Was Jesus as smart as Plato?

Great Debates
1

So, was Jesus as smart as Plato, or Socrates if you prefer, or Aristotle, Epicurus or a bunch of philosophers that predated him (some) by centuries? Is he as smart as a lot of philosophers that postdated him (Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Hume, or Russell)? Is there any reason to think him smarter or more profound than most dopers?

From what I have read of the bible I think whoever wrote Ecclesiastes was an exceptional thinker, Job less so, but I don’t see that with anything attributed to Jesus. Based on what’s in the gospels, what would we guess his IQ to be? I say maybe 110. Certainly he had enough charisma to attract a modest following while alive but this seems no better than David Koresh or Jim Jones. It seems they used similar tactics of appealing to the poor and societal outcasts, who one might reasonably assume were, for the most part, more gullible than average.

I see nothing with regards to Jesus’ dialogs to suggest he was any smarter or more divine than Koresh or Jones. Certainly nothing that would indicate divine wisdom or even mere human genius. More like just a regular preacher, who mostly parroted the parts of the Old Testament that he liked, added or emphasized the afterlife, and had a few other ideas that compared to mainstream Jews were somewhat different, but not amazing. He threw in some stories to emphasis his points but that doesn’t seem much different that what other preachers and public speakers do all the time. It just seems like posterity was disproportionately kind to him.

From what I have read of the philosophers I listed in the first paragraph, I am often amazed by their brilliance, sure they had errors a plenty, particularly the older ones, but their thought processes, reasonings and many of their conclusions were often remarkable. With Jesus I just don’t get that. Rather, Jesus sounds like just another preacher telling us to love god, sometimes claiming to be god, and sometimes claiming not to be. Sometimes saying to follow the OT law and sometimes saying you don’t have to, telling parables that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t. Promoting morals that even the most beloved liberal Christians on this board have admitted they don’t agree with, and in practice often prefer to follow a moral code that seems more in line with modern day secular humanism than it does with the words of Jesus. Jesus often called god loving, but described him as a beast. He saved a woman from being stoned but seems to have condemned most of humanity to hellfire. I really don’t see anything that would lead me to think it likely he had godly intelligence.

The reason I ask is that it seems that many liberal Christians are comfortable writing off the miracle stories as exaggerations or make believe (save for the resurrection for some reason) while still holding that Jesus was somehow exceptional. Discounting the miracles it seems all we have is Jesus’ say so that he was god and, as mentioned, he even contradicted that. Also I have noted that some sympathetic deists, agnostics, and even atheists hold some reverence for Jesus was at least a great philosopher, if not god. Ignorning the miracles, is there any evidence of otherworldly wisdom? Did he ever say anything so smart that one could rationally conclude that no regular human could come up with anything as good? So what gives?

And no, personal revelations with Jesus, that no one else can see or hear don’t count.

2

The problem with godly intelligence is that since it can do or say anything at all with any crafty ultimate purpose one might think of after the fact, is that it can’t ever be off base. A God beyond human understanding is a God that cannot be trusted to be anything in particular, which can have virtually any motive at all, and is completely obscure. So Jesus could well get everything exactly “right” insofar as whatever God’s ultimate purpose for everything is. Of course, by that standard, for all we know, so could Milton Berle.

It’s also important to note that intelligence is the thing you’ve chosen to focus on as a guide to greatness, but not everyone, not even really me, really, agree that THAT is the ultimate most important measure of things. In fact, Jesus and his followers seem to cultivate an attitude of being downright hostile to both skepticism and established intellectual expertise. This makes sense given that they were pretty much outsiders trying to convince people that probably knew a heck of a lot more than they ever would about Scripture that they were 180 degrees wrong about it. But if we want to get less suspicious of these anti-intellectual attitudes, we could also point out that if the point is to assert that Jesus was either the most insightful observer of morals, or just knew everything and had little need for developed argument in order to just tell us what was right, then displayed intelligence seems unnecessary. Of course, asserting those things and then defending them against those that aren’t so convinced runs into the first problem I noted. :slight_smile:

Those two things said, however, I share with you, however, as with Sam Harris, a deep confusion as to the elaborate claims made about the primacy and superiority of religious texts, their moral declarations, and the figures within them on all sorts of subjects.

The Koran, for instance, seems to assert that it is so perfect that no human being could ever improve on a single sentence. With all due respect to such an arrogant claim, that is, no respect, I beg to differ. Likewise, the Ten Commandments seem woefully both incomplete, at times immoral, themselves and just bizarre despite their reputation as some “ultimate” guide to morality. It would be trivially easy to improve on these supposedly fundamental and perfect things.

Jesus is of the same mold. He is an interesting character who presents the beginnings of a radical re-interpretation of Judiasm that will mostly be fleshed out later by others. His somewhat cryptic reported sayings are very similar to those of similar wandering cynics and sages. His basic guide of “love god and love your neighbor” seems to be a highly lauded idea (though neither unique nor original to him), and yet it is in the end an exceedingly vague commandment which most of the time even his most ardent followers seem to treat as either hopelessly naive, unworkable, or near meaningless.

In short, Jesus certainly is an interesting figure, and has a place in the long history of human thought, but he is neither alpha nor omega, and the idea that he should be the “whole of the law” in any sense seems to be absurd.

That doesn’t mean that he should get no notice: but the idea that he should get special notice above all the other great thinkers and contributors and innovators in history is, I think, something that only makes sense in light of a pre-existing belief that this is THE guy, that this theology is THE theology, and so forth: ABOVE and BEYOND just liking what he says. A person who reads and studies only the teachings of Jesus is likely to be, I think, severely impoverished in virtually every respect (morally, intellectually, emotionally, etc.) compared to other human beings who have studied and experienced more widely: all the breadth and depth of thought and expression of other traditions, philosophies, or even things like literature and art. And it would still be true even if we limited it just to a sampling of purely Christian thinkers and theologians: a focus on the Bible or the Gospels alone impoverishes even Christianity.

But we needn’t even crow over either other important specific books, or even having read lots and lots of things in and of itself: if just about any modern person at all, even a fundamentalist literalist Christian, sat down to write out plainly, from scratch, a discussion of what is moral and important and so forth on its own terms, they could almost certainly pen a far far more instructive and useful single tome than the Bible, or any of the Gospels. That’s because they would be able to pick and choose insights regardless of their origin, and include countless ideas that are, simply foreign to anything in the Bible, or that have developed a long way from their expression in the Bible.

And a person reading THAT tome would likely be FAR less impoverished than the person who had simply read the Bible and nothing else.

3

Although there are stories of Jesus teaching at the synagogue and impressing the scholars at a very young age (stories which you are free to believe or doubt as accurate), I don’t think straight intelligence is what Jesus was shooting for.

Jesus came to serve as subservient to the Will of God. His “power” was the power to channel the work of God. You can’t even pin perfect benevolence on Him (think of the merchants at the temple). He had his caustic moments. Even in those, though, He was acting the Will of God.

Plus, there is what I understand Apos is saying in his first paragraph. As God, He just can’t be wrong, ever. If he goes against all logic, then it is logic that is wrong (!).

4

Right. “Intellectual brilliance” is not what JC’s rep and influence are based upon, as well-stated by Apos. And in any case, I don’t think that many “sympathetic secularists” place Jesus THAT high in the summit of philosophical rankings; it’s more like since the movement that coalesced around his figure* became * a major philosophical power, and thus the founder WAS a highly influential figure in the end, he looks “bigger” than someone who may have written extraordinary philosophical texts but is only followed by a handful of Grad students; it’s fair game to question what if anything made him individually remarkable.

In the end, the documentary record of statements directly attributed to Jesus is quite scant, even compared with such cases as Socrates where we also are mostly limited to relying on secondhand accounts from disciples. Not only that, what we have contains very little of dialogs or debates per se; as pointed out, the man worked in the style of a country preacher, **not ** of a philosopher as commonly understood. The source material is insufficient to pass a judgement on comparative intellectual/scholarly standing in strictly academic terms vs. people who dedicated whole lives and a large corpus of work to the pursuit of academic philosophy. (So providing an “IQ” based on the record is a nice little bit of rhetorical insolence but is meaningless even beyond the depreciated meaning of IQ itself).

Besides, maybe the point of the Christian movement is NOT to intellectually overpower anyone but is based on an emotional appeal, so that becomes secondary.

5

It’s not about what’s in your brain, but what’s in your heart.

6

Wasn’t that the message of every episode of Touched by an Angel?
B.F. Skinner figured Jesus was more serendipitous than brilliant, discovering the power of passive resistance by accident, and I’m inclined to agree.

7

There is also this famous passage:

At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. — Luke 10:21

8

We also have John The Baptist’s say so that Jesus was the messiah, which counted for quite a bit back then, apparently. His divinity was recognized and validated by one of leading religious authorities of the day.

9

The use of the word god is/was never restricted to Jehovah. As Liberal noted in another thread, humans were sometimes referred to as a god. Satan himself is described as a god.

The bible has consistently made a distinction between gods of various flavors and the Sovereign Lord Jehovah God; the one true God. (The capital G God)

From my readings, Jesus never identifies himself as the Sovereign Lord Jehovah. He always identifies himself as subordinate; as the Son of God. He consistently indicates that he has rejected self will, and subordinates himself to his father,*** and to his God***

This is not a minor distinction. Jesus did not say he was God.

10

No, but he did claim to be able to forgive sins & never disputed his enemies’ objection that only God could forgive sins, and he did say "Before Abraham was, I am (Greek- Ego eimi, which means “I am”, NOT “I already was” or “I have been”.)
Also, he accepted Thomas’ declaration of him as “My Lord and my God” (which seems to be directed as a declaration about Jesus, NOT just an exclamation or praise to the Father.)

So, how are ya doing? Good to see you back!

(We differ a lot theologically, but I do respect you for standing up for God, Christ & the Bible.)

Re the OP- I don’t know how smart Jesus was RE Plato & the Classical Philosophers, but they didn’t die for our sins & rise to give us eternal life either.
Brains are good, valuable, to be treasured & nurtured, but they aren’t everything.

11

This is mostly what I was talking about with the anti-thought, anti-skepticism streak. This sort of sentiment is, in fact, the sort of ultimate self-sealing defense of people who don’t otherwise have very good arguments. It’s certainly possible to see it as justified, of course, if you already pre-believe that so and so has the truth of things, but as a general sentiment it’s really quite loathsome as a rhetorical tactic.

12

This is precisely what I mean. If you simply assume right off the bat that someone is working the will of God, they can do literally anything and have it be hand-waved into acts of greatness.

Indeed. But this position is deeply dangerous, of course. It is a claim that can be made about ANY position, and in fact, this is precisely why we have so many “true” religions running around that DO, in fact, make precisely these sorts of (competing) sophistries the center of their claims to greatness. In short, it is pretty darn meaningless and useless when you get right down to it, and the more it is used, to more it only underscores how little else Jesus has going for him as an example or interest, not how much.

I stand by my claim in all respects too: Jesus wasn’t simply just one among many intellectually, but in the “in your heart” sense as well. Improving on his teachings and ideas today is a perfectly trivial matter. Liberal’s accounts of love and its primacy and so forth are far more compelling, for instance, than anything Jesus had to say about the matter, even if they could claim to be a close interpretation of what Jesus taught.

13

Well, Jesus used to regularly beat Socrates at Scrabble…

Some people have deemed Jesus’s teachings (or at least some of them) to be pretty brilliant, but that’s a YMMV matter of opinion. And certainly some of his parables and sayings have achieved classic status, though that leaves the question if they would still have done so if they had come from someone else.

One point in Jesus’s favor is how, whenever he was challenged with a tricky question, he always had a clever answer. Of course you could object that the gospel writers left out the times he wasn’t able to come up with a snappy answer. But they at least give the impression that Jesus won every battle of wits he was challenged to. And they never showed him being outsmarted, or lacking the brainpower to do anything he needed to do.

The problem with Jesus (and the same goes for Socrates) is that we don’t have anything he wrote himself, just what other people reported him saying, so we can’t say for sure how much came straight from him and how much was invented, selected, organized, or tidied up later. And there’s a lot he might have said that we don’t have. Since the gospel writers weren’t primarily interested in Jesus’s IQ, there could be lots of evidence for or against that they didn’t bother to put down.

14

Argument about what? You think Jesus was arguing about something? In case you didn’t understand the passage, it was saying that the path to God is not intellectual in nature, but rather aesthetical in nature. God appeals to the child in us. Just because a man is intellectually smart does not mean he is morally good. There have been plenty of evil geniuses.

15

No, not as smart, but I’d say he was more clever, more like Heron, who helped various oracles and soothsayers fool the masses with his magic tricks.
Rather, I should quickly point out, not as smart as Heron, who was a genius, but as clever as his soothsayer patrons.
But clever soothsayers are rife in all time periods. Jesus was just one of a hoard in his own time and an endless hoard in the long run.

16

In case I don’t understand how you interpret the passage, you mean. And I do understand that, as well as other ways others have interpreted it.

You just told me Jesus wasn’t arguing about something, and yet here you are telling me that he WAS basically making a claim about something? You seem to want to have it both ways: the pleasure of telling me I’m wrong for saying that there is an argument and a motive for making this point, but then also trying to justify the claim.

The passage says that things are HIDDEN, deliberately, from the wise (i.e., the people whom Jesus was opposing, the scholars who felt he was grossly misinterpreting Scripture) and REVEALED to children. There’s nothing in there about aesthetics. If anything, the passage could just as well mean that they ARE intellectual truths, it’s just that God isn’t going to give them to Mr. fancy-pants rabbi when the populist rabble knows better.

Maybe, but this claim can be made about any theology or God, manipulating and playing off the idea of children as being innocent and pure (which itself is somewhat questionable: the simple emotions of children are often grossly amoral and selfish in ways that adults cannot match) to try and make your own philosophy look so as well.

True, but irrelevant. Being intellectually smart is an enabler of morality just as it can be of immorality, and it is particularly important in the case of people making claims ABOUT what is moral and what is not. Getting rid of people’s skepticism is a great start in enabling flim-flam and heck: that’s one of the very first thing evil geniuses generally try to do in order to convince people to come along with them! Children and emotions are easier to manipulate. Heck, this is pretty much the appeal of Bill O’Reily’s “think of the children!” arguments: it’s in the same vein. Likewise, Jesus’ bit about pots questioning their master is pretty much akin to: “Shut up,” he argued.

The point is, if you want to make the case for these particular teachings being of particular note, it’s all well and good to start by denigrating intellectual thought and skepticism. But anyone can play that game and make those appeals, and they are pretty much the last thing from trustworthy.

17

Apos, I agree with your point. It makes no sense arguing againt a position where the answer to every question is “because that is what I know is best for you”. Only faith can stop you from hating that guy. Take a look at children’s relationship with their parents. As early as 2 years old, they start questioning that line of wisdom.

My first paragraph, though, was only meant to point out that Jesus wasn’t supposed to be famous for his smarts but only for his obedience. He came here to do a job, no matter what he thought of it.

18

Most of the pertinent points I’d want to make have been already made. But I have two:

  1. It’s a … well, not a mistake, but an exercise in speculative deduction, to try to place Jesus in a specific metaphysical role based on his teachings alone. And from the way discussion is going here, what may or may not have been the conclusions of dogmatic theology over the years is not relevant to the question-as-asked. Jesus taught as a rabbi, in what is clearly figurative language, metaphor, parable, haggadah, halacha. What did he mean by “I and the Father are one”? Certainly not identity, when two chapters later he’s praying to the Father as man to God. What does “…that you may be in me as I am in the Father” mean? That’s either metaphorical, mystical, or completely bonkers.

  2. The four canonical Gospels are slanted portraits. Each author is writing with an eye to portraying Jesus in the role in which he sees him. Mark sees him as a man, a wonder-worker to be sure, “Son of God” in the sense in which that phrase is used in the OT, an exceptional individual who exemplifies what being a righteous Yahwist is all about. For Matthew, he’s the promised Messiah, and Matthew will stand on his head on a unicycle wearing a clown costume and juggling codfish to make sure he’s given you every possible proof, no matter how far-fetched, of that assertion. For John, he’s still intensely human, but also something numinous and transcendent, the Word, =the active principle of God, in human form. John’s Jesus is given to making cryptic and arcane claims that seem to equate him to being in the godhead – sorta kinda. Bottom line, though, is that the image of Jesus you work with is heavily colored by those four portraits and how much credence relatively you put into each.

19

Why? “In your heart” usually refers to how compassionate or loving a person is. That has nothing to do with intelligence, which is what the OP is asking about. Intelligence, in the sense of the OP, is most definitely in your brain.

But since we have none of Jesus’ own writings to compare to the likes of Plato or Aristotle, I don’t see how one could even begin to compare him to those folks in any meaningful way.

20

I understand what you are doing here: it is essentially emotional manipulation, appealing to the idea of disobedient children and then comparing me (or some hypothetical “you”) to an unruly and disdainful child. However, as has been a constant theme for me here, your belief that this particular set of beliefs and ideas are correct is what is blinding you to the fact that the point you are making is, simple put, terrible. Anyone could play the same game. The fact that Jesus can make this point doesn’t make the ideas he is trying to justify any more likely to be correct than any other. Anyone can portray their opponents thusly. But as a rhetorical move, doing so is hard to respect.

That’s one interpretation… of virtually any possible interpretation.