There’s an interesting little moment in John 10 where a crowd bent on stoning Jesus (a) stops to readily admit that Jesus has of course done many good works, but (b) explains that claiming to be God equals blasphemy equals capital offense.
This of course fits with Jesus replying “I am” in Mark 14, and cue the what further need have we of witnesses insta-condemnation to death.
“I and my Father are one,” he says. Or, as C S Lewis famously put it,
So . . . how would the alternative play out?
What happens if Lazarus gets resurrected like various minor characters in the story of Elijah and Elisha, and ditto for multiplying loaves, and curing leprosy and blindness, and prophesying the future, and et cetera, and, well, cue the message delivered from on high, but with nary a word about being God or the Son of God or both or whatever; imagine he pretty much just talks like an Old Testament prophet, and maybe acts like Superman, but without ever mentioning – or even hinting at – the elephant in the room?
(Note: yes, I know this is the SDMB. No need to tell me the whole thing is fiction; just answer as if I’d asked a what-if about some work of fiction.)
Well, to begin with, C.S. Lewis was engaging in one of the grand-daddies of all logical fallacies: “Either agree with everything I say, or with none of it: there is no middle ground.”
Nice writer of fantasy fiction, but a dog-rotten theology writer.
What would have happened? Anybody’s guess. Maybe some other monotheistic cult would pop up and seize the world by force. Something like Islam. Or some violent sub-sect of Buddhism.
Or…maybe comfortable little pantheons would continue to exist. You’d be an Odinist, while I’m a Zeusite, and we have little fights about it, but not whopping great inquisitions and pogroms. The Jews would incorporate some of what Rabbi Joshua said, while ignoring other parts. Jesus, today, would have about as much of a following as John the Baptist does.
I’ve heard it said that all of history is no more than the preparation for whomever first gets the first nuclear weapon. After that, everything changes anyway.
For about three days after his death, the popularity of his cult would have a sudden down-turn. Then things would probably change just a touch when he walked into the room.
If you study early Christian history there was a major divide between the sects of whether Jesus was truly “son of God” or just a wise prophet who performed miracles. It wasn’t finally settled for a couple centuries IIRC, so what C.S. Lewis said is a steaming pile of crap. Jesus meant a lot even to those who didn’t consider him God-like.
There was certainly enormous controversy within Christianity over exactly who Jesus was, and what was the relationship between Jesus and the Father, but I think it’s a false dichotomoy to suggest that the choice was between “son of God” in anything like the now-orthodox trinitarian understanding on the one hand, and “just a wise prophet who performed miracles” on the other.
In fact, if there was anyone in the Christian movement who believed the latter, I think they were pretty marginal.
Whether or not you accept the historicity of the resurrection, it’s undoubtedly the case that the resurrection was something Christians believed from very early on, and their understanding of who Jesus was and how he was related to the Father was probably shaped by that at least as much as by any interpretation of what he was remembered as having said about himself. (Remember, the resurrection was a current belief before any of the four gospels were even written.) So I think in approaching this question, even once they had the gospels, Christian thinkers weren’t trying to interpret Jesus’s statements about himself as recorded in the gospels; they were trying to understand what the resurrection told us about Jesus, in the light of what Jesus was recorded in the gospels as having said about himself. There isn’t much room there for “just a prophet”.
No, there wasn’t. Even the Ebionites viewed Jesus as in some way “the Son of God”, basically in an adoptionist way, in which Jesus was a God-anointed man who was exalted & entered the Divine Court via his resurrection. Every time Jesus spoke of himself & the prophets, he made it clear he considered himself the superior to them &/or the fulfillment of their words.
If you believe that Jesus was just a prophet - albeit the most amazing one ever to walk the earth before Muhammad - then you’re pretty much in line with Islam.
Assuming you keep the rest of the story intact, with Jesus dying and being resurrected and redeeming humanity from death, I don’t think the precise nature of what he is really matters, except to hard-core theologians. And the latter would no doubt have pretty much the same arguments they had otherwise about the nature of Jesus, just with slightly different quotes from scripture to support this side or that.
Its like asking what would be the difference if Tolkien hadn’t specifically said Sauron was a Maiar in Lord of the Rings. It might make a difference to some people that are really into the back story of MiddleEarth, but it wouldn’t really change the story, the popularity of the books and movies or really, anything of consequence.
See, that’s why I started by mentioning John 10: I guess you could call them hard-core theologians, but the point is their actually, we think you’re great and can’t come up with anything bad to say about you, except for that one claim about the precise nature of what you really are, which is of course matters to us, since it’s a capital offense stance.
And likewise for Mark 14: say those guys are maybe hard-core theologians for whom the precise nature of what he is really matters. So what changes?
I would wonder why Jesus supposedly said the world would end in that generation or that he was going to return in his father’s glory before some of them standing there listening to him had seen death? Some like to translate that is different than we think of generations now. But Matthew also says there was 14 generations between David and Jesus just as we do now. It is a matter of belief not fact.
Depending on how to translate that He used the 81 psalm in RC version and 82 in K J V He is also quoted as saying his ancestors (or theirs) were called god and sons of god. So that would be like the ocean composed of water drops. Part of a greater whole. We know the Bible like all written things were written by humans, and called the word of God by humans.
One possibility, given the time gap between the described events and the earliest written accounts thereof, is that the OP is, in fact, what happened, with the claims to divinity being added later by adherents seeking to amplify the authority of their new sect. This suggests that the answer to the question is “It wouldn’t change anything”.
This is sometimes proposed as a solution to Lewis’ trilemma (adding “Legend” to the original three-Ls “Lunatic”, “Liar”, or “Lord”). As already noted, a simpler solution is that Lewis’ argument is built on false-dilemma fallacy – insanity in one area is not incompatible with wisdom in another (as the old joke puts it “I’m in here because I’m crazy, not because I’m stupid”).
I think you (and billions and billions of christians and atheists) should reread the passage in John 10.
The dude defends his characterization of himself as son of God like so:
[QUOTE=John 10:34-38]
10:34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?
10:35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
10:36 Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?
10:37 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
10:38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.
[/quote]
He’s referring (when we speaks of ‘I said Ye are gods’) to Psalms 82:
[QUOTE=Psalms 82: 6]
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
[/quote]
So, loosely transliterated, Jesus is saying “Yeah, I said I was the Son of God. So are you, dipshit, and you, and you over there, you’re the daughter of God, and so on. WTF is your problem?”
So…
• Jesus is a “mere” prophet
• We are all sons and daughters of God, hence the prayer that begins “OUR father who art in heaven” and all that shit
• He was, at the same time, trying to draw attention to the importance of the message he was trying to convey. ‘Mere’ is applicable only in the sense that the messenger is not intrinsically more divine than the rest of us. But this was Da Big Word, so lissen up, y’all.
that’s an interesting “what if” you pose there. its something i’ve thought about a lot in the past, actually but i read somewhere that what separates jesus from pretty much all other figures from other religions is that he did come right out and say that he was the son of god. people like muhammed, buddha etc never claimed to be god like jesus did.
Paul pretty clearly holds Jesus as divine, and while he mentions all sorts of much more minor divisions within the early Church, he doesn’t mention that was one of them. So the idea must’ve either been part of Jesus’s teaching originally, or at least something decided on by his followers very quickly after his death.
I disagree. He was merely saying that, when asked, Jesus left no middle ground. He said under no uncertain terms that he’s the son of God, etc., so either he was, or he was crazy/evil.
I often think of how Joseph is portrayed: Mary tells him she’s pregnant, but still a virgin, because it’s totally God’s baby, and he of course doesn’t believe her, but then he does, because he gets visited by an angel…
…in a dream. Joseph gets visited by an angel in a dream, and is suddenly convinced. Taken at face value, he’s neither a liar nor a lunatic for relaying what the angel told him: that the skinny little kid over there is in fact the son of God.
Now, you presumably believe – as I do – that dreams of course don’t work like that. To paraphrase Matt Groening, dreaming about riding a giant blue doggie to the candy planet isn’t exactly something folks should (a) take seriously, let alone (b) base a Biblical claim on. But back then, people apparently did. Joseph is presented as reacting in a sensible and appropriate fashion to the angel in his, uh, dream.
So if Jesus had lordly dreams – well, he arguably wouldn’t be a Liar or a Lunatic, since he’d have (what back then counted as) good reason to honestly believe the claim he’s relaying. But it wouldn’t actually make him a Lord, either.
The problem with this argument is that having wise insights to teach people is not precluded by being crazy (again, recall the old joke about the guy who gets a flat tire in front of the insane asylum) or even by being evil (some of the greatest thinkers in history were right bastards in their personal lives).
Good point. Yes, that’s true, but it’s not quite the theological debate Lewis was concerned with. I don’t know if many people say “Jesus was a great moral teacher and insane person who thought he was the son of God.” But maybe.