Special to CosmicTribune.com, January 2, 2025

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of ‘What I Saw at the Second Coming: Bloodline of Christ; The Big Story, Part II.‘

Every time I look at you, I don’t understand

Why you let the things you did get so out of hand? ….

If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation,

Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.

— Voice of Judas in the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar

Since 1960, candidates for the presidency of the United States must communicate extremely well not only as public speakers but on television and, in the case of the 45^th president, reality television.

How important are such skills and strategies for Messiahs?

Jesus Christ exercised enormous charisma over those who fell under the spell of his words of life. But he also incited mob violence against himself by directly challenging the moral and political leaders of society in his time.

Reputation Management for Messiahs

Listening to Sun Myung Moon read a speech to an American audience in halting English could be excruciating in contrast to his high energy extemporaneous interactions in less formal circumstances.

His corporate media profile as a pro-God, anti-communist force of nature was made more sinister by the fact that it had been created neither by him nor his supporters. The newsmen telling his story to the general public rarely had any idea why so many found both the man and his words compelling.[1]

From all accounts, sharing time and space with Jesus, the son of God on earth must have been a transformative experience for those who opened themselves to him and became followers. One could see the face of God, His personality and Heart in action. But such epiphanies were rare amid day-to-day life in transit on dusty roads with a man who had no home. Memories of such experiences and his credibility, like a dream, too often vanished as the early-morning mist evaporates with the rising of the sun.

Jesus as a politically incorrect fraud is not how most think of him. A rising populist phenomenon among the “deplorables”[2] of his time? A close friend whose ancestry included a long line of rabbis from Aleppo in Syria once referred to Jesus in private conversation with me as a “poor unfortunate”. But what did he or I know of the cultural, social, geopolitical, spiritual and psychological context for the three-year ministry of the man who clearly changed the world?

More to the point, what if he had been accepted rather than rejected?

To be sure, the problems faced by the alleged son of God on Earth go far beyond social acceptability. The “god of this world” wanted him dead, and the “establishment” of that time helped incite mob violence as foretold by Jesus Christ.

And yet he lives on through those whose lives were changed by his words, example and the Holy Spirit. The rolling juggernaut of Christianity shaped the history of the Middle East, Europe and then the United States of America and worldwide over the past 2,000 years following his death on the cross after only 33 years of life on Earth.

His simple commandments, parables and sacrificial example served as the new standard of law, ethics and culture worldwide even in nations that tried but failed to suppress Christianity. ….

[1] “Messiah as Investigative Journalist,” Chapter 1, “What I Saw at the Second Coming: The Big Story, Part I,” by R.J. Morton, Origin 2021 Publishing, pp 23-24.

[2] Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on Sept. 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event described supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump as “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”.

‘What I Saw at the Second Coming: Bloodline of Christ; The Big Story, Part II,‘ was published in October, 2024. Part I was published in 2023. [See Part II excerpts 1, 2, 3. Part I excerpts 3, 2, 1]

  Forerunners and the Social Acceptability of Christ