(Note: this is part 2 of a two parts post. If you did not read part 1, please find it in the blog)
40 years before Augustus became emperor, the Roman army put down the revolt that was led by Spartacus and have caused the republic much embarrassment. Spartacus was a gladiator, who thus had nothing to lose. The Romans needed a punishment worse than death, that they could threat the
unlawful with. The solution they found originated from north Africa. It was called, crucifixion.
Death in crucifixion is by suffocation. As the crucified person, loses consciousness or is simply too exhausted to carry his weight on the cross, his torso collapses in a way that makes him unable to breath. It was a cruel and humiliating punishment. It was supposed to be used only in extreme situations but maybe the Romans thought that if they will do so, crucified people will be special and therefore revered, so they started using crucifixion as their main mean for capital punishment, and they made sure to crucify people in groups. Imagine the sight of a group of people agonizing on the crosses, struggling to stay alive in face of unavoidable death. Rome wanted its citizens, all of them, to think of life this way. There was peace and stability but no meaning. It could not last. Yet who cared? As long as everyone have a chance to win on the short run, nobody notices that on the long run, everybody lose.
Until someone did notice. His name was Jesus from Nazareth.
When Jesus died on the cross, his disciples have split to two camps. One camp, led by his half brother James, saw Jesus as their Rabbi and as a man who just wanted to lead a much needed reform within Judaism. The other camp that was led by Simon Cephas, also known as Peter, is in fact the origin of Christianity as a religion, separate from Judaism. This is the story, as it is told in the book of Acts. It ends up with a council that was held in Jerusalem around 50 AD, in which the followers of James have given up their position and Christianity was officially born.
But a little known fact is, that there was a third group. It was made by all kinds of people, Jews and non Jews (among them many Roman soldiers), who've heard about Jesus and his teachings but never fully identified themselves as Christians. They adopted Christian ideas in a selective and self chosen manner. They created a sub current of Christianity that kept its deeper secrets and ideas alive while official Christianity was forming in parallel. Some of these semi Christian communities arrived to the Arab peninsula, and their stories and ideas found their way into Islam. We can see that in the way biblical figures like Abraham, Joseph, Moses and even Jesus himself appear in the Quran, in a way that is different than the official biblical narratives.
This process have created a continuum of theological thinking, in the space between the three Abrahamic religions. A continuum in which beliefs and ideas were constantly exchanged. One of the most powerful ideas that the historical circumstances have embedded into this thought space was the one of self sacrifice.
Judaism was originally against self sacrifice as it puts life conservation above all other imperatives. Although there is one story of self sacrifice in the Bible (that of Samson), it was unacceptable as a strategy. To this day, when a Jewish person commits suicide, he or she are buried outside of the cemetery's fence. And yet, only few decades after Jesus performed the most famous act of self sacrifice in western history, we find stories of self sacrifice in the events of the great Jewish revolt. They were the acts of extremists but they happened none the less, and as M. K. Gandhi said, an exceptional did is exceptional in its extremity, not in its essence. In the 600 years between Jesus and Mohammed, a new meaning was embedded into the Monotheistic thought. That which is called in Arabic, “Jihad”.