This is permitted me: I was born and raised Catholic. Born into it.
Jesus of Nazareth is annoying, supercilious, hectoring, manipulative; he loves the sound of his own voice, is self-important, power-hungry, and exceedingly puritanical (excuse the anachronism, this trait is elaborated on further down).
JC is intelligent, scholarly and bookish. He is geeky about Jewish history and different traditions within Judaism in a way that's familiar to me. That is, when he talks about King David and different Jewish leaders who came after David, JC sounds like a kid going through the minutia of the Marvel Comic Universe or NBA team rosters.
JC is "low-key obsessed" with John the Baptist. It is clear why. JTB was as hard-core as hard-core can be regarding JC's burning and abiding focus: Bringing the worship of God out of the realm of the pomp and circumstance he perceived among certain elites of his faith and back down to the basics. Back to basics for John the Baptist meant living in the desert and living off of locusts and wild honey. Crunch, crunch.
For JC, it's all about the parables and some of his parables are pretty out there. They tend to focus around farming and banquets. JC got a lot of questions about the almost-here arrival of the "Kingdom of Heaven." A representative parable-answer is the following: God the Father is posited as the owner of a vineyard or some other agricultural enterprise. God-as-Farm Owner Guy is getting married, so he sends his servants out around the area to invite what appear to be kind of middle-income (non-servant) folks to the wedding banquet. The invitees tell the servants to piss off, that they don't want to go to the wedding. One middle-income villager guy kind of whimsically kills one of the servant inviter guys. He gone! (JC's parables are full of these sudden violent, homicidal outbursts. The effect of these sudden blood blasts is jarring and disorienting on the listener/reader).
The servants go back and tell the Farm Owner that the non-servant villagers said "no thanks" to the wedding invitation. God says, cool, then you guys are the new wedding guests. The wedding party is about to go off without a hitch except… one of the servants didn't put on nice clothes for the shindig. God Farm Owner orders a group of "good" wedding guest servants to beat the shit out of the poorly dressed wedding guest guy and to bind him up with ropes and kill him. Shit is like a Scorsese movie. Like Joe Pesci playing God in these fucking parables. Regardless, the point is clear: get your shit together and worship God and - for fuck's sake - be ready to prove your faith when called or you're going to be shit-out-of-luck like the villagers or maybe even the servant who didn't dress up...
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