...we might have been spared this whole Christianity thing.
Jesus Christ was a troublemaker. There's no getting away from it. Far from going along with the Received Wisdom of the day, he spoke the truth as he saw it, and got into Deep Serious. There was serious pressure to take him out. Probably, his worst mistake was to offend the bankers. It was all very well feeding the poor- very commendable - and going on about some hand-wringing peace and love thing that nobody took seriously, but when he upset the bankers - well - he had to go.
The problem was, there was no good way to get at him. He had a lot of popular support, and didn't seem interested in money or power, and in fact couldn't be bought. He was therefore a dangerous radical who couldn't be dealt with in the usual fashion. Only death would do, and preferably an ignominious, horrible death in the company of other Bad Guys, and so there had to be a setup.
The Right People were spoken to, and it all happened as planned. The trouble was, the hit backfired, although it wasn't completely obvious at the time, and the blowback ended up in the Vatican, which in turn exercised its own oppression. Rome by that time was history.
So if Herod had had the right technology - a judicious Hellfire missile here and there - the world might be very different and spared the entire Inquisition thing among other horrors. Really, it all comes down to technology. The problem seems to be finding the sonofabitch...
