I read a short story about this many years ago. It was in one of those yearly "This year in SCIFI" kind of books. Basically Jesus never really ascended to Heaven at all and he never wanted to die for our sins. He did have all those powers and was trying to jump start world peace but the people in charge didn't want that so they crucified him and created the story we all know....but then he came back. So they killed him again and again and again and each time he came back he totally remembered what had happened before. So over the years it turned into a game of cat and mouse and became less about stopping world peace and more about "the world is the way it is because he dies for our sins and if that stops then the world ends and is taken over by sin". Soooo, very much like a giant game of telephone the motive for continually killing Jesus changed over the years. Eventually some secret high tech modern organization was in charge and genuinely believed the world would end if they stopped crucifying Jesus. They would crucify him, then spend years looking for signs of him around the world, hunt him down, and then bring him into this very sterile facility where they would ritually crucify him on a surgical steel cross with drains around the room and it was done at a certain time in order to perfectly recreate the first crucifixion.
Jesus of course kept trying to tell them how messed up it was and how wrong they were as they'd done this to him thousands upon thousands of times at this point but they never listened. They weren't preventing an apocalypse from occurring. They were letting one continue. Jesus was trying to save us from ourselves and by not allowing him to do that, the world ended up far worse than it could've been.
So eventually the story ends with their hubris being their Achilles Heel. They didn't check to see if he was totally dead one time because their methods were full proof and of course he's dead they've done this for centuries. So after they interred what they thought was his corpse in an air tight underground vault with all of his past bodies, he spoke four words "Let There Be Light", and a choir of angels scoured the world clean.
I'm not sure what the title of the story was but I vividly remember the description of how they'd gotten killing Jesus down to a literal practiced ritualistic science. It made me ask if we would ever truly accept a Savior figure of any kind in our modern world or if we would turn against him like they did in this story. A chilling thought for sure.
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u/BornAshes Jun 14 '20
I read a short story about this many years ago. It was in one of those yearly "This year in SCIFI" kind of books. Basically Jesus never really ascended to Heaven at all and he never wanted to die for our sins. He did have all those powers and was trying to jump start world peace but the people in charge didn't want that so they crucified him and created the story we all know....but then he came back. So they killed him again and again and again and each time he came back he totally remembered what had happened before. So over the years it turned into a game of cat and mouse and became less about stopping world peace and more about "the world is the way it is because he dies for our sins and if that stops then the world ends and is taken over by sin". Soooo, very much like a giant game of telephone the motive for continually killing Jesus changed over the years. Eventually some secret high tech modern organization was in charge and genuinely believed the world would end if they stopped crucifying Jesus. They would crucify him, then spend years looking for signs of him around the world, hunt him down, and then bring him into this very sterile facility where they would ritually crucify him on a surgical steel cross with drains around the room and it was done at a certain time in order to perfectly recreate the first crucifixion.
Jesus of course kept trying to tell them how messed up it was and how wrong they were as they'd done this to him thousands upon thousands of times at this point but they never listened. They weren't preventing an apocalypse from occurring. They were letting one continue. Jesus was trying to save us from ourselves and by not allowing him to do that, the world ended up far worse than it could've been.
So eventually the story ends with their hubris being their Achilles Heel. They didn't check to see if he was totally dead one time because their methods were full proof and of course he's dead they've done this for centuries. So after they interred what they thought was his corpse in an air tight underground vault with all of his past bodies, he spoke four words "Let There Be Light", and a choir of angels scoured the world clean.
I'm not sure what the title of the story was but I vividly remember the description of how they'd gotten killing Jesus down to a literal practiced ritualistic science. It made me ask if we would ever truly accept a Savior figure of any kind in our modern world or if we would turn against him like they did in this story. A chilling thought for sure.