Christology with a Dash of Freud and a Pinch of Marx

Here are some excerpts from Erich Fromm's essay "The Dogma of Christ" in The Frankfurt School on Religion and the collection of essays entitled The Dogma of Christ. This is an extremely interesting essay, Fromm employs two of the "Masters of Suspicion" to read (and critique) the doctrine of Christology for the early Church and later its shift away from the early Church's Christology to the Christology of the Catholic Church. Both doctrines of Christ are rooted in the Church communities' social and economic standings.
I want to include enough to interest people to read it, but not too much to give it all away. The parts that I focus on a Marxian reading of first century Palestine which sets up for a Freudian reading of the doctrine of Christ for the first century Christian community. Without further ado, dear reader, let's get started.
In the first century C.E., "Palestine was a part of the Roman Empire and succumbed to the conditions of its economic and social development".
Economically, there were basically three classes. First, "the rural population was exhausted by an extraordinarily heavy tax burden" and either became debt slaves, or as the farmers lost their means of production or their small land holdings, they "swelled the ranks of the large-city proletariat of Jerusalem" or "resorted to desperate remedies, such as violent political uprising and plundering." Second, just above the impoverished proletariat there arose a middle economic class, "though suffering under Roman pressure, was nevertheless economically stable." Third, there was a "small but powerful influential class of the feudal, priestly, and moneyed aristocracy." Within the Palestinian population, there was a corresponding social differentiation to this severe economic cleavage. Sadducees represented the rich upper class, Pharisees represented the middle economic class, and the Am Ha-aretz (literally, land folk), corresponded to the "lowest stratum of the urban Lumpenproletariat and the oppressed peasants." There was much hatred between the lowest class and the Pharisaic circles (if you question this, ask me for some literary instances where this arises), and the conflict increased as "Roman oppression became heavier and the lowest classes [became] more crushed and uprooted." This is where we see the rise of national, social, and religious revolutionaries; mainly embodied in political attempts at revolt like the Zealots and Sicarii (dagger carriers), and religious-messianic movements (but "there is by no means a sharp deperation between these two streams moving toward liberation and salvation; often they flow into each other).
Out of these lowest classes - "the masses of uneducated poor, the proletariat of Jerusalem, and the peasants in the country", those who "because of the increasing political and economic oppression and because of social restriction and contempt, increasingly felt the urge to change existing conditions" - arose the kind of people who supported early Christianity.
Do passages like Luke 6:20 ff, then, not only "express longing and expectation of the poor and oppressed for a new and better world, but also their complete hatred of the authorities - the rich, the learned, and the powerful"?
How did the early Christian community view Christ? In Acts 2:36, wee see that "God made him [Jesus] both Lord and Christ". This "is the oldest doctrine of Christ that we have, and is therefore of great interest, especially since it was later supplanted by other, more extensive doctrines." This is called the "adoptionist" theory "because here an act of adoption is assumed". "The thought present here is that Jesus was not the messiah from the beginning; in other words, he was not from the beginning the Son of God, but became so only by a definite, very distinct act of God's will. This is expressed in the fact that the statement in Psalms 2:7, 'You are my son, today I have begotten you," is interpreted as referring to the moment of the exaltation of Jesus (Acts 13:33)." According to the ancient Semetic idea, the king is a son of God on the day he mounts the throne. "It is therefore in keeping with the oriental spirit to say that Jesus, as he was exalted to the right hand of God, became the Son of God."
"We see thus that the concept of Jesus held by the early community was that he was a man chosen by God and elevated by him as a 'messiah', and later as 'Son of God'. This Christology of the early community resembles in many respects the concept of the messiah chosen by God to introduce a kingdom of righteousness and love, a concept which had been familiar among the Jewish masses for a long time." Except there are a few new elements: "in the fact of his exaltation as Son of God to sit at the right hand of the Almighty, and in the act that this messiah is no longer the powerful, victorious hero, but his significance and dignity reside just in his suffering, in his death on the cross."
This is where we add the dash of Freud, and may get a little controversial.
"The first Christians were a brotherhood of socially and economically oppressed enthusiasts held together by hope and hatred." "While the Zealots and Sicarii endeavored to realize their wishes in the sphere of political reality, the complete hopelessness of realization led the early Christians to formulate the same wishes in fantasy." "If there was nothing left for the Zealots but to die in hopeless battle, the followers of Christ could dream of their goal without reality immediately showing them the hopelessness of their wishes. By substituting fantasy for reality, the Christian message satisfied the longings for hope and revenge, and although it failed to relieve hunger, it brought a fantasy satisfaction of no little significance for the oppressed."
1. A man is rased to a god; he is adopted by God. "We have here the old myth of the rebellion of the son, an expression of hostile impulses toward the father-god." "These people hated intensely the authorities that confronted them with 'fatherly' power. The priests, scholars, aristocrates, in short, all the rulers who excluded them from the enjoyment of life and who in their emotional world played the role of the sever, forbidding, threatening, tormenting father - they also had to hate this God who was an ally of their oppressors, who permitted them to suffer and be oppressed. They themselves wanted to rul...but it seemed hopeless to try to acheive this in reality and to overthrow and destroy their present masters by force. So they satisfied their wishes in fantasy. Consciously they did not date to slander the fatherly God. Concious hatred was reserved for the authorities, not for the elevated father figure, the diving being himself. But the unconscious hostility to the divine father found expression in the Christ fantasy. They put a man at God's side and made him a co-regent with God the father. This man who became a god, and with whom as humans they could identify, represented their Oedipus wishes; he was a symbol of their unconscious hostility to God the father, for if a man could become God, the latter was deprived of his priveleged fatherly position of being unique and unreachable. The belief in the elevation of a man to god was thus the expression of an unconscious wish for the removal of the divine father.
2. The figure of the suffering savior was determined "by the fact that some of the death wishes against the father-god were shifted to the son. In the myth of the dying god (Adonis, Attis, Osiris), god himself was the one whose death was fantasied. In the early Christian myth the father is killed in the son."
3. "Since the believing enthusiasts were imbued with hatred and death wishes - consciously against their rulers, unconsciously against God the father - they identified with the crucified; they themselves suffered death on the cross and atoned in this way for their death wishes against the father. through his death, Jesus expiated the guilt of all, and the first Christians greatly needed such an atonement."