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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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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