Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith is yanking Jesus out of the stained-glass ether and dropping him back into the noisy, factional politics of first-century Jewish life. The provocation is deliberate: if you keep treating Jesus as the founder of a free-floating “Christian ethic,” you’ll misread him twice - once by stripping away the intellectual world he argued inside of, and again by turning pointed, local instruction into universal platitudes.

The line “not only by birth” does the heavy lifting. Keith isn’t making a genealogy point; he’s pushing against a long Western habit of praising Jesus while quietly disinheriting Judaism, as if Christianity’s moral capital requires Judaism to be merely the backdrop it escaped. Saying Jesus “lived and taught as a Jew” insists that the Sermon on the Mount should be heard in continuity with Jewish law, prophecy, debate, and communal obligations - not as an anti-law manifesto or a wholesale replacement of “old” ethics with “new” kindness.

“Distracted fellow nationals” is telling, too. It frames the Sermon as crisis rhetoric aimed at a community under pressure - occupation, sectarian dispute, moral exhaustion - rather than a tranquil self-help lecture for individuals. Keith’s scientific posture (anatomist, evolution-era thinker) also matters: he’s importing a contextual, almost anthropological insistence on origins. The subtext is polemical and corrective: ethical teachings don’t descend from nowhere; they come from a people, a moment, and a set of arguments already in motion. Ignore that, and you get a Jesus tailored to whatever the listener already wants.