Mark 2:15-17

Jun 11, 2012 11:10

“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”This is another of the famous quotes, and one I quite like ( Read more... )

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 12:08:50 UTC
I've sometimes hypothesised that Jesus's life story might be adequately explained by coincidence: the odds are that one long-haired hippy cult leader every few thousand years will get lucky and have everything go right.

And then I remember he got framed and crucified, which in a mundane sense is pretty far removed from everything going right. Maybe someone who had a quite extraordinary amount of good luck, embellished by a great deal of special pleading and sparse comtemporaneous accounts of events.

One key question for me is how much less lucky someone has to be in order to disappear in the noise floor of history. While it's hard to be quantitative about such subjective (not to say potentially metaphysical) issues. If Jesus wasn't divine, merely both a very good man and a very lucky one, where are the near misses? Saints, perhaps?

To pick an example, what if Francis of Assisi had had a little more "oomph"? Might Franciscanism now be a major world religion forked from Christianity in the way Christianity diverged from Judaism? Conversely, if Jesus had lacked a little "oomph" might be now be another Jewish prophet?

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atreic June 11 2012, 14:28:56 UTC
If Jesus wasn't divine

I think if you want to work with that as an axiom, you need to bite the bullet of 'but claimed he was divine' or 'and never claimed he was divine, this just got ret-conned in by over excitable disciples', pretty quickly. If the former, I don't think you can _be_ a 'very good man' if you're actively misleading people; although presumably you could be very good and insane. If the latter, then I think your important qualities are probably not a property of your saviour/saint, but a property of their followers (although clearly there must be some correlation between the two)

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cartesiandaemon June 11 2012, 15:21:31 UTC
I remember hearing about the supposed trilemma of Jesus -- liar, delusional, or God but only recently seriously thought about it. But when I thought about it, it didn't surprise me at all that a charismatic leader of a big movement might be both (a) moved by social justice and (b) delusional: in fact, I'd almost expect it, lots of great people have some really weird aspects, and the trope of "someone who seems totally whacked out, but turns out to be right surprisingly often" is common in stories and to some extent in the real world.

It's not like "mad" is a uniform category that invalidates everything you say. Someone may be completely unable to communicate sensibly. Someone else may have had some very weird visions they're able to fit into their belief system, but otherwise be perfectly normal -- I don't think "mad" covers everyone who experiences sleep paralysis, etc.

It's also possible that Jesus didn't claim _consistently_ to be God -- maybe he started out preaching stuff, and then later on slowly realised or admitted that he thought he was God (whether he really was or not).

I don't know, that's somewhat controvertial, but it was bubbling under the surface for a while.

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atreic June 11 2012, 15:32:00 UTC
Well, yes, I think 'he said sensible stuff about being nice to each other, so clearly wasn't mad about being God' argument has so many holes in it you can use it as a sieve, but it's worth thinking about.

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cartesiandaemon June 11 2012, 15:54:41 UTC
:) I'd agree a bunch of stuff that seems right/true/sensible/good earns someone at least a good hearing for their more outlandish claims. But when you put 'he said sensible stuff about being nice to each other, so clearly wasn't mad about being God' that starkly it doesn't sound like a seive any more, it sounds like the hoopy bit of of the seive but without any of the wire mesh in the middle :)

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 15:26:24 UTC
I lean towards the synoptic Gospels, in which Jesus never claims he's divine, even to the extent of ducking direct questions.

If I follow your line of reasoning, you're saying that if:
  • someone's life story has an influence that spans continents and millennia
  • they are not divine
  • they never claim to be divine
  • their followers claim the person is/was divine
…then that person's influence is more attributable to the followers than the person themself? If so, I'm not sure I'd agree. Plenty of people through the centuries have had followers who claimed they were divine. What sets Jesus apart is surely the quality of his teaching? (Well, either that or people being divinely influenced to follow him rather than one of the False Prophets™, but for God to influence people into thinking Jesus was divine when he wasn't would be to move in an especially mysterious way!)

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atreic June 11 2012, 15:40:53 UTC
Err, I don't know why you think people follow Jesus, but my gut impression is that the real strength of Christianity is as a mystery cult that promises Eternal Life, the Spirit of God within you, and the ability to Eat God. I mean, you could say that these are part of Jesus's teachings - even the synoptic Gospels have lots of 'who will enter the kingdom of heaven', and 'take, eat, this is my body broken for you', and predicting his own resurrection. But I kind of got the feeling you were referring to the more atheist-friendly teachings like 'be nice to poor people' and 'don't be a hypocrite'.

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 15:59:20 UTC
If Jesus was (and therefore is) divine then yes, those are all plausible reasons for people to follow Him.

However, are those still plausible reasons if Jesus wasn't divine? Lots of other religions and cults through the ages have made similar offers to their adherents; why should Christianity dominate?

Nowadays, of course, a big part of the answer might be 2.35bn-person peer pressure, but that doesn't explain why it took off when other newly-founded religions didn't.

Meanwhile, talk about the Kingdom of Heaven and indeed about God can be regarded as an anthropomorphisation of deeper ineffable mysteries. If Jesus ever did actually say something tantamount to "I, of all humans who have ever lived and ever will live, have been uniquely chosen in a profound and metaphysical sense to found the world's foremost religion and form a focus of its worship." that would be a little harder to explain away. (-8

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cartesiandaemon June 11 2012, 16:01:37 UTC
I lean towards the synoptic Gospels, in which Jesus never claims he's divine,

Although, I guess you could substitute "being the son of God" or even "being a uniquely favoured prophet of God" and the trilemma and much of Christianity could be the same -- the differences are important to Christian theology, but in terms of delusion, neither is necessarily more incompatible with being good than the other...

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 16:08:22 UTC
Though, unless I've missed something, Jesus doesn't make either of those claims in the synoptic Gospels either.

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cartesiandaemon June 11 2012, 16:10:21 UTC
Good question. I thought he said something like that (or, even being a regular prophet is quite a large delusion :)) but I don't actually know -- do you or anyone have any details?

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 23:33:14 UTC
If I understand correctly, you're asking me for more precise details of where in the synoptic Gospels Jesus doesn't say those things? :-p

More seriously, Luke 22:66-71 would seem to be a canonical example.

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gerald_duck June 11 2012, 23:35:25 UTC
Um… figuratively speaking, that is. I appreciate that in a more literal sense the entire Bible carries rather greater force than mere canon. (-8

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cartesiandaemon June 12 2012, 09:43:09 UTC
LOL.

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cartesiandaemon June 12 2012, 09:51:18 UTC
If I understand correctly, you're asking me for more precise details of where in the synoptic Gospels Jesus doesn't say those things? :-p

LOL. Well, yes. But apparently that was the right question.

I think it makes sense, because I thought you'd know the points where Jesus comes closest to it :)

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simont June 13 2012, 13:04:39 UTC
even being a regular prophet is quite a large delusion :)

Hmmm. I don't know, though. Is it?

If as a result of your existing religion you already believe in all the underlying machinery required for 'prophet' to be a meaningful concept in the first place (e.g. an active interventionist deity who occasionally selects people to communicate with, gives them important information, and charges them with passing it on to a wider audience) and believe that there have in the past actually been some prophets, then surely it becomes rather less implausible to get the idea that you might be a prophet yourself, if you feel inspired out of the blue by some kind of insight that looks a bit similar to the sort of thing past prophets have tended to talk about.

You'd certainly have a duty to examine that idea closely with all humility and give serious thought to whether your insight is really as great as it seems, or as new as it seems, or whether it's really inspired by God in a prophecy-type way, but given a cool insight and the pre-existing belief that people with similar cool insights in the past were True Prophets, it seems to me that you could make a plausible case for it being merely an error of judgment to decide you're one too, rather than a medical-type delusion.

Of course it would seem implausible to me that someone might be a prophet, but that's because I don't believe in prophets in the first place so it would require a considerably greater stretch from premises I already accept!

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