—Confucious spoke of perfect virtue. Kant spoke of the perfect ethic. Can you name someone before Jesus who commanded absolute perfection?—
First, what does “absolute perfection” mean? To speak of perfection without specifying a perfect “what” is to speak in incomplete thoughts. It’s like giving directions as: “proceed due…” Uh, which way? And for how long? The fact is, Jesus DOES give an answer to this question, far from simply asserting “be perfect” and having done with it. You’ve already related this answer: be perfect: like your heavenly father is perfect. Of course, that only adds another layer of confusion: our heavenly father is a perfect WHAT? If an absolute, is he a perfect example of himself? Of what import is that: ALL beings are perfect examples of themselves?
My point here is not really to argue with Jesus’ statement (it would be philosophy whether or not it is right), but to point out that advocating perfection with some referent is not exactly new, nor is advocating emulating or embracing the idealized divine.
But secondly, where do you draw this idea out of Christ’s teachings? Where does the concept of absolute, in the sense you seem to use it, appear in his teachings?
You’ve made this case before, but not, in my opinion, without a fair bit of reading in what you think he must be saying, when to me its quite ambiguous (especially since your case relies upon adding many layers of philosophical thought onto the conception of God and “absolute”). At the very least, whether he uttered statements like this that you interpret to mean what you say they do, it still becomes very hard to argue that Jesus advocated a philosophy in the sense of a core set of ideas explained in detail.
Confucious and Kant both did this at length: they let us know what their assumptions were, what they thought followed from them, what they actually meant, etc.
Jesus, on the other hand, is said to utter cryptic phrases of debatable coherence and interelation, many of which bear striking similarities to wisdom sayings of Greek Cynics and Jewish tradition (for instance, the golden rule), and almost none of which were explained or justified beyond simply references to authority and forceless analougy. Plenty of people debate whether major thinkers were really philosophers, lacking as they do complete systems of philosophy. If anything, the philosophers are those, like you, who develop philosophies based on extended and developed readings and justifications of Jesus’ scattered assertions.
