I am reading a terrific book about Augustus. It begins with Julius Caesar's imperium and death. Caesar was declared a god shortly after his death, allowing Octavian (not yet Augustus) to claim the title divi filius (son of god). Later, Augustus was declared a god while still alive. He titled his autobiography Res Gestae Divi Augustae, well translated as 'the events of the life of the divine Augustus'. And these two were by no means the only ones declared gods during the 100 years surrounding the birth of Jesus.
For the Greco-Roman world, the line between gods and men was not sharp, but blurred. There were numerous half-divine heroes (Achilles, Aeneas, etc), and the declaration of a person as a god did not imply, as it does to us in the monotheistic world, that a particular threshold had been crossed changing the person's very nature. Spirit of one type or another was recognized in many objects, living and dead. The polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans was, to this extent, animistic, and recognizing a man as a god was a change of status but not of state.
Latin has many complex endings, but it has no articles. The sentence a son of a god reads the same as the son of the god, and any variant in between you like. The socio-religious values of the Romans were such that a claim to be the son of the god made no sense, any more than a claim of being a son of a god makes sense to us in a monotheistic society.
I have written before about the contemporaneous claims of divinity for Augustus and Jesus, remarking that we reject one and take the other as truth. My question today is why. When most people are asked what proves Jesus was the son of God, they reply that it says so in the Bible. If asked if this is a reliable or true source, not infrequently they will reply the Bible is the inerrant word of God and literally true. There may be a statement that the Bible, while not literally true in every word, is true in its essence and claims, and that therefore Jesus is the son of God.
My question becomes one of proof. Here, I completely understand Thomas. There is far more material about the divine Augustus and his works than of the divine Jesus and his. We even accept the writings about Augustus as reasonably historical. If we remove the issue of religious faith, and were talking to a stranger to our culture, what material can be brought forward to support a claim of divinity of Jesus, as opposed to Augustus?
I am not asking here for scientific proof of faith. Rather, I am asking what material outside of faith supports a claim of divinity. Faith may be used to accept the most outlandish things. We have extensive writings about the Easter Bunny and even more about Santa Claus. Does faith in their existence make it true? At what point should we question the tenets of faith in the face of the physical world? As I have written in other contexts, spirituality transcends the flesh, but belief, in transcending the intellectual, should not demand the suspension of the intellect for support of its claims.
The great achievements of Augustus are real whether he was a god or not. The teachings of Jesus resonate across 2000 years, at least for me. Their validity does not rest on a claim of divinity, however. God is, in our monotheistic culture, almost always, if not always, a male noun. God gets a male pronoun. Does this make God a man? Does this mean God has a man's body? I personally don't think so. God is so enormous a concept that using a pronoun has no meaning- it is only an earthly convention. Like the languages at Pentecost,where each heard in his own tongue, I believe God is manifest to people in different ways and forms, not a man with a long white beard. In the same way, Jesus was clearly a man, died like a man and suffered like a man.
So what proof can there be? Was he an emanation of God? I believe yes. Was he the son of God, I don't know. His teachings and example make the issue irrelevant. The New Testament amounts to Res Gestae Divi Jesum. Like Augustus' achievements, he changed the world around him. Unlike Augustus, he did so spiritually, not materially, and did so not by killing others, but in his own death.
That looks and feels a lot more like the God I experience and understand. Perhaps the true meaning of the son of the God is found, like so much of the word and message of God, within. In that sense, Jesus is without question the living son of God. In that sense, he is alive as a representation of the spirit of God within us. It is in that sense especially that his teachings have meaning, as a living presence within life, an emanation human enough to be understood, from a God too magnificent to ever be understood.
Ted
For the Greco-Roman world, the line between gods and men was not sharp, but blurred. There were numerous half-divine heroes (Achilles, Aeneas, etc), and the declaration of a person as a god did not imply, as it does to us in the monotheistic world, that a particular threshold had been crossed changing the person's very nature. Spirit of one type or another was recognized in many objects, living and dead. The polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans was, to this extent, animistic, and recognizing a man as a god was a change of status but not of state.
Latin has many complex endings, but it has no articles. The sentence a son of a god reads the same as the son of the god, and any variant in between you like. The socio-religious values of the Romans were such that a claim to be the son of the god made no sense, any more than a claim of being a son of a god makes sense to us in a monotheistic society.
I have written before about the contemporaneous claims of divinity for Augustus and Jesus, remarking that we reject one and take the other as truth. My question today is why. When most people are asked what proves Jesus was the son of God, they reply that it says so in the Bible. If asked if this is a reliable or true source, not infrequently they will reply the Bible is the inerrant word of God and literally true. There may be a statement that the Bible, while not literally true in every word, is true in its essence and claims, and that therefore Jesus is the son of God.
My question becomes one of proof. Here, I completely understand Thomas. There is far more material about the divine Augustus and his works than of the divine Jesus and his. We even accept the writings about Augustus as reasonably historical. If we remove the issue of religious faith, and were talking to a stranger to our culture, what material can be brought forward to support a claim of divinity of Jesus, as opposed to Augustus?
I am not asking here for scientific proof of faith. Rather, I am asking what material outside of faith supports a claim of divinity. Faith may be used to accept the most outlandish things. We have extensive writings about the Easter Bunny and even more about Santa Claus. Does faith in their existence make it true? At what point should we question the tenets of faith in the face of the physical world? As I have written in other contexts, spirituality transcends the flesh, but belief, in transcending the intellectual, should not demand the suspension of the intellect for support of its claims.
The great achievements of Augustus are real whether he was a god or not. The teachings of Jesus resonate across 2000 years, at least for me. Their validity does not rest on a claim of divinity, however. God is, in our monotheistic culture, almost always, if not always, a male noun. God gets a male pronoun. Does this make God a man? Does this mean God has a man's body? I personally don't think so. God is so enormous a concept that using a pronoun has no meaning- it is only an earthly convention. Like the languages at Pentecost,where each heard in his own tongue, I believe God is manifest to people in different ways and forms, not a man with a long white beard. In the same way, Jesus was clearly a man, died like a man and suffered like a man.
So what proof can there be? Was he an emanation of God? I believe yes. Was he the son of God, I don't know. His teachings and example make the issue irrelevant. The New Testament amounts to Res Gestae Divi Jesum. Like Augustus' achievements, he changed the world around him. Unlike Augustus, he did so spiritually, not materially, and did so not by killing others, but in his own death.
That looks and feels a lot more like the God I experience and understand. Perhaps the true meaning of the son of the God is found, like so much of the word and message of God, within. In that sense, Jesus is without question the living son of God. In that sense, he is alive as a representation of the spirit of God within us. It is in that sense especially that his teachings have meaning, as a living presence within life, an emanation human enough to be understood, from a God too magnificent to ever be understood.
Ted
N.T. Wright discusses many of these parallels between the gospels and various "pagan" sources in his book "The Resurrection of the Son of God". It is over 700 pages long but not pedantic or boring. It is a scholarly assessment of the resurrection in which he touches on the assumption of divinity in "pagan" sources.
ReplyDelete"Rather, I am asking what material outside of faith supports a claim of divinity." As Bart Ehrman pointed out in his book "Jesus, Interrupted", it is rather startling to realize that outside of the Jewish tradition, there is not one single reference to Jesus in any "pagan" (i.e., Latin or Greek source) from the time of his death around 30 A.D. to the end of the first century. That makes asking for material outside of religious faith that would support the assertion of Jesus' divinity basically impossible, at least as far as the written word is concerned...
David Graham