom. I think my one chance for existence was the time it actually happened. I don't think bodies and souls are interchangeable units, they happen together." Gave me food for thought. And a headache. And I have decided that I have no regrets; the butterfly effect and all that.
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"my one chance for existence was the time it actually happened" applies to every moment of our lives.
ReplyDeleteWe could have been many alternative selves; some of these we can imagine. But those imaginations are restricted by our experience in the selves that we have become, and do not have the advantages of our many alternative selves.
I think of this in terms of Merton's image of Seeds of Contemplation. We are given so many seeds of contemplation that it is impossible for all of them to mature. Most fall by the wayside, or die from poor circumstances, or neglect.
God is in love with our freedom, just gives us more seeds.
God also gives our lives away to others, more than we ever understand, and more than we have the capacity to realize.
Not only bodies and souls but people happen together. We are not just individual persons but social beings. Maybe your son can find some stability and consolation in this idea.
Jack, you're right that our "one chance for existence was the time it actually happened" applies to every moment of our lives. To me that's what the phrase "the sacrament of the present moment" means. And I like your idea that not only bodies and souls but people happen together.
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DeleteYeah, never tell your kids about your youthful hopes, dreams, and regrets. They take it way too personally. When I sensed things moving into the quicksand with The Boy, I'd pull out the Tom Waits CDs or the Marx Brothers movies or "A Hard Day's Night."
ReplyDeleteA Hard Day's Night :)
DeleteA lot of the Marx brothers went into "A Hard Day's Night." I like the scene with Paul's grandfather and Ringo in the police station. Hilarious.
DeleteDid you like Help! too? Not as good but still some nice songs.
Delete"Help!" was more cynical and kind of stupid. And a little racist what with the "funny Indian" played by Leo McKern. "Hard Day's Night" satirized English-ness, classism, the media, and had some very funny improv in it.
DeleteYeah, I watched it recently and sadly it was pretty cringe-worthy.
DeleteThere's the idea that a particular soul and body go together, that the soul is the 'form' of that body, and that they can't be separated (Aristotle). This is why Aquinas thought souls without bodies in heaven were incomplete person until they were reunited with their bodies. This is partly why Catholics used to be against cremation and organ donation.
ReplyDeleteBut most of us are dualists (Plaro) who believe the soul is the real us, the immortal us, and that the body can be interchangeable in life and left behind at death..
I view the resurrection of the body similar to the caterpillar and the butterfly. One is not like the other, yet they are mysteriously the same. The caterpillar had to literally dissolve before the butterfly could come to be. Our glorified bodies won't be anything like the ones we have now, but they will still be us.
DeleteIt is really interesting what our resurrection bodies will be like. Jesus' resurrection body seemed to be different because the disciples had trouble recognizing him.
DeleteJeremiah 1:5: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." It's a little out of context but reassuring. I take it to mean God gets who he wants, even if it is ahead of someone else's schedule or requires him to wait a little longer.
ReplyDeleteI like the Jeremiah quote, Tom. I think you're right that God gets who he wants. Which means he wanted...all of us. I like that thought, too.
Deletemakes me wonder about abortion. there was only one chance for that human to be and they got shop vac'd out.
ReplyDeleteStanley, yes, that's a sad and sobering thought. I do believe though that there is a chance for those souls to mature in the next life; as well as those who died in infancy and childhood. Nothing scriptural or doctrinal to back that up, just a belief that God is just and merciful.
DeleteI should add a bit of context to my son. He's actually not a twenty-something with a case of existential angst. He's 43, happily married, and established in his career. But he writes sci-fi fantasy novels on the side. Has always had a very active imagination, he's no stranger to "alternative realities".
ReplyDeleteDo you think that his is a theological view...or sci-fi?
DeleteIf theological it fits with the language of our being created "in the image and likeness of God."
Margaret, I think it's both. He's religious, and there's some cross-over with that and some ideas that end up in his story lines.
DeleteThe line also states that "you knit me in my mother's womb'. I had a Quaker friend who was born with radioulnar synostosis ... he couldn't bend his arms at the elbow. He said about that verse that God must have dropped a stitch when it came to him. It's a nice idea to think God is overseeing everything, but it also makes him responsible for a lot of bad stuff.
ReplyDeleteI have always been convinced that people with strong theological leanings are also good fans of sci-fi and fantasy-fi.
ReplyDeleteI've always found the whole "my ways are not your ways" bit helpful when it comes to wondering why God seems to be screwing up left and right.
ReplyDeleteI think God must have a whole different aesthetic than humans. God sees beauty in what we reject as deformed, handicapped, deficient, or aged. God has mercy for people we cannot tolerate.
The Boy Et Ux recently brought home a cat that was stunted and has some kind of chronic esophageal mucus problem and needs specially prepared food. They love it BECAUSE it needs their help and trusts them. An imperfect analogy, but I often think of people as God's wayward pets that only God could love.
Stanley Kopacz and Katherine Nielsen: If unbaptized babies go to heaven, then why should we feel sorry for those who are aborted? many people who survive for years (the profoundly developmentally disabled, the severely mentally ill) do not get to "develop" during earthly life. If there is life after death, surely they have a better time of it in the afterlife. If the aborted go directly to heaven, they do not risk an eternity in hell. I understand opposing abortion because human beings do not have the right to take the lives of innocent persons, but I don't understand why we should feel sorry for the "victims" of abortion. There is simply no way to know (if there is life after death) if they are worse off or better off than those who are born and mature.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I don't know that "feeling sorry" is really what we are doing. Recognizing an injustice is more what I would say. The same would be true of any life that was cut short by deliberate action. Every life has some kind of a purpose, see Jean's comment above at 3:35 pm. I think "My ways are not your ways" puts it well.
DeleteDavid, yes, I have wondered about that, too. Certainly the reason the Church lacks any kind of coherent rite for miscarried babies is because teaching is silent about what becomes of these souls. Pope Benedict said we may hope for God's mercy, which is cold comfort if you've had a miscarriage.
DeleteAnd the whole idea is that we're all tainted with original sin the moment we are conceived. So the unforgivable-ness of abortion is that we have committed murder of body AND soul.
I suppose in the hierarchy of sins, euthanizing the baptized would be a lesser evil.
All of this strikes me, however as very legalistic and bloodless. My sense is that Catholics are less likely than Protestants to consign people to hell based in the rules of their religions.
I think this bespeaks a sense of mercy that trumps "the rules" the theologians have laid down. It raises interesting questions about what kind of relationship we have with God. Is it a "deal" or "bargain" that, in exchange for trying to follow the rules we get to go to heaven?
Or is it a promise that God will always love us and that we are bound for heaven unless we choose evil?
And if the latter, why bother with sacraments? And where does that leave original sin?
This is my half baked theory: I believe in original sin, the evidence is all around. I just don't believe in original innocence, the garden of Eden. I picture original sin as the long slow evolutionary slog, in which nature rewarded the strongest, scrappiest, horniest, and hungriest with survival. And those qualities survive to one degree or another in all of us. If there ever was a state of original innocence, it was at an evolutionary stage where we lacked the moral agency and intellect to be capable of sin. Jesus came to show us a better way, i.e. the Beatitudes, etc. which are a conscious rejection of the Law of the Jungle.
Deletejust seems that it is so unlikely to even have a chance to come into conscious existence after 14B years of cosmic evolution, to have that chance squashed at the last moment seems a bummer. What the hell do I know? But why not merely think about it a little?
ReplyDeleteOne of the basic ideas of Christianity is that life is good, that it's a gift. Once that is set up (and I don't really agree with that idea), then any act that terminates something's life is seen as bad. But one of the prime killer of babies in the womb could be said to be God ... Women Now Have As Many Miscarriages As Abortions
ReplyDelete"God's way aren't our ways" .... but they should be. There shouldn't be a big disconnect between what a creator wants and what his creatures want, since he made us what we are. Jesus said God is like a human father to us his children, only even better. We recognized that Jesus was good - kind, helpful, brave, self-sacrificing - and the NT says if we want to know what God is like, we just have to look at Jesus. So God shouldn't be so unpredictable in his ways.
I'm not talking about God being inscrutable.
ReplyDeleteWe've all resented somebody who inconveniences us. We've all gotten empathy fatigue for someone who seems to advertise nothing but problems. We suffer from competitiveness, irritability, vengeful thoughts, selfishness, suspicion, prejudice, and cynicism. Some of them we abort, euthanize, murder, execute, or stick in institutions. We run brothels and sweatshops. We wage wars. We shove people off their land. We leave people without food, medical care, clothing, and clean air and water.
God does none of these things.
His ways are not our ways.
If we take the OT at its word, God has done a lot of questionable stuff too, including killing a lot of people and animals on a bet (Job).
DeleteJesus got angry, cursed a fig tree, insulted the Canaanite woman, let one of his friends die so he could freak everyone out by bringing him back from the dead, and sent his disciples off on a mission that he predicted would get almost all of them killed.
And then there's the eternal punishment of hell brought to us by the guy who told us we should always forgive others. Maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree :)
God does none of these things.
DeleteI think a very good case can be made that he is responsible for all of them, because he created all of the circumstances in which his creatures do all of those things. Catholicism certainly teaches that God permits everything (good and bad) that happens.
I have a strong sense that if there is a God, he is even more benevolent than the Catholic Church teaches, but I wouldn't be able to make a rational case for it. We're dealing with the problem of evil here, and no one has a fully satisfying answer.
God permits evil because God permits free will, no? To say he is "responsible" for all these things is accurate, I guess, but not the whole picture. God had a choice: to subject us to his will and make it impossible for us to do anything wrong, like robots. Or to give us agency. I believe he chose the latter because he wanted us to be free.
DeleteDo I wish God were more willing to step in and call a halt to some things? Of course. But then we learn only that we can make messes and God will pull us out of the fire. We don't learn limits.
I don't pretend to have answers for sickness, pain, and the deaths of innocents. Some of this we bring on ourselves, though. Couldn't we fight the causes and symptoms of disease far more than we do if our political will inclined that way instead of toward WMDs?
When "bad" things happen, it isn't very hard to find the human cause. Blaming God seems counter-factual.
DeleteOf course, someone can always brings up the 1755 Lisbon earthquke to blame "natural" events on God...But now we live in a world where we can increasingly blame ourselves for floods, landslides, vicious storms, etc. What a relief!
I remember when there was that tsunami that killed so many people in 2004. Many theologians wrote about it, about God let bad things like that happen. David Bentley Hart had an article in the Wall Street Journal and at First Things and then wrote a book about it later.. He also did an interview about it here - Where Was God? An Interview with David Bentley Hart
DeleteWhen a woman becomes pregnant, the local Orthodox parish prays for the parents and the unborn child. They also pray for the sick, and those serving in the military; all these by name.
ReplyDeleteOf course Eastern Catholics and Orthodox administer confirmation with baptism, and give the Eucharist to young children. No waiting to grade school for Eucharist, and later for Confirmation.
Seems like they are willing to recognize the full humanity of the unborn and the young a little better than we who tend to spend a lot of time "preparing" people for sacraments.
This was the way it was done in my former Episcopal parish except for the confirmation part.
Deletejust seems that it is so unlikely to even have a chance to come into conscious existence after 14B years of cosmic evolution, to have that chance squashed at the last moment seems a bummer. What the hell do I know? But why not merely think about it a little?
ReplyDeleteStanley Kopacz,
Believe me, I have given it a great deal of thought. I have written in forums like this for many years about early embryo loss after conception (as high as 80%), and the rate of miscarriage after clinical pregnancy (implantation in the uterus) has taken place, which (as crystal has noted) is very high. Now, it goes without saying that just because more conceptions end with a very premature death than with a live birth, that is no justification for abortion. But it does raise troubling questions. If every conception results in the creation of a human person, by far most of the persons who have ever been conceived have never lived an "earthly life." Those of us who are born and reach some level of moral and intellectual agency are the exception rather than the rule. This seems, to me, like finding out that what we think of as "normal" matter and energy accounts for only about 5% of the universe. The Catholic Church won't even say with confidence what the fate of unbaptized babies is, but just speaks of "hope." Well, if every conception is the creation of a person, then the vast majority of people who have ever been conceived have no clear reason for existence. They have existed for a few hours or days without ever developing a heart or brain, and then gone who knows where.
In any case, according to Christianity, earthly life is practically insignificant in the overall scheme of things. I have often seen it argued (in one form or another) that even if one lives a life of utter pain and misery, weighed against eternal bliss after death, that whole life of suffering is utterly trivial. It is more than made up for. So from a Christian point of view, life on earth—in this vale of tears—can often be something to be suffered through with hope of infinitely better things to come. Why it should be lamentable to skip the vale of tears altogether and go directly to eternal bliss is not clear, to me, at least.
David, if they go directly to eternal bliss (and that's the direction I lean), then it's true that there's nothing to be lamented...for them. But as Jack Rakosky pointed out in his comment on the 17th at 9:32, people happen together, not just bodies and souls. Maybe they are a missing piece of a family, a friend you didn't meet, or someone who furthered world peace or found a cure for a disease. And if we believe this life is a sort of school, then there's lessons not learnt (which maybe are made up in the hereafter, but who knows?)
DeleteI did not day that a fertilized egg is a person. I am saying that the one time chance of a unique person coming to be in spacetime has gone from some finite percentage to zero. Sort of like tearing up your lottery ticket before the drawing. Taken by itself, is this worthy of moral contemplation or is it just another of those things to be put in the giant pile of disregard?
ReplyDeleteOne thing that seems clear about life on planet earth is that it is cheap. People, animals, plants, are born, often suffer, and die, and there have been multiple mass extinctions. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that individual lives (and the quality of those individual lives) don't really matter to who ever is running the show.
DeleteGod permits evil because God permits free will, no?
ReplyDeleteI don't think so ... there's little to no evidence in the bible that God cares about people's free will. Here's a bit of an article by Ben Witherington about this - Shacking Up With God - William P. Young's The Shack ...
******* The Bible is all about divine intervention. God is always intruding into our affairs, like a good parent should when his children are as wayward as we are. Is it really the case that God never rescues us against our will? Does God stand idly by, when a normal human parent would leap in and grab the child about to step out onto a highway and be smashed by a sixteen wheeler? ......
But when you once allow that God is busy working all things together for good for those who love Him, whether they realize it or not, then it becomes perfectly clear, as also in cases like when God flattened Paul on the road to Damascus that there are times when God doesn’t wait on our permission to do things on our behalf, and in various cases does things that would have been against our wills at the time. And herein lies the mystery—God, by grace both gives humans limited freedom, but is prepared to intervene and make corrections, redirections etc. for God is free as well, and there is something more important than human beings ‘having it their independent way’ and that is rescuing them. A drowning person can’t save themselves, they require a radical rescue—but how they respond to that rescue thereafter, whether in loving gratitude or with a bad attitude—well that’s another matter and involves human volition.
In other words, the answer to the question of why tragedy happens in the world is not just because God won’t violate our wills, or just because our wills are bent and fallen, and we are the orchestrators of our own tragedies. It’s far more complicated than that ...... *******
I didn't mean to sound glib, as if I had it all worked out. And I hate falling back on "the ways of the Lord are mysterious." But I think they are. We have only have five senses and our perspective of the universe in our little dot in space must be limited. Does God seem like a ridiculous concept or even an SOB at times. You bet. I don't know how a sane person can avoid thinking that at times.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know what you mean. I used to dwell on this a lot, trying to figure it out, but I've mostly given up now.
ReplyDeleteWhen "bad" things happen, it isn't very hard to find the human cause. Blaming God seems counter-factual.
ReplyDeleteGenetic defects, bacterial and viral infections, parasites, auto-immune disorders (arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis), heart attacks, strokes, allergies, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, poisonous snakes, scorpions, death. Sometimes human agents are responsible for doing damage to themselves, but I would estimate that most suffering is not because of the "bad" things that people do. And of course when people do "bad" things, it is often the innocent people who suffer.
And of course the mechanism for evolution is mutation. If God designed the world so that there would be humans who resulted from random mutations and natural selection, errors in replication (mutations) were a necessity. So the genetic "mistakes" (like the ones that cause sickle-cell anemia, for example) are a "feature" not a "bug."
"...a feature, not a bug." But so are people with curiosity, and intelligence, and caring, who become doctors, scientists, etc. In order to help solve the problems.
DeleteBut we don't want to say that what's good can be made better through what's bad. Suffering may bring out the good in some people, but suffering is still bad and God better not be the author of that.
ReplyDeleteIs suffering always bad? That guy who went up the side of El Capitan without ropes or assistance must have suffered like crazy. It wouldn't be my idea of fun, but he accepted the pain for a super satisfaction. If the pain had been less, others would have done it already.
ReplyDeleteAnd on a smaller scale, millions of people burn the midnight oil and concentrate until their head is spinning to master, oh say, the poetry of William Blake or the equations of Albert Einstein. Or who do three more laps when they ache all over because they are playing the Packers on the coming Sunday. In all those cases, the pain is part of the gain and the gain seems worthwhile. No pain, no gain.
It would be foolish to say suffering (or pain) is always bad. But it would be equally foolish to say suffering (or pain) is always good.
DeleteEl Capitan, playing the Packers, William Blake and Einstein, indeed. Let's not forget childbirth.
DeleteTom, all of these examples are matters of personal choice by individuals seeking a goal that provides them personal satisfaction. Nobody has to study the poems of William Blake or climb El Capitan, and few who experience non-chosen suffering are paid the exorbitant sums that professional football players enjoy. Enough money that they can buy any help they need to alleviate their "suffering' (massages, physical therapists etc). Any "pain" experienced by those whom you cite as examples is freely chosen and the "suffering" is not only chosen because one's goals and sense of accomplishment or personal satisfaction outweighs the temporary suffering, but is short-lived.
DeleteNone of these examples of temporary pain really relate to the issue of real suffering.
I think there's a difference between voluntarily choosing to do something hard because it will desired yield results, and, for instance, being the parents of Otto Warmbier, who are probably suffering a lot right now.
ReplyDeleteThere's a theme in Catholicism that tries to make suffering a good thing. Mother Teresa is said to have kept pain meds from her patients because she thought suffering was a blessing sent by God. I think this idea is wrong. David Bentley Hart once had an email discussion with some Catholic theologians about suffering that was pretty interesting. If anyone is interested, I posted it all here.
I don't know. I don't wish suffering on anyone, but I have had some interesting epiphanies in the midst of personal suffering.
DeleteI don't know what to make of the Mother T story, which my mother enjoys trotting out frequently as, I guess, proof that the Church is an evil sham.
Some say she simply didn't have medicine and offered the idea of grace in suffering as the only medicine she had to offer. I don't think we'll ever know the truth. The hagiographical job started on her long before she died.
She apparently had a ton of money in donations from the very rich, and when she herself was sick, she had only the very best care, including treatment at the exclusive Scripps Clinic in La Jolla (where I applied for a job once :). Here's a bit about her from Wikipedia ...
ReplyDeleteMother Teresa considered that suffering – even when caused by poverty, medical problems, or starvation – was a gift from God. As a result, while her clinics received millions of dollars in donations, their conditions drew criticism from people disturbed by the shortage of medical care, systematic diagnosis, and necessary nutrition, as well as the scarcity of analgesics for those in pain. Many of her critics accused her of a fundamental contradiction: It was estimated that she raised over $100 million for her charity, yet only 5-7% of this was used in catering to the poor. Some have argued that the additional money could have had transformative effects on the health of the poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities in the city. Others, both in India and abroad, criticised her opposition to abortion and contraception ...
Once we decide that since suffering can't be avoided and so we might as well find a reason to accept or even welcome it, we are relying on a survival mechanism, not on Christianity.
ReplyDeleteJesus wasn't an ascetic. When he met people who were suffering he didn't counsel them to find a silver lining in it, he made their suffering go away. Jesus came to save us from suffering and death, not reconcile us to it.
Well,Christianity was founded by and on a suffering God and is, in its own way, a survival mechanism.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but I think that's a sort of twisting of the theology to fit the unexpected circumstances of Jesus getting arrested and killed ... The Incarnation: Why God Wanted to Become Human by Ken Overberg SJ
ReplyDeleteExcept scripture doesn't indicate that it was unexpected.
DeleteYes. Overberg's idea was that the writer's of the gospels tried to come up with a plausible explanation for why the man they thought was going to save Israel from the Romans instead got killed - they went back through scripture to find clues, like the suffering servant thing ...
ReplyDelete"[...] How did this view develop? Just as we do when we face tragedy, especially innocent suffering, so the early followers of Jesus tried to make sense of his horrible death. They asked: Why? They sought insight from their Jewish practices like Temple sacrifices and from their Scriptures. Certain rites and passages (the suffering servant in Isaiah, psalms of lament, wisdom literature on the suffering righteous person) seemed to fit the terrible end of Jesus' life and so offered an answer to the why question. Understandably, these powerful images colored the entire story, including the meaning of Jesus' birth and life ..."
It is clear from the historical facts that Roman collaborators such as Herod and the High Priest were responsible for making sure that John the Baptist and Jesus did not disturb the Roman peace. There were other religious figures at that time who were also killed. Both Herod and Pilate were extremely vicious people, even though the Gospels depict them as having qualms about the Baptist and Jesus.
ReplyDeleteSo there should not have been anything unexpected about the death of Jesus. What has to be explained is why Jesus went to Jerusalem, why he allowed a "messianic" entry, and why he drove the money changers out of the temple.
All these things would surely bring about his death. Especially when as Mark makes clear, Jesus had little support among any of the religious elite (priests, scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees). He also had a motley group of disciples, one of whom betrayed him, another who denied knowing him, and the rest fled.
So the idea that his followers had to "search" scripture to "invent" an explanation is far fetched; these images were readily available to explain a very expected death; his death was so predictable that it is likely the Jesus would have had to make sense of it himself by using these images.
Yes, the Gospel writers had to explain the death of Jesus, that he was not a criminal. I think they did a good job of explaining the situation to non-believers as well as to those who understood the Scriptures.
Jack, the disciples seemed to think Jesus was the messiah and that he was going to chase the Romans out of Palestine and rule himself. The big disconnect was not that people wanted Jesus dead, but that Jesus could both be the messiah and also at the same time fail. That was what they had to explain away.
ReplyDeleteSo the idea that his followers had to "search" scripture to "invent" an explanation is far fetched . . .
ReplyDeleteThere were undoubtedly religious and political reasons why some of the actions of Jesus put him in danger, but it seems to me the New Testament comes up with reasons (based on Jewish Scripture) of why Jesus was predestined to die, and why he had to die as part of God's plan foreshadowed all the way back in Genesis 3:15 (the "protoevangelium"). Unless my memory is faulty, in none of the accounts of the various trials of Jesus is the incident involving the moneychangers at the temple mentioned. The charges against Jesus fall into two categories—trumped-up charges, or charges of blasphemy.
The New Testament authors had to come up with an explanation of why the person they claimed to be the Messiah was so different from the Messiah who was expected.
“There were undoubtedly religious and political reasons why some of the actions of Jesus put him in danger”
ReplyDeleteYes, and it is essential to understand the social and political context outside the New Testament. Otherwise, we end up blaming at least the Jewish leaders, if not the Jewish people for the death of Jesus! That has had terrible consequences for both Christianity and Judaism
The Roman Empire executed Jesus, just as it executed many trouble makers. It also executed many Christians before Christianity finally triumphed. The basic conflict has always been between Christianity and the powers of this world.
There have always been those who like to view the Pax Romana as benign, even providential. There are a lot of people today who like to view the Pax Americana as benign, even providential. Wealth, power and status, i.e. the world, are the enemy of the good. We need to recognize that, even if God can bring good out of them.
The New Testament was written within the context of profound disagreement with Jewish leadership. The question was why Jewish leaders, and many Jews rejected Jesus. The answer was that the prophets had always been rejected. So it was understandable that the Jewish leadership rejected Jesus, and the prophetic leadership of the Jesus movement. Again rejection of prophets can be seen as providential because God overcomes that rejection. (We modern Christians must be very careful in handling this conflict between early Christian leadership and early Jewish leadership which is embedded in our founding documents).
Peter in Acts preaches that God raised up Jesus, and has sent his Spirit upon the Jesus movement which can be seen in all sorts of extraordinary happenings. So everyone should repent, and receive the Holy Spirit. Now of course if, a priori, the modern reader rejects the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Pentecost, you are left with trying to explain Jesus death, and the bizarre god of the atonement.
Finally there were likely many different concepts of messiah. I think Qumran had several. Early Christian did not call themselves Christians but rather the saints, the brethren, the disciples, followers of the way. Outsiders first called them Christians, it likely had the same implications as when we refer to people as terrorists.