Jesus liked to stir things up. Jesus preached that “the end of the world is near! The Kingdom of God is imminent.” His disciples believed his message. They left their homes, families, and occupations to follow this apocalyptic preacher wherever he went. They soon came to believe that the old world order would soon end and that a new world order would be created in their life times by a supernatural act of God. They believed that they would rule with Jesus in the new kingdom, sitting on twelve thrones. Jesus was obviously very convincing.
Jesus was a very persuasive, controversy-provoking, radical!
Jesus’ followers were very emotionally-charged, hyper-religious, very superstitious, mostly lower class, people. They were not too dissimilar to the type of people who believed the radical new teachings of Joseph Smith in the United States in the 1830’s.
The Jesus portrayed in the Gospel of John would be seen no differently in his day as Joseph Smith was in his: a complete loon! A wide-eyed, delusional mystic. And I assert that the evolutions of these two religious movements, Christianity and Mormonism, most probably had very similar beginnings.
Both Jesus and Joseph Smith were killed for their wild claims of possessing divinity or claims of communicating with the divine. The strong personalities and charisma of these two men were so powerful and attractive that their delusional beliefs were accepted as fact by their otherwise mentally healthy, but gullible, simpleton followers who soon experienced their own hallucinations, wild dreams, and illusions and carried on the original leader’s delusions.
And the rest is history.
I see nothing spectacular or amazing about the development of either one of these movements.
Escaping Christian Fundamentalism 