Jesus and the Buddha
A tale about Sariputta, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, relates that he once encountered a skeptic who said, “I recognize you. You’re one of the followers of this fellow who calls himself ‘the Buddha,’ the ‘Enlightened One.’ Now how do you know he is enlightened? I suppose he told you so himself. If so, why would you believe him? After all, he could be lying.”
Sariputta replied, “The Buddha has never claimed that he is the ‘Enlightened One.’”
“Then why do you believe that he is?”
Sariputta smiled. “Have you ever met the Buddha?”
As with the Buddha, it was not just what Jesus said, although that was profoundly important, but Who He Was.
Who Jesus Was has been fiercely disputed from the very beginning of the Jesus movements. Was he all divine (as the Docetists argued) or all human (as some Christian so-called Gnostics maintained)? Or was he both entirely divine and entirely human (as what came to be Christian orthodoxy asserted)? Was he a mere magician as many Pagans and Rabbinic Jews claimed? Or was he the Son of God as Trinitarian Christianity triumphantly maintained?
To provide a new answer of Who Jesus Was requires a thorough re-evaluation of all the common presuppositions among scholars and lay people alike of the “thought world” of earliest Christianity. I have therefore divided my analysis into two parts. Part I: “A Critique of Jesus Scholarship” provides the evidence and arguments that support Part II: “Towards a Psychological History of Jesus” explores the perceptual world of 1st century Palestine using a methodology derived from the history of perception, not previously applied to early Christian history.
Yes, who was He? Certainly the most influential person in history. Some idiot published a book a few years ago ranking Jesus the 3rd most influential historical figure after Muhammad and Isaac Newton. But there are twice as many Christians as there are Muslims and while Newton was certainly a great scientist his influence has clearly been less significant than Jesus'
ReplyDeleteIt would seem we've accepted the "laws" of Newton with a good deal of happy scholarship while we continue to brawl over the aims of Jesus. Is it because Jesus is all about us while Newton is all about physics?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I understand there are over 1 billion Moslems...are there 2 billion Christians? And, would it really matter if but one of us could say we knew who Jesus was...