Black Hills
There is a country called Black Hills when you roll through South Dakota. Its hills were formed in different geological processes than the main Rockies range, more volcanic than sedimentary. Interesting stuff from deep within you can stumble upon there. Yep, gold.
We of the Eurochristian tradition, even the non-practitioners, even the non-believers, have a tendency to think of Christianity as emerged in the process of a straightforward religious evolution. That a particular religious strand produced by a particular ethnic body in a particular world region had gone through a preliminary stage, “A,” and in due time and location advanced to a higher stage, “B.” Or, better yet, the preceding stage was “B,” followed by the final and complete product, “A.”
But if you familiarize yourself with similar processes in the American religious heartland – similar in outline, not the scale – as I did, you might reconsider. You may perceive that what would become our principal European religion for the next two millennia was, beside being a product of a plain linear evolution, also the result of nature's violent displeasure at being kept for too long under the harsh Hebrew wraps. The tribal psychic energy in the Middle East crucible having gotten condensed to such a degree, that when it finally did burst through the form, it came out as a Birth, most certainly a Birth – but also as a Rebound.
In other words, when the compressed spiritual — shall we conventionally say — matter within the fossilizing Hebrew canon did get out in a moment of relief, it had crossed the subsequent equilibrium point and came to a still some theological distance past it. Like a bullet ejected by a greater than standard pressure in the gas chamber flies an expected stretch and then some – so Hebraism locked within its petrifying cask had blasted so powerfully, that the result was better than it should be.