The Henry rifle is an interesting adjunct. I am unfamiliar with this art work. Jesus, I think, is no more irrelevant than the Buddha, or, Mohammed. Believers would likely agree. Beliefs are personal affairs. Dewey said this makes them adventures and, therefore, shady. The matter is, facts notwithstanding, people find grounding in their beliefs, in spire of how irrelevant those may be to others. There is no conundrum. No problem at all. Searle would get the rifle symbolism. He probably has at least one Henry of his own.

The big what-to-do now has featured Qatar and the World Cup. Some activist friends and people I don't know are pretty red about it. Faith is, at once cohesive and divisive., because different ones are contradictory in their teachings.. I take a skeptical pragmatist approach because anything else is equivalent to what one person said on a social media platform. We may as well forget an activist posture.. Followers of Islam are not about to change, like it or not. Christians won't either.

Assuming that some causal factors of later historical events associated with the historical Jesus (from the West Bank town of Nazareth) must be found in the optional behaviors of the individual himself and are therefore not accidental, essential causes of events whose beginnings are traced to Jesus's deliberate action can intelligibly be sought. Further, because there's no requirement that such causal factors must belong solely to the individual in whom their connection with deliberate agency can be verified or corroborated, but rather might be more like a common property of a community or whole population, a legitimate research goal could be described as ascertaining the inception of a popular object in its reception by a dynamic subject. The governing principle of such a research goal is that essential causes of events can be found in shared goals independent of singular agents which express the common aspiration in individual form. Now, the widest extension of the shared-goal reference will in some fundamental way pertain to the relation between labor arrangements and distribution of product surplus or, differently, between production and consumption. Before undertaking a brief analysis, then, it's appropriate to state my opinion on the matter at the outset, so that what follows can be more readily examined: Jesus was executed by the state on account of his view of the relationship between labor and production-- in short, because he was a subversive economist. As can be shown also, Socrates of Athens centuries previously was indicted on almost identical grounds, who also made no serious attempt to defend himself against them in court.

In the service of the above stated goal of discovery of essential causes of comprehensive events by finding popular objects in individual subjects, three examples are cited below on the basis of their corroboration by the three historical Gospels and general scholarly agreement as to the authenticity of their occurrence. These are the protest action against the currency exchange office located in Jerusalem's Temple, the action against taxation by the occupying authority, and the conviction on the charge of blasphemy, since the transparency of a charge of "economic liberation" or something similar would have been politically inexpedient.

1) Protest action against the exchange office.
a) At Mathew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-19, and Luke 19:45-48, Jesus and his supporters vandalize the office and chase the adjacent vendors and their customers out. In Mark there's a pause between the two parts, ("he looked around at everything", -periblephomenos panta- 11:11), which implies that he took some care to see who was present before routing them. And Jesus left at night, suggesting that he fled. In Luke only the vendors are mentioned in the second part, and instead of fleeing he hung around a few days to do some teaching (didaskoen to kata hemerani). In all cases however both the impotence of the domestic authorities to respond to the felonious offense and their seething resentment at its leadership elements are clear.

2) Protest action against taxation by the occupation authority.
a) At Mathew 22:15-22, Mark 12:13-17, and Luke 20:20-26, elements of domestic counter-insurgency acted as provocateurs to extrude an actionable statement against the occupation authority, by dressing in street clothes and asking whether or not he was obligated by law to pay his taxes. Taking the bait, he first asks for a coin to demonstrate, inquiring to identify the image embossed on one side. When told it's "Caesar", the famous reply is issued, "give the things of Caeser [i.e. his image] to Ceasar, and the things of the god [i.e. the material in specific form upon which the image is pressed] to the god", (-my translation). All three accounts concur exactly as regards the provocateur's reaction: They were very impressed, or "marveled" (ethaumasan). What are the grounds of this commendatory response, if not found in the fact that they were well educated and had read Plato? The effectiveness of demonstrating the distinction between the world of appearance, governed by the imperial monarchy, and the reality of ideas, by means of which material is cast into diverse form, seems to be what won them over, so that the danger posed to ground level economic arrangements were especially pronounced in the minds of those by whom they were sent.

But there's a second element underlying the Platonic reference deriving from the slave economy. As slave labor was concomitant with mining as a necessary condition, the coin's material had to be understood as a product of that labor, so that separating it from the image impressed on it indicated a return of commodity-value to the work which produced it, leaving the owners of the mine with the image of their protector, but not the mine or its contents.

These two events therefore offer the clearest identifiable causal factors for his execution by the state. And here the similarity to Socrates of Athens appears in salient relief. Although Socrates at his trial cites the anger of Anytos on behalf of management over the craft-industries (-demiourgoi; Apology, 24a5), the charge was roughly the same as the blasphemy charge in the indictment of Jesus. Further evidence is found in Xenophon, Memorabilia, at 37.1-37.5, where Charikles and Kritias summon Socrates during the rule of the Thirty, and tell him to stop talking to "the shoemakers, the carpenters, and the smiths" (toen skuteoen kai toen tektonoen kai toen chalkeoen), --a restriction afterwards clearly violated.

3) The death-sentence.
a) The concurring Gospels represent the governor at the time as reluctant to convict Jesus of blasphemy since all he did was not deny that he was the king with messianic implication, and didn't affirmatively say that it's the case. But on the basis of the auditory consensus spurred by provocateurs amongst the court observers, the governor conceded to a crucifixion-demand.

It's the tax-protest at (2) that pulls the three events together in determining the essential cause of their historical effect: fear of labor rebellion under conditions of unjust product-distribution.

Whether or not this excursion can be seen as obtaining to some success must be decided by the reader. What might some alternatives to my interpretation from the context of class-distinction entail?

For those who might be interested, the citations for point (3) of the 12/10/22 post above are Mathew 26:64-66, Mark 15:9-15, and Luke 23:1-4. The passage in Luke holds special import for the Plato-connection because it refers back to the tax-protest (23:2), and therefore the distinction between the superficial image and the materially instantiated formal reality. These bear a close resemblance to Plato's grounds in The Sophist for issuing an arrest warrant* for the practitioner of the "semblance-maker's craft" (eidoelopoiike techne (235b8)). The sophist's crime as a generator of mere appearances consists in pretending to be, or imitating, something he/she's not, which, if taken seriously in wide enough circles, produces a general skepticism of and for the existence of Ideas, resulting in society's degeneration into an hedonistic libertarianism. The sophist is therefore the defining enemy of philosophical monarchy. And didn't the historical Jesus represent something similar to the real one? If philosophical rule ala Plato was supposed to be based on the authority of ideas, imperial rule turned out to be actually based on the irresistibility of swords. Relevant interpretive models thereof must include as primary that what starts with the mere idea of freedom, ends with the actual reality of slavery, while nevertheless resulting in a better understanding of the original idea. Hegel calls such a process "the cunning of reason", commenting somewhere that 'in History, only people get hurt, --Reason comes out fine'.

So if one puts together the different pieces of
1) the passage at Luke 23:2 which states that non-payment of taxes was among the culpability-grounds which led to conviction,
2) the blasphemy-grounds (Mathew 26:65) which derive from non-denial of a purported claim of being the real monarch, since well-known from the tax-protest was his view that the commonly recognized one is a mere appearance, (thereby asserting by default, in the eyes of the Prosecution, to be the real one), and
3) the word used for handing someone over to law-enforcement authorities in both the Plato-passage (paradontas 235c1) and at Luke 20:20 (paradounai auton tae archae-- "to hand him over to the proper authorities"), is the same, derived from paradidoemi, "to deliver",

-might a picture emerge that the mere image of Jesus as a de-facto Caesar on the basis of not denying that he's a king without asserting it, which results in the image of a ruler without the reality of it? Has Plato's arrest warrant for a crime against epistemology been translated into a death-sentence for one against civitology? Would it make any sense to say that Plato's revolution devours one of its own children? The question is intelligible only if one accepts the retrograde relation between ideas and reality, as Hegel describes in a favorite example, that the Greek civilization begins with Achilles, the ideal youth in poetry, and is "completed" in Alexander, the ideal youth in reality. "The owl of Minerva flies at dusk", was supposed to describe the state of affairs where things are only understood after they're gone. The question raised therewith is, for those who arrive after the avian advent: Is it optional?
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* Sophist 235b10- sullabein auton kata to epestalmena hupo tou basilikou logou, --"to arrest him according to instructions from the king's statement".