On November 19, 2003, Bill O’reilly said , “The Menorah is up. The crescent and star is up. And the nativity scene can be up because you can admire Jesus the philosopher without believing that he’s God as millions of Americans do. It’s insulting.”
In 1978 C.S. Lewis said , “I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Chapter 5 of John definitely brings up some questionable acts and sayings of Jesus that coincide with what C.S. Lewis said, and I personally agree with him. (I believe there are others as well)
Is what Bill O’reilly said true? Is it possible to ‘admire Jesus the philosopher’ without thinking he is a total crackpot? It personally sounds a little blasphemous to me. (Please keep in mind that I am not a Christian, I believe my point of view to be unbiased. It just stuck with me when I heard O’reilly say that, and when I read this the two didn’t fit with eachother.)
It rather depends on which “Jesus” you refer to. The Jesus of the Gospels, the man who went about forgiving the sins committed by other people, condemning the Pharasees, driving people out of the temple as if it were his own house, and answering Pilate by silence, that person is hard to think of as a philosophical teacher. The Jesus that has been reduced to sound bites, who appears in calendars with sayings, who is in the Koran as a prophet second only to Muhammad, that Jesus works just fine as a philosophical teacher.
So if you dismiss the Bible (and particularly the New Testament) as a book of ravings written by fanatics intent on starting a new religion (as many do), then Jesus works just fine as a philosophical teacher whose words were twisted by those crazy Christian rightists (you know those guys — they are all Republicans, and therefore can be dismissed entirely, even back before there were Republicans). If you take the Bible as the Word of God (as C.S. Lewis did), then you cannot accept Jesus as a “great human teacher.” Lewis is quite right. The guy was a fruitcake. “I forgive you for being a whore.” Who could say such a thing and imagine it would stick?
I’m an athiest. I don’t believe that Jesus is God or the son of God.
However, that doesn’t mean I think that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic.
There is the possibility that Jesus simply never existed. He was made up by those writing the bible hundreds of years after the time when he supposably lived.
There is the other possibility that Jesus’ story from the writings of the bible is a collection of tales of many people. This is what I tend to believe. A group of legends and folk tales were combined to be the story of one man.
However, I’m with O’Reilly on the idea that the nativity scene can be up. Or a Menorah, or a cresent and star. As long as it’s not offensive to anyone (Burning cross, etc) I have no problem with it. I don’t have to admire Jesus as a philosopher to tolerate images of him around town during the holidays. It is what most people believe, and there isn’t any harm in it.
I can admire Gandhi as a man willing to stand for his people against oppression, and to mostly successfully use the very risky tactic of passive resistance against Powers that Be- tho I believe his absolute commitment to non-violence (to the point of recommending the same to the Jews facing Hitler, even if their destruction be the result) and some of his personal practices were totally nutso.
C.S. Lewis’ trichotomy holds only if we accept the Biblical version of Jesus as accurate.
Inconsistencies in the Gospels, among other things, make holding the Bible as a literal historical record problematic.
Ergo, no trichotomy.
Anyway, as has been pointed out, someone who provides the grand unified theory while insisting they are the Son of God’s Poached Egg is still a great physicist, despite nuttiness.
CS Lewis was full of crap about a lot of things. His theological arguments don’t really hold water. He basically wrote overrated, smug, pseudo-intellectual glurge. He would have been eaten alive on SDMB.
His argument vis-a-vis Jesus being a lunatic is predicated on the false assumption that the Gospels infallibly represent the true words of Jesus.
There is no reason to assume this and many reasons to doubt it. It’s perfectly reasonable, logical and scientifically supportable to take a position that Jesus only said a small portion of what is attributed to him in the gospels and that any seeming proclamations of his own godhood are simply not authentic.
Lewis’ argument does not allow for historical/literary/linguistic textual analysis of the Bible. Such a critical approach would be quite inconvenient to Lewis who was interested in evangelizing, not in any serious philosophical exploration.
I would go further and say that the Lewisian trichotomy depends not merely on the accuracy of the Gospels (which we know to have been written from polemic points of view) but on the interpretation which the church has placed on Jesus’s utterances. Assuming John to accurately report discourses of Jesus, for example and for the sake of argument, it’s clear that He identified Himself in some way with the Father, and in a manner in which His followers could identify with Him and participate in His union with His Father. But this does not inexorably lead to the Nicene/Chalcedonian definitions of the Trinity and the Dual Nature of Christ. It could have been an extended metaphor conveying truth without literal identity. When Libertarian, for example, says “God is love,” he is not making a statement that “the holy, infinite, and external spiritual reality presented in the Bible as the creater, sustainer, judge, righteous sovereign, and redeemer of the universe who acts with power in history in carrying out his purpose is in one-to-one correspondence with the attraction, desire, or affection felt for a person who arouses delight or admiration or arouses tenderness, sympathetic interest, or benevolence.” (Definitions courtesy of Merriam-Webster, 3rd New International Dictionary.)
I feel strongly that there was in fact a historical Jesus who taught much of what one finds attributed to him in the Gospels, but that each person adds a superstructure of interpretation upon the historical reality of that person according as his beliefs or absence thereof lead him to do so.
I don’t see why not. A lot of his more famous teachings seem to me to be good ways to live one’s life. The Golden Rule, don’t remove the speck from your neighbor’s eye until you remove the plank from your own, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, ect.
Of course, I think the Bible is full of all kinds of useful and practical advice, so I may be a bit biased. YMMV.
Jesus of Nazareth said he was the son of God. Fine. So am I. So is Cecil Adams. For that matter, so are Bill Gates, Hannibal Lecter, and Michael Jackson. And Robin Morgan, Oprah Winfrey, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair are, or were, daughers of God, for that matter. Not everyone in the time of Jesus understood that “we are Gods, and all of us Children of the Most High” [Psalms 82 IIRC], even though we so seldom live up to our legacy as creatures created in the image of God – nor do many understand it now – but Jesus of Nazareth understood it. So he was no lying when he said he made this claim, but neither was he God in a metaphysical sense that you and I are not. God manifests God’s self as that which we call “Creation”, and therefore as us. Or, translated for the atheists: there has been but one event, ever, that which the astronomers call the Big Bang, which was not itself caused by anything prior to it, and of this one event comes everything including consciousness; the “clockwork” model of cause and effect, while a highly useful predictive tool and means for understanding precise mechanisms, is ultimately something we impose by categorically dividing up the One Event into states, and only within that imposed model does the earlier state cause the later state. So both consciousness and everything that there is to be conscious of, with all its wonder and beauty and intricacy, has historically been understood in this way and this understanding has been given names, among which are words such as “God” and “prayer”, and semi-translucent bearded dudes in the sky are simplified representations, just as are representations of the atom as round blue marbles orbiting bigger red and green marbles – the falseness of the simplified representations doesn’t make false that which is represented. In that context, I think you should suspend dismissive smugness when evaluating the claim to being the “son of God”.
Jesus of Nazareth, meanwhile, also made two other important claims – he claimed to be the fulfillment of prophecy concerning a great leader who would make the people great and right with God (these being inseparable concepts), and he laid down some messages about how we should regard and treat each other (you know the drill; if not, check out Sermon on the Plains and Sermon on the Mount). And from these two claims in tandem, moreso than the claim of being the son of God*, the guy said, in essence, “Listen to me – this is the way to do it. You aren’t going to get there [the state of being great and right with God] except this-a-way”.
although at times “I am the son of God” seems to have stood for “I am the son of God who comprehends that he is the son of God and have taken it seriously enough to have grasped the truths of the message that I bring you”
So there is certainly plenty of room for admiring the heck out of Jesus of Nazareth the philosopher without “believing he is God as millions of Americans do” – which is to say as a supernatural entity who was deliberately sent down here to get his sacrificial-lamb self killed off so that he (God) would then permit himself to forgive humans for our sins. Not to mention walking on water and raising dead people (including himself) back to life and doing cute things with fishes and water and whatnot. I have no difficulty whatsoever finding more consistency and continuity in my understanding of Jesus of Nazareth than in the conventional Christian interpretation thereof without calling him “liar, lunatic, or both”.
Good catch! I knew when he wrote it too. See how easily I fell prey to weak information! Blast it all, you made a good point within your point! =)
Diogenes the Cynic said,
I can appreciate this in a verbatin sense, but you are riding on the assumption that what we ‘think’ Jesus said is not what he actually said. Considering your lack of evidence of things that Jesus ‘really’ said I don’t see how you can hope to make a good point that what we think he said is not indeed what he said, or at least portraying the same meaning.
Diogenes the Cynic said,
I don’t know much about him but I do know that he was at one point an athiest. His experience says a good deal in favor of his character, and you have drawn several broad conclusions within this post that require some solid referencing.
Polycarp said,
So basically what you are saying is that you feel strongly that Jesus is not what our written record of him says but rather your interpretation that it doesn’t say what he said, and that your reason against him being what our written record says is that it is an interpretation of the same works through which you both came to know of him in the first place that does not fall in line with your discource and reasoning.
Interesting.
I realize he is written of in other places, but please keep in mind that this seemingly scientific reasoning, which is in essence interpretation, is no better than the interpretations that you are disparaging on the very grounds that they are interpretations.
I’m not making any assumption at all I’m just pointing out that Lewis’ conclusions are not the only possible ones which can be drawn from the available data. I have made no absolute assertions about what Jesus actually said. I only said that an argument can be made that he didn’t say everything that’s attributed to him. All we know is what other people said he said. We have no reason to believe they were right and cirmunstantially a pretty good case can be made that the Gospels contain a locus of authentic sayings overlayed with a lot of mythology. It’s not an arbitrary process to isolate the authentic sayings either. There are perfectly valid methodologies available to us to help us discern wht is more likely to be authentic from what is less likely.
You don’t have to agree with the conclusions produced by such an analysis, that’s not the point. All that matters is that such conclusions are phiosophically reasonable.
So what?
What experience would that be, and what does it have to do with character?
What does his character have to do with this debate anyway. I’m only talking about his theological arguments. They are weak, fallacious, unsupportable and bigoted in favor of a very narrow spectrum of belief.
I’m sure he was a very nice guy but that doesn’t make his arguments any stronger.
Such as…?
No, scientific analysis is nothing like a subjective interpretation.
If you’re really interested in the methodologies which are used in historical Biblical criticism I can outline some of them for you.
That, sir, is not what I was saying, and I will thank you to not read inferences into what I say.
There are “written words” above that say He was a completely mythical construct. There are “written words” not Scripture that say He was “of one being with the Father, yet truly god an truly man, subordinate to the Father as regards his humanity and yet coordinate and co-eternal with the Father as regars His divinity.”
I am saying that you learn of Jesus from the Gospels, not bring your preconceived understanding of Jesus to them and interpret them in accordance with it. And that one learns of Him through the Gospels by intelligent use of the tools of textual analysis. Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John had particular axes to grind; one must read past their clearly (and in three cases explicitly) defined purposes to identify the Man of whom they write.
btw, let me add that while I find much in the Sermon on the Mount to be insightful & admirable, if I did not believe in the Divinity of Jesus, I’d also find just as much in that Sermon to be idealistic nonsence. To worshippers like me, His Person gives His teachings authority, while to admirers, his teachings give his person authority.
One thing that I’ve been mulling over recentally, which is slightly related to this, is ‘did Jesus say anything new’; ie, as far as good morals are concerned. It’s my understanding that a lot of what he was preaching had been around either in his day or prior to it.
While it seems Jesus brought a lot of these moral ideals together, is it fair to credit him with all of them?