Variations on Death - 8. On Jesus

Jesus was at least as gifted in speech as Oscar Wilde, but lived in a crueler age. In his whole career, the bachelor prophet uttered not a single word against homosexuality, unlike some who later spoke in his name. At the end, he was betrayed with a kiss. When the Roman soldiers stormed the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him, he was not alone. Let us review Mark 14:51, 52:

And there followed him a certain young man,
having a linen cloth cast about his naked body;
and the young men laid hold on him:
and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.

Authorities were annoyed by Jesus's magnetic ability to attract followers, his heresy in declaring himself the son of God, his moral teachings that strayed from orthodoxy, and his criticism of their practices. They petitioned the Roman authority to have him crucified to discredit him in the eyes of his followers by revealing him to be an ordinary man. Their plan backfired, because the followers were so invested with love for the man that their imaginations devised and their reason accepted a fantastic alternative reality in which Jesus rose from the dead, and this story was repeated often until many came to think it so.