Jesus clearly, painfully obviously, intended to do exactly that. It is an utterly delusional reading of every single document from every single witness to his ministry to say he never intended to set up a religious system. He trained disciples. Told them “He who listens to you listens to me”. Declared that they would sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Ordered them to go into all the world and teach all that he had commanded. Gave them specific rites to perform and told them to do it in memory of him. And he came of (and founded) a religious tradition that took for granted that worship was liturgical, observed rites that were intrinsically social, not private and esoteric, read from a common set of holy texts, believed in common, lived a common life, observed common rites and mores, and obeyed a common body of teaching. He even declared “You are Peter and upon this Rock I will build my church. The idea of an “ecclesia” or “assembly” comes from the Greek Old Testament and transfers the idea of Israel as a holy people to the Christian assembly, just as Peter does when he calls Christians a royal priesthood and a holy nation, a people set apart by God. Everything we know from the documents left us by the people closest in time to Jesus tells us absolutely, 100%, intended to set up a religious system.
The fantasy that Jesus never meant to found a church and was just an esoteric guru exhaling Mysterious Sayings with no goal in view is not so much to misread the New Testament as to scream it down in direct contradiction of what it–blindingly obviously–is saying.
Now, if you want to say that he did not intend to set up a religious system that was more important than the human beings it served, you’d have a point. As he himself made clear, the law was made for man, not man for the law. But that does not mean that the law (including ecclesial law and religious systems) is worthless garbage. It just means that such structures matter less than the dignity of the human person.
But the notion of a formless, structureless, non-theological, misty “wisdom” having nothing to do with ideas like “church” and “religion” and facts and reality and the hard, awkward reality of liturgy, scripture, and so forth is, as Chesterton noted long ago…
… exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: “All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Esculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors.”
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Honestly, I’m not so sure. I remember reading a Patheos Catholic article a (long) while back, that talked about the origin of the word “religion” and how it refered to members of a specific sect/order, rather than the general sense in which we use the term today. The point was that the distictions being referred to in terms like “religious” and “secular”, are relatively modern inventions that didn’t exist back then.
Just to be clear, I really don’t have a dog in this fight; I’m not invested in it being one way or the other, since none of my ideology hinges on this issue.
However, the impresion I get from Christianity is that it started out as an off-shoot of Judaism that eventually evolved into its own separate ideology, rather than one that was intended as such from the get-go. This is reinforced by the way Christianity is presented as a continuation, affirmation and fullfillment of old Judaism, instead of a rejection and deviation from it.