We don’t have any particular reason to believe that Jesus left any writings at all. And given that the only way we know of his teachings are through the edited accounts of others, I would say that this allows his teachings their best case scenario, or at least having the best chance for an editor to clean them up and make them sound as good as possible. The “Jesus” we talk about is the Jesus of the Gospels: any other Jesus is obscure, so I think that, taking that into account, we can certainly compare this figure to other figures in terms of the quality of their insight and reasoning.
Except that we don’t know that the writers of the Gospels were a) trying to present the intellectual side of Jesus’ teachings or b) any good at doing that if they even wanted to. We also have only what seems to be Jesus speaking extemporaneously, whereas for the great Philosophers, we have their carefully laid out writings which, presumably, they edited themselves and refined over time.
Yes, we can compare Jesus’ intellect with Plato’s, but that doesn’t mean we have a level playing field for doing so.
But the point is that this IS Jesus. The origin of that Jesus is what you say: the gospel writers account of him. But there isn’t any other “real” Jesus to compare anything to, and likely never will be. This is the Jesus whose sayings have rung throughout history, these are the ones that many many people claim are pretty much the only things anyone needs to read or know about, period, and so this is the Jesus we deal with and compare to other works. If his stuff doesn’t measure up on some scale, there is nothing else to fall back on to make things “more fair” for him. We got what we got from the guy.
Why not? The point of the comparisons is not some sort of refereed sporting match, but just who came up with the best ideas, moral insights, and so forth, period, in absolute terms. Maybe Jesus was handicapped by poor biographers (though I suspect that the Gospel writers had just as much time to think over and refine their ideas about what Jesus had said), but when we sit down to consider whether to read the Gospels or Theory of Moral sentiments, so what?
The Lindberg baby was severely handicapped by the fact that it was murdered before it had time to edit it’s great works on philosophy. But that’s just how the cookie crumbles. There are probably folks out there who wrote works of staggering genius and passionate insight into the human condition whom we will never hear of, because they died or had their works destroyed before they ever saw the light of day (something that some followers of Jesus, in fact did quite a lot once upon a time, believing that Jesus’ teachings were the final word on everything, and all these witty “learned wise” people with their snooty insights were getting in the way of God’s simple childlike truth).
As much as it appears you want me to, I am not trying to disagree with you here, at all. All I am saying is that even a two-year old is smart enough to rebel against a voice that tells him to do things he doesn’t want to, because the voice claims that’s what is best for him, in ways he doesn’t understand. Such an argument simply breaks down any attempt at reasoning. That the voice (or parent) might be right or wrong is irrelevant. One wants to make that decision by oneself (I hate onespeak but I am just trying to avoid youing you)
The case of Jesus is particularly hard to defend as he is doing “God’s Will” but at the same time he is God. The perfect way to cover all his bases and do whatever he wants.
In His defense, he was very consistent throughout his life (at least according to the story we got). You could say he didn’t do what he preached but that he preached what he did. Quite a rare trait in this modern age.
Yes, but my point is that the OP is poorly conceived. You might as well ask whether Jesus could have driven a race car faster than Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Or whether he was as good a painter as Picasso. Or a better chess player than Paul Morphy. How about a thread titled, “Was Einstein a better prophet than Jesus?” It’s just ridiculous, even setting aside the sheer futility of determining the answer. A more apt thread might compare Aristotle to Plato, or Jesus to Mohammad. At least there would be some handle to hold onto.
So only near comparisons are worthy to ask about?
Not in my experience. The OP is reasonable.
Are we talking about book smarts or common sense? I’ve known a few people who can understand complicated calculus problems without breaking a sweat but make the worst decisions for their personal life I’ve ever seen. I’ve also known a few people who are very wise and yet they can’t balance their checkbook or understand basic algebra.
I don’t know what you mean by a “near comparison”. It’s fine by me if you want to compare apples to retread tires. But asking which tastes better or which will get more mileage is just plain dumb.
Well, the OP is a bit mushy, so you could be right. I was focusing on the “intelligence” part, in particular the note about Jesus’ probable IQ. One can have a very high IQ and yet accomplish nothing. I’m sure there have been geniuses among the Yanomamo India tribe, but none of them discovered F=ma; not because they weren’t intelligent, but because they weren’t in the right environment. I will defer until we have further input from the OP as to what exactly he’s getting at.
Liberal: OK, it seems that we are basically in agreement, although I still stand by my critique of your first post-- what you are saying now is quite different from what you said earlier.
I guess I was focusing mostly on what I saw as the most interesting question, which was the “Is there any reason to think him smarter or more profound than most dopers?” thing, and particularly the profound part. I agree that the question of “what would Jesus score on his SATs” is sort of boring and pointless.
The question that seems interesting to me is whether there is really any compelling reason to treat the Gospel Jesus as especially insightful or interesting as a thinker above and beyond the way we treat most people. As I argued, I think that just by the very nature of the way human culture develops and builds on itself that virtually any person alive today, whether smarter or dumber than Jesus, could write a clearer, better guide to love life and happiness than the Gospels. That’s just the nature of humanity, not a particular failing of the Gospel in particular. But it does run in hard contrast against the views that the Jesus of the Gospels demands some special attention in ways that other people before and afterwards do not.
Just to point out that by Jewish tradition then, as well as now, a claim of messiah-hood is not a claim of divinity - in fact the Messiah was recognized as being purely human.
I’m not sure how you would call John a leading religious authority, except retroactively.
Asking who is smarter is not dumb. It is smart. In fact, I think it’s the main determinant when deciding whether to pay attention to someone’s opinions. Present company excepted 
I never really understood why Thomas Jefferson had such a high opinion of the guy.
Well yeah, you too. That’s because we moved on.
I stand by my original point as well as the ones that followed. Jesus’ message was never intended just for smart people to the exclusion of dumb people. The sweetest person I’ve ever known was an old black man who had zero formal education but never uttered an unkind word about anyone, and was always the first in line to help with anything you’d need. And smart people like us are frankly mean as spit sometimes. That’s true enough. Likewise, the comparison between Jesus and Plato is Neanderthal in its conception. Like a comparison between Moses and Einstein. That’s true too.
And now I’ll make a third observation; namely, that I hope Poly doesn’t take this bait.
You seem in an awful hurry to carefully and narrowly define and limit this thread by only those questions and points which are least interesting and most easily caricatured and dismissed, to the exclusion of all other issues.
Well, so far it seems all opposition has just rolled over conceding that there isn’t anything intellectually impressive left by Jesus. As for those who think I am comparing apples to oranges and that Jesus was just a moral luminary I respond in two ways. First, elsewhere in the bible man’s wisdom is called mere foolishness in comparison to god’s. As such one might think that if Jesus were really one in the same as god, then he might have dropped a few gems of wisdom that would be evidence of such. One might think that his biographers would have thought them gems of wisdom worth remembering. Second, and as Apos pointed out, Jesus didn’t say anything particularly great with regards to morality either. He parroted the golden rule from Leviticus IIRC, and his love god rule is what Jewish preachers have always said. Never mind that he didn’t seem too inclined to do anyone any favors unless they bowed before him, which seems quite selfish to me.
Any examples that you think are brilliant that you would offer up for analysis?
I would offer that Jesus’ responses often seemed more like excuses. He was sometimes clever but not more so than those typically offered by preachers, psychics and other charlatans to get them out of difficult spots. When asked to produce a sign. The gospels offer evidence Jesus would even resorted to dishonesty in a fix, as when asked for a sign he said none would be given to that generation, and yet the same gospels tell of him doing many signs and wonders. Are there any responses however that you think are beyond that of what dopers write daily. Any that in your opinion hold up to the clever retorts of say, Voltaire?
I think the comparison with Socrates is good in that we don’t have the direct words of either. However, with Socrates most would agree that brilliance is certainly there, whether it was put forth by himself or his biographer Plato. With Jesus brilliance just doesn’t seem to be there at all, either by him or his biographers. It seems to me that one can latch onto his miracles as evidence of the divine (assuming you believe those miracles, which to me seems irrational) but with regards to anything he said he seemed quite ordinary. With his preaching of hellfire he/god come across as quite selfish and spiteful, so much so as to make Hitler look good.
I’ll take that as a no, that in your opinion Jesus did not in fact say anything impartial observers would think of as brilliant.
I’ll take that as meaning that even if there were evidence of some grand intelligence or wisdom attributed to Jesus, that because of shakyness of the source we couldn’t confidently attribute it to him in the first place. Very good Polycarp, I’ll buy that.
And as others have noted, it’s not like people go around saying Jesus was this incredibly intelligent being. If he’s God, then he knows everything-- end of story. If not, then so what if he wasn’t “intelligent”? I’ve never heard anyone try to insist that he was (outside the God = omniscient thing).
I think the key points are that if Jesus is god and knows everything there is certainly no indication of such per his dialogues. Heck even his prophesies were wrong. As such the liberal Christians who doubt the miracle stories have little else reason to believe. As for if he weren’t god, a lot of people, including a lot of atheists, still hold him in some kind of reverence for him. I’m saying remove the divinity and miracles and all that remains is a ho-hum preacher who’s wisdom and morality were substandard at best.
Yeah. I don’t know why Jesus didn’t teach astrophysics and calculus to the weak and hungry people on the Mount, rather than feeding them and lifting their spirits. I reckon the blind man would have appreciated a lesson in occular science, rather than a healing. A lecture on organic chemistry would have been more appropriate at the wedding feast than a bottle of wine. And rather than telling people they were forgiven, He should have given them their genome maps.
Brilliance is most beautiful when it is simple, and rightly applied.
Out of curiosity, badchad, would you rather live in Plato’s Republic or Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven?