# Is it fair to say Jesus committed suicide? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 25, 2017, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184 "2017-01-25T21:29:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/61 "2017-01-26T18:35:05Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > This was the original post to which I was responding: > > So MY question was, were all the prophesies that are written in the Old Testament written AFTER Jesus? > > As a response question to the post. > > I didn’t have a point. I had a question, based on reading something that I hadn’t heard before. I think “which is generally accepted by scholars…” means “generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled”. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/62 "2017-01-26T18:37:17Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > I think “which is generally accepted by scholars…” means “generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled”. Ok. So does that mean that there are NO prophesies from the Old Testament that are generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/63 "2017-01-26T18:39:40Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > Ok. So does that mean that there are NO prophesies from the Old Testament that are generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled? Christian scholars that already believe because of their faith, or impartial scholars? ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/64 "2017-01-26T18:47:38Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Christian scholars that already believe because of their faith, or impartial scholars? I would assume Christian scholars would accept it. Any impartial ones? I honestly want to know, I’m not pushing an opinion any way. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/65 "2017-01-26T18:49:21Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > I would assume Christian scholars would accept it. Any impartial ones? > > I honestly want to know, I’m not pushing an opinion any way. I would like to know the answer to that, too. It would be interesting to hear from an impartial scholar. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/66 "2017-01-26T18:50:08Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > It all depends on whether you can call it a prophesy if it never comes true, and whether some of them were really prophesies at all. in post #39 I wrote > Also, if one prophesy is supposedly fulfilled and another is obviously not, does one cancel out the other…or does a flood of prophesies thrown at a dartboard make you a prophet? > Yes, there were prophesies written before Jesus did his thing, but did they pertain to him? It’s the ones that people claim are accurate that are in question. Additionally, how much that he supposedly fulfilled is actually true? The whole Bethlehem sequence, for example, is pretty clearly a later addition to the text, and none of the specifics check out. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/67 "2017-01-26T18:51:04Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > Czar, that’s a Jewish source. They don’t believe Christ was the messiah. Dude, it’s _their_ book. You would think they would have some insight on their own language and the intents of their _Jewish_ writers. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/68 "2017-01-26T18:55:03Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > I would like to know the answer to that, too. It would be interesting to hear from an impartial scholar. I’m not, but every instance of a prophecy being referenced in anything I have ever read had used it as one mechanism for dating the text. And I’ve definitely never encountered anything in the Bible like, “One day, mankind will walk on the Moon!” ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/69 "2017-01-26T19:04:17Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I’m not, but every instance of a prophecy being referenced in anything I have ever read had used it as one mechanism for dating the text. And I’ve definitely never encountered anything in the Bible like, “One day, mankind will walk on the Moon!” [Wanna bet?](http://www.spaceacts.com/predicts.htm) Welcome to the wonderful world of Christian scholarship, where the whole damn history of the world has been predicted in the Bible! :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/70 "2017-01-26T19:16:13Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I’m not, but every instance of a prophecy being referenced in anything I have ever read had used it as one mechanism for dating the text. And I’ve definitely never encountered anything in the Bible like, “One day, mankind will walk on the Moon!” Well, I sort of thought you meant prophesies that were depicted as being fulfilled IN the Bible, not 2000 years later. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/71 "2017-01-26T19:17:43Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Bolding mine. We distinguish between **taking** one’s own life and **gving** one’s own life. The martyr who dies for a cause, the soldier who dies for his country, the fireman who dies trying to rescue a child—in such cases we’d say that the person **gave** his life, but never that he **took** his life. **Gving** one’s own life implies unselfishly dying with at least the hope or potential of benefiting someone or something else. Which applies to Jesus, according to the standard understanding of his story. I see the distinction, but I don’t see an opposition. I’d say my points up thread about how the certainty of death plays a role in describing how we talk about these things, but, that said, I see nothing strange about talking about someone giving and taking their life beyond the rarity of the word choice. And that doesn’t change definitions, it’s just what people commonly say. I’d also point out the bomber issue; a suicide bomber gives their life for a cause. Yet we don’t seem to have any problem calling them “suicide” bombers. > [@](#): > > What about Socrates—would you call his death “suicide”? Yes. He took his own life. > [@Atamasama](#): > > That’s the difference between martyrdom and suicide. This seems like another situation in which I see a difference but not opposition. Being a martyr doesn’t mean you’re therefore not also a suicide, if the definition fits. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/72 "2017-01-26T19:26:45Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I am not a Biblical (or other relevant kind of) historian and confess to extrapolating a lot from the little I do know, but my impression has always been that J of N intended to put the relevant officials in a position where they’d have to choose between _either_ condemning him to death on a bullshit charge or _else_ conceding his point about the spirit versus the letter of the law. > > I don’t think he anticipated that they would punt the matter to the Romans. I don’t think he was trying to get his ass killed. I don’t know about this. The section I quoted from the Bible in the OP reads to me that Jesus knew/believed something pretty big was going down, to the extent he wouldn’t be sitting eating and drinking with the apostles again as he was at the Last Supper. It doesn’t seem like a “Hey, guys, just in case…” situation; he reads as expecting the worst. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/73 "2017-01-26T19:27:47Z")
Whoops, this isn’t a post. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/74 "2017-01-26T19:30:35Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > Well, I sort of thought you meant prophesies that were depicted as being fulfilled IN the Bible, not 2000 years later. I forgot about the Messiah prophecies. And perhaps there are some others that I’m not aware of where the prophecy and the event were written at separate times. But so far as I am aware, on the whole, Jesus doesn’t match most of the Messiah prophecies - he didn’t become the King of Israel, he didn’t rebuild the temple, etc. - and to the extent that he does match them, those all seem to be fictions. (Technically, I’ll grant that he probably was a descendant of David, but probably every Israelite of his time was, through some path or another.) But minus something like “Mankind will walk on the Moon”, there’s a large potential for deceit. Once something has already “happened”, regardless of whether the prophecy was written previous to the event or not, you’re writing after the event. It’s very easy, at that point, to massage the event to match the prophecy. Or, for some cases, go back in and change the text of the original prophecy to match the later event. I know there’s at least one such example, but it might take me a bit to track it down again. I’ll do so later today. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/75 "2017-01-26T20:37:55Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > I was responding with a question to this quote: > > “there is no prophecy listed in the Bible which is generally accepted by scholars to have been written previous to the events prophesied” But you choked when you said that this meant all prophecies were written after Jesus. That isn’t implied in the quoted statement. e.g., when an OT prophet said that Jerusalem would be destroyed, that wasn’t written after Jesus, but it _might_ have been written after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. You left out a whole bunch of middle ground. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/76 "2017-01-26T20:40:14Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Or, for some cases, go back in and change the text of the original prophecy to match the later event. I know there’s at least one such example, but it might take me a bit to track it down again. I’ll do so later today. This is the one I was thinking of. It’s not so much that they changed the prophecy as the prophet: > **[Deir Alla Inscription](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Alla_Inscription)** > > The Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscription (or Balaam Inscription, or Bal'am Son of Be'or Inscription), known as KAI 312, is a famous inscription discovered during a 1967 excavation in Deir 'Alla, Jordan. It is currently at the Jordan Archaeological Museum. It is written in a peculiar Northwest Semitic dialect, and has provoked much debate among scholars and had a strong impact on the study of Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions. > The excavation revealed a multiple-chamber structure that had been destroye... > **[Balaam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaam)** > > Balaam (/ˈbeɪlæm/; Hebrew: בִּלְעָם, romanized: Bīlʿām), son of Beor, was a biblical character, a non-Israelite prophet and diviner who lived in Pethor, a region or settlement which has never been located, but is thought to have been between the region of Iraq and northern Syria in what is now southeastern Turkey. According to chapters Numbers 22–24 of the Book of Numbers, he was hired by King Balak of Moab to curse Israel, but instead he blessed the Israelites, as dictated by God. Subseque The m... Balaam, according to our 9-8th century source, was a prophet in a polytheistic religion. In our 6th century (Biblical) source, he has turned into a prophet for Yahweh. How much are we supposed to trust that the “prophecies” given to him have survived, unchanged? ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/77 "2017-01-26T20:52:35Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > But you choked when you said that this meant all prophecies were written after Jesus. That isn’t implied in the quoted statement. > > e.g., when an OT prophet said that Jerusalem would be destroyed, that wasn’t written after Jesus, but it _might_ have been written after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. > > You left out a whole bunch of middle ground. I’m not sure how I “choked” by asking a question? Perhaps you could explain it? It wasn’t my point to make anyway, nor was I attempting to make a point. You can read whatever you want into someone asking a sincere question, but that is what it was, a sincere question. One that has since be discussed with all parties, except you I guess, on the same page. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/78 "2017-01-26T21:07:08Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > How much are we supposed to trust that the “prophecies” given to him have survived, unchanged? It is a guy that claimed to have a talking donkey. I think that all of his prophesies should be considered suspect. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2017, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/79 "2017-01-26T21:25:31Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > This is the one I was thinking of. It’s not so much that they changed the prophecy as the prophet: > > [Deir Alla Inscription - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Alla_Inscription) > [Balaam - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaam) > > Balaam, according to our 9-8th century source, was a prophet in a polytheistic religion. In our 6th century (Biblical) source, he has turned into a prophet for Yahweh. How much are we supposed to trust that the “prophecies” given to him have survived, unchanged? Cool, thanks for looking for that. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2017, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184/80 "2017-01-27T01:51:42Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > It is a guy that claimed to have a talking donkey. I think that all of his prophesies should be considered suspect. Well yes, but on that basis we should ignore the Bible in its totality. (Which, granted, we should - but apparently talking donkeys and orders to rape women don’t seem to be sufficient evidence of that for many.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-fair-to-say-jesus-committed-suicide/778184.md?page=5)