Eh. What irritates me is his implicit claim that the ideas there are original or exclusive to Jesus.
With the amount of censorship, deliberate credit-stealing, and other failures of memetic replication in the ancient world, the chance is pretty slim that the earliest instance you’ve heard of of a moral or religious idea is actually its earliest invention. We should expect that the earliest extant sources for an idea do not correctly attribute its origin: there are so many more ways to be wrong than right, and the correct attribution of an idea (or an entertaining story, for that matter) is not under selection pressure to stay correct as the idea itself is.
(Consider that until the 1853 discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a European scholar might well have believed that the story of Noah’s Flood originated with the Bible. We similarly know that much of the mythos of Jesus echoes earlier salvific gods and demigods — Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, etc. — whose cults were later suppressed as pagan.)
So thinking of the moral teachings of Jesus as originally Christian seems problematic. For instance, given the extensive contact between the Near East and India since the time of Alexander, it’s reasonable to consider some contact with ideas from Buddhism, Jainism, etc. — as well as the Greek (or Greco-Egyptian) philosophy more readily recognized by Christian sources.
My point here isn’t to say that Jesus was a Buddhist, of course — but rather that if we happen to observe what look like moral truths (or just moral good ideas) in one particular tradition, we shouldn’t take that tradition seriously when it claims to have discovered them or to possess unique access to them.
What irritates me is his implicit claim that the ideas there are original or exclusive to Jesus.
I don’t really care about credit for originality, just beautifulness and deepness of message. Linus’ take is ugly, whereas the Sermon is beautifully constructed. Just seems a shame not to go for the latter whenever possible.
Eh. What irritates me is his implicit claim that the ideas there are original or exclusive to Jesus.
With the amount of censorship, deliberate credit-stealing, and other failures of memetic replication in the ancient world, the chance is pretty slim that the earliest instance you’ve heard of of a moral or religious idea is actually its earliest invention. We should expect that the earliest extant sources for an idea do not correctly attribute its origin: there are so many more ways to be wrong than right, and the correct attribution of an idea (or an entertaining story, for that matter) is not under selection pressure to stay correct as the idea itself is.
(Consider that until the 1853 discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a European scholar might well have believed that the story of Noah’s Flood originated with the Bible. We similarly know that much of the mythos of Jesus echoes earlier salvific gods and demigods — Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, etc. — whose cults were later suppressed as pagan.)
So thinking of the moral teachings of Jesus as originally Christian seems problematic. For instance, given the extensive contact between the Near East and India since the time of Alexander, it’s reasonable to consider some contact with ideas from Buddhism, Jainism, etc. — as well as the Greek (or Greco-Egyptian) philosophy more readily recognized by Christian sources.
My point here isn’t to say that Jesus was a Buddhist, of course — but rather that if we happen to observe what look like moral truths (or just moral good ideas) in one particular tradition, we shouldn’t take that tradition seriously when it claims to have discovered them or to possess unique access to them.
I don’t really care about credit for originality, just beautifulness and deepness of message. Linus’ take is ugly, whereas the Sermon is beautifully constructed. Just seems a shame not to go for the latter whenever possible.
Linus’s take fits my aesthetic better, and “beautiful” language is often unclear.