About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is 'living in the end times' (Pew)

[Major Nikon]

70. All of the things you mentioned are control functions

You may believe those things are benevolent and benign, but that doesn’t make them any less controlling. The whole idea Jesus was taking Mosaic law and telling his followers what it really meant makes it even more so, not less so.

You hit the nail on the head when you said the gospels were written many decades after the fact. The likelihood Jesus actually said any of the things attributed to him is quite remote. So what we really have is a mythological perspective of Jesus rather than an actual one.

What does seem reasonable is he was a Rabbi that had his own followers and operated the same way organized religion has always operated. As far as giving to those in need is concerned, the real meaning is you give to the church and the church distributes to those in need after taking their cut off the top. Those in need wound up getting very little if anything as priority is given to “spreading the word”. Jesus certainly didn’t revolutionize that concept as it was in place thousands of years before he came along and still operates that way today thousand of years later.

The mythological perspective has Jesus feeding people with tons of fish and bread with hocus pocus. The reality was he was taking in donations, paying his logistical expenses, and taking out a salary for himself and his workers whether modest or generous, and if there was any left over it might (or might not) have found its way to those in need. His followers were Jewish people of the area and decidedly lower and middle classes of people who would have had very little disposable income to give to him. It’s hard to imagine he was providing that much in the way of support to anyone who needed it which perfectly explains the need for making up the literally magical ways he was making all those things happen. You don’t get there any other way.

When you try to reconcile the mythology with the reality you are left with the undeniable conclusion those two things were very different. The idea even Jesus himself practiced what he is alleged to have preached seems pretty far afield from what must have really been going on. However much we think modern Christians stray from that mythology, there’s no real reason to believe the first ones operated any differently. They simply take what is written down and form their own dogmatic and doctrinal viewpoints, which equates to controlling or at least attempting to control the behaviors of everyone around them.