It was convenient for Romans to misunderstand Jesus as a revolutionary, to be sure, but if anyone preached a kind of realized eschatology analogous to what the Christian Church, especially modernist protestantism, has preached, it was not Jesus but the Zealots, who thought that by human action they could restore the independence of the Jews. Onward Christian soldiers, His truth is marching on.
The apocalyptic basis for Jesus' radical ethics, which included poverty and flight from the wrath to come, not fighting for it and actually meting it out, and his prediction of the imminent judgment of the world, have to be jettisoned on this view, which is therefore no more explanatory of all the evidence than is the Fourth Gospel's recourse to a heavenly kingdom to which the Son of Man repairs, world without end, Amen.
Reza Aslan in his new book says all we need to know about Jesus is that the Romans crucified him between two bandits. Well, that's all the Romans cared to know. Reductionism of this sort is characteristic of minds predisposed to ideological thinking. Who is Lord, Jesus or Caesar?
The terrible simplifiers of post-Enlightenment times aren't so "post".
