Talkin' about Je-sus
Yesterday I posted a question on FB asking Christian friends their reaction to question "If Jesus had died in bed at ripe old age, would he still have died for your sins?" Unfortunately, I was not able to phrase the question quite so pithly at the time so there was a lot of confusion about what I was asking. Here's where that came from
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Full disclosure, not a Christian and doubt I could play one on TV. But have read a bit.
I predict that those Christians who considered this question carefully would all say "no", but give a wide range of justifications depending on their theology. Most comments here touch on pieces of this so I'll just reword below:
- C. S. Lewis would have been appalled, first of all, not the least because the Crucifixion is the pivotal event for the whole mythic structure of Christianity. He would have found it a much less interesting story if Jesus had merely died in his old age. The story has a lot more dramatic power (and gains a wider following) if the protagonist is executed in a particularly cruel way by the absolute temporal power (the Romans), and then comes back. The message is then clear that not only do the Romans not have the moral high ground, but their power on earth is also threatened; this message has universal appeal and makes it stick with converts and dissidents. It's a "show of force" by the God of Abraham.
- Kant, or those who admire him, might have put it a different way: Jesus could have continued to live and preach and do good works, but by agreeing to get himself killed in this spectacularly grisly way, he calls attention to the fact that these new universal values are so important as to be worth being put to death for. if Jesus had avoided rocking the boat enough for the Romans to want him dead, he probably wouldn't have had much impact, and if he had cut and run or somehow bargained for his own release, he would have lost all credibility with his followers. Even non-resurrected martyrs generally have considerable moral force through the strength of their convictions, and the universality of what Jesus was preaching presumably took on additional significance. But this is more a meta-religious view.
- In terms of what Jesus's martyrdom is supposed to accomplish (theologically), John 14-16 is probably the best reference: John 16:7 But I say the truth unto you; It is better for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you... That is, one statement of the problem of evil in Christianity is that we are born corrupted in nature and simply can't be ethical, and anything ethical necessarily comes from God. Jesus's sacrifice then bridges the gap and brings in the Holy Spirit, which among other things allows us a different level and quality of union with God than was previously possible in the "bad old days" of blood sacrifices in the Old Testament. Another way I've heard it put is that the Crucifixion was sort of the final blood sacrifice to end all others, allowing a transition from Old Testament theology to one less combative. The mechanism by which this is supposed to happen, though, remains ineffable; we're just supposed to take it for granted. It's a very specific solution to the problem of evil -- death being the ultimate evil, Jesus's resurrection concretely assures the faithful that if they don't get their reward for doing good in this life, they'll get it in the next.
So in short, the Crucifixion shows the importance of Jesus's values, and the Resurrection guarantees the benefits of adhering to them. I don't think the Crucifixion makes any sense from within Christianity without the Resurrection; unless Jesus came back to life, his death on the cross can only be seen as a political/moral statement, not an act which confers any lasting temporal benefit on us. We can talk about the meaning of the Crucifixion in isolation only from a meta-religious point of view, not in the way most Christians would understand it.Of course, in Buddhism none of this makes any sense because Buddhism preaches the clear-eyed recognition of death and impermanence; the victory comes through acceptance. The Buddha couldn't have been a savior if he had died in this way, because he taught that salvation comes from within each individual, not from the outside with trumpets and flaming swords.
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I notice that all three of your responses are all post-Crucifixion responses by which I mean they are indoctrinated with the necessity of Jesus dying and are various kinds of attempts to find a message in that fact.
Another way to think about it is: what was the meaning of Jesus' life 2 months before his arrest by the Romans?
To take on CS Lewis first: what if Jesus was unconcerned with creating an interesting life story? And what he was even less concerned with dramatic arc and an increased following? This would apply to your point about Kant as well- assuming that Jesus was mostly interested in helping people and not in establishing a big power structure that lasted for centuries. To me it seems that these are both answers that assume that his plan was to create a long lasting religion with mythic heft. It sounds more like people imposing a dramatic arc to a series of events to create a cohesive story than a carefully wrought plan from the beginning....
As for the quote from John- I don't read that statement that way. He could have died of old age and still the absence of him to those who loved him would be a wound of love. The rest seems to be like the previous- a way to impose a story after the fact.
I see no reason why the stories and interpretations of Jesus and Buddha could not be reversed. If you're enemies kill you, people create a Jesus-type story. If you live a long time, people create a Buddha-type story about you. It's always more comforting to make up stories than to practice love and kindness to obnoxious and annoying people when you are tired and grumpy!
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I acknowledge that my response was what I believe Jesus's followers would say about the necessity of His death, and how they interpret it -- not necessarily what Jesus himself might have thought (modulo words that are attributed to him in the Gospels). C. S. Lewis converted mainly because of the mythic power of the Passion and Resurrection, not necessarily because he believed Jesus's ethical teachings were best or unique -- Lewis himself says that e.g. the Golden Rule is universal and therefore banal, without giving it its due, compared to the glory of the Resurrection.
Jesus's first-hand experience is a very different kind of question, but one which the structure of Christianity as it is practiced makes almost impossible to ask. Alan Watts was the only theologian I've read who was so audacious as to ask what it was like to be Jesus, not just one of his followers... and his personal beliefs were more a Buddhist/Taoist syncretism (like Zen) than Christian.
I don't claim to know what was in Jesus's mind personally, but there was an interesting class at Chicago (that I never took) which talked about how his ethics and teaching were politically subversive, nonviolent resistance against the Romans. e.g., "turn the other cheek" -- because a Roman would have hit you with the back of his left hand, and if you invite another blow on the other side, he either has to hit you with his open hand or with his right hand, either of which implicitly acknowledges you as an equal and not an inferior. And "go the extra mile" -- because there were laws against how much work the Romans could shanghai you to do in a day, so by voluntarily going farther you got your oppressor in trouble. So I doubt he was interested in building up any huge earthly power structure, but more interested in tearing down unjust orders and bringing a new ethical awareness to all. And he might have seen his own martyrdom as part and parcel of his ministry. I expect that if he talked about the "kingdom of heaven" this was more about the language of his time. Anyway there's a lot there, but this may also be ingenious post-facto rationalization or reconstruction also. Just fun to think about.
While the content of Jesus's and Buddha's ethical teachings were similar, aren't their rationales totally different? By all accounts Jesus talked a great deal about the kingdom of heaven, and what we could do in this world to prepare for the next one where all wrongs would be righted. His insistence on a particular metaphysics seems pretty solid, and his investment in its truth fanatical. Buddha, on the other hand, insisted that to ask about what lay beyond the veil and above the sky (the poisoned arrow) was irrelevant to living a good life, and that the important facts were those pertinent to relieving human suffering in this life. And just as crucially, he didn't appear to believe he had to be put to death specifically to save others (if that really was his belief I have no doubt he would have done so in a heartbeat), so I don't think his untimely demise wouldn't have had the same meaning. This seems hard to escape unless you posit a hypothetical Jesus of which the Gospels give a distorted vision at best -- which may be, but then we need to appeal to non-canonical texts like the Gnostic Gospels or the Gospel of Thomas, or engage in wild speculation.
Eh, I'm kind of making stuff up now. Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ contains a really great literary exploration of the whole what-if-Jesus-wasn't-crucified theme, if you haven't read it yet. The movie's not bad either.
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