Rebels like Paul and Luther would be unthinkable without that example.
Catholics used to understand this. It is amusing that Weigel argues like a Protestant fixated on the resurrection instead of on the life and teaching of Jesus.
Before Christianity, immortality was a family concept: One lived on in one’s family. The Resurrection of Jesus and the promise of a “resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5) changed all that, as the individual human being became the locus of immortality—and thus the bearer of a unique, personal, “individual” dignity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
None of that would have been even thinkable were it not for the example of the supreme individuality of the forerunner as the "true man", whose vertical faith relation to God superceded [sic!] the social dimension and made it irrelevant:
And
[the Pharisees] sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians,
saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God
in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the
person of men.
-- Matthew 22:16
This aloofness of Jesus, if we may call it that, is one of the things which marks out the unique individual qua individual so characteristic of the figures we name "religious founders". For good or for ill, it is that attitude which triumphed in the West and has been democratized to an extreme degree, in large measure due to Protestantism. Positively it has evolved into what we call "leadership". Negatively it is what is known as "a Messiah complex".
The example of Jesus is not unalloyed.
