My first attempt at writing a spiritual history.

When souls transmigrate they have some power to choose which worlds they will inhabit. Souls who are very ambitious, or very brave, or very noble, might choose to try to break into the upper class worlds of ancient Rome, for example. This world was a politically confrontational one, and the Roman senate was more of a counsel of Godfathers than it was anything like a democratic republic. What the nobility did to one another was the sort of thing we see today in Mafia movies, and the lower classes did not have to treat with this kind of intrigue in their daily lives.

Instead, the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world lived in domains of relative squalor, dirt, and disease. It is easy to understand why the nobility shunned the lower classes. There was a practical reason for this, even if nobody understood that reason. The lower classes were easily infested with illnesses of which nobody understood the nature. There were neither cures nor explanations, and humanity walked about in a great darkness. The nobility, by separating themselves from the lower classes, spared themselves from many of the threats which took so many of the lives of ordinary citizens.

Because the nature of disease was not understood the Romans believed that disease was a curse from the Gods. The nobility, sheltered and set apart from those disasters which struck the lower classes, naturally assumed therefore that they were protected and blessed by the Gods. Thus the ordinary citizens had their gods, and the upper classes their Gods, and the nobility treated the ordinary citizens with a great deal of contempt. The lower classes were, after all, cursed by the Gods—the nobility were morally justified in cursing them as well: it was their duty.

For a soul, therefore, to transmigrate from the world of the ordinary citizen to that of the nobility was a great feat indeed. It meant passing through the belief that one is inherently inferior and trying to prove that one is not. The separation must have been like a glass ceiling: even if one felt a certain amount of strength of character, the evidence was hard to put aside: the lower classes were morally and spiritually inferior. Even the very attempt by a soul to pass from the ordinary classes to the upper classes must be perceived as a noble effort. Surely the alure of riches must have been offset to some extent by a certain disgust at the underhanded way the nobility dealt with one another. According to today's standards, no morally pure soul would want to join the Roman nobility. I would imagine few souls ever even tried—and of those who did I feel that it is safe to assume that blessed few succeeded.

But Jesus changed this situation. Here was the story of a man who healed the sick. The message was powerful: the nobility were not the blessed of God. There was a Door way through the glass ceiling. And for the very pure souls, there was a way out of the disease ridden streets which didn't mean joining the ranks of the mafia-esque nobility.

Furthermore, the traditions of the Jews engrained themselves onto 1st Century Christianity and became part of the Christian way of life. The Jewish emphasis on physical cleanliness was a major distinction between ordinary Jews and ordinary Romans—the Jews lived in an environment of relative sanitation compared to their neighbors in the Mediterranean world. The Christian world, by making these traditions more normative, realized a greater level of sanitation and thus demonstrated the physical evidence that the nobles were not superior because of the blessings of the Gods. Of course, to accept Christian traditions meant to accept Christ, and thus the early Christians understood that the salvation from the noble-underclass caste system and all of the pain it entailed was Jesus Christ. It is easy for us to look back today and claim that it was the sanitary levels of Christians that made them healthier, but nobody knew that back then. Most importantly from a historical point of view, the souls of Christians breached a divide which only a few souls had really ever broached—and they did it with so much power that the Roman worldview—which by that time had become the Pagan worldview of the ancient western world—must collapse under the onslaught. Souls saw the rupture caused by Christian faith, and they understood that the Gods were not what it was claimed that they were.