People generally think that Jesus started out approaching the world as a moral thinker, working out of compassion (like the Buddha or Saint Francis) or out of a sense of justice (like Martin Luther King). I have been wondering seriously recently whether his starting point might have been logical, like that of say Zeno or Heracleitus, or Socrates on one reading of Socrates, or Ramanujan or Einstein, in contemporary times. Jesus had a very strong interest in a family of logical relationships such that it is proper to say, in one respect, "x is A" and, in another respect, "x is not-A." Consider: "the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (or capstone -- depending on the translation)." To put the thing in good form: "This stone is useless and this strone is the most useful in the whole building." If one looks at the sayings of Jesus, as culled by someone like Dominic Crossan from the mass of later embellishment, you find that pattern over and over again. Usually, the expression of the pattern is followed by a moral. What I want to know though, is whether the moral is part of the core idea, or whether the initial intuition is purely logical. An enlightening experiment: take any saying of Jesus and preface it with the words, "Isn't it intersting that...."
To speculate in this way is not to rule out the possibility that Jesus became a moral teacher. Other logicians have gone that direction: Socrates and Heracleitus surely did; Zeno didn't, so far as we know. Indeed it is likely that Jesus underwent several stages of development; those are surely hinted at in the gospels. What I want to suggest is that one reads the whole story very differently if one takes the initial intuition to be logical than if one takes the initial intuition to be moral. I am trying to work out the consequences of that idea.
Posted by shea0017 at June 21, 2006 1:16 PM