PhilosopherJay

Hi All,

From "Jesus Christ Superstar" by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice

This song gives us an explanation for why Jesus must die. It does so from within the narrative, what is called the diegesis in literary and movie theory. In the story world, Caiaphas is worried that Jesus' popularity will cause a revolution that will lead to the death of many of the Jewish People. We can call this a diegetic explanation.

We can also give an explanation on what Gerard Genette calls the extradiegetic level. A believer in the historical Jesus would say that the author believed or knew that Jesus had been crucified in real life and wanted to tell the truth about it. Jesus had to die in the narrative because the narrative is following the true history. We can call this an extradiegetic historical explanation.

We can ask if this is the best or only extradiegetic historical explanation? I propose a different extradiegetic historical explanation:

Let us suppose that Jesus was not crucified, what would have happened? Jesus would have rallied the people to him and he would have established the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Romans and Greeks would have all prayed to the true Jewish God and there would have been peace on Earth. The Roman-Jewish Wars would not have taken place, the Temple would not have been burnt down, the Jews would not have followed Bar Kokhbar, Jerusalem wouldn't have been leveled and the Jews would not have been
expelled from Jerusalem. Yet we know that the wars and destruction and expulsion did take place.

If Jesus did not die in the story, then we would have a fairy tale, a non-historical story, but a fairy tale with a strange moral. The moral would be that only in an invented world does a God send a Messiah to save his people - in the real historical world a God does not care enough to send a Messiah to save his people. God and his heartlessness is to blame for the catastrophe that happened to the Jews. This was not the message the authors wanted to deliver.

By having Jesus die, we get a different moral - God did try to save his people by sending a Messiah, but the stupidity, self-righteousness, and selfishness of the Jewish leadership thwarted God's plan.

Jesus had to die because the authors wanted to shift the blame for the Jew's terrible defeat at the hands of the Romans away from their God and onto the Jews (or at least the Jewish leadership) themselves.

I propose that this is the real extradiegetic historical reason that Jesus has to die in the story.

As for his crucifixion, that is explained by the fact that the son-of-man character is described in Hebrew Scriptures as a suffering servant as well as a messiah. Certainly a death by crucifixion is a suffering death appropriate for a suffering servant (slave). Thus the Hebrew scriptures determined what kind of death the Jewish Messiah (called son-of-man in apocalyptic literature) in the narrative would have.

The authors of the narrative were constrained by real history in their choice that Jesus must die, but not because the narrative had to follow the history of Jesus, but because the narrative had to follow the history of the Jewish people (loss and destruction).

In choosing that the Jesus character die by crucifixion, they were constrained by the Hebrew Scriptures.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aeebee50

He lives. Great song.

Toto

This explanation is required by monotheism. If YHWH is all powerful and has a covenant with his chosen people, and yet they lose in battle, it must have been because they failed to live up to their part of the covenant, and YWHW is using the Romans to punish them.

One reaction to this is the Rabbinic tradition of following the minutia of the law with OCD-like compulsiveness. From the prohibition of cooking a kid in its mother's milk, rules were developed to prevent even one molecule of milk touching a molecule of meat in one's stomach.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Toto,

Good points.

I guess when your God doesn't rescue you, you need to either follow the covenant rules more carefully, trying to figure out which ones you messed up on, or make up a fantasy about what went wrong. Recognizing that the God didn't exist was not really an option for the priests.

In a sense, asking why Jesus has to die in the narrative, is the same as asking why Romeo and Juliet has to die, or why Captain Ahab, Willie Lohman, Jay Gatsby, Young Werther, Madam Bovary, Camille, Anna Karenina, or Vito Corleone had to die.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Horatio Parker

I agree that the crucifixion is a more powerful ending in a dramatic sense, but I'd like the suggest that if he somehow escaped execution, maybe there would be a tradition shaped more by beauty than suffering.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Horatio Parker,

Possibly, but where else could the story go? Lets say Jesus escapes. What would the moral be?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

The Jesus story was NOT the only story that was BELIEVED by Christians of antiquity.

There were Christians who believed in God alone.

There were many, many, other myth fables that people of antiquity BEFORE the Jesus story.

In the very NT, the death of Jesus in the Synoptics was NOT for Salvation but to Fulfill prophecy of the destruction of the Jews.

But, in gJohn and the Pauline writings the death of Jesus signified Salvation.

Horatio Parker

A villa on the Med, surrounded by disciples?

There are traditions that Jesus either escaped or survived the crucifixion and lived to old age.

The moral: you can't kill the son of god? Which is pretty much what is anyway, with lots of violence thrown in. Rated "g" instead of "r".

PhilosopherJay

Hi Horatio Parker,

In a sense the resurrection stories do show an escape, but it seems an add-on.

The whole point of the narrative is the Jewish leadership being suspicious of Jesus the savior sent from God and causing his death. The dozen different resurrection scenes are a codicil to the story. They answer the question, "Okay, we've killed the messiah, now what do we do?"

Each Gospel gives its own answer:
Mark: Wait in Galilee - "he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him,"

Matthew: Replicate - "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 28.20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you

Luke: Get power from the holy ghost - "stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high."

John: No instructions here (this represents the earliest level of post-resurrection appearance) - "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Although in the additional resurrection appearances, we get instruction like have faith (Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.") and feed the hungry (feed my sheep).

Gospel of Mary: preach about the kingdom of heaven - "preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said."

Horatio Parker

I suggest the "Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Robert M Price. Fascinating book, IMO.

He talks about a compelling theory by one Paul L Couchoud that explains your intuition about the artificiality of the story.

Starts in the epistles...

Phillipians 2:6-11:

'...who subsisting in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, having become in the likeness of men 8 and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, having become obedient until death[, even the death of a cross]. 9 Because of this also God highly exalted Him and gave Him a name above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus "every knee should bow," of heavenly ones, and earthly ones, and ones under the earth, 11 and "every tongue should confess" that Jesus Christ is "Lord," to the glory of God the Father.'

(the bracketed phrase is widely considered an interpolation)

The idea is that this passage represents the moment when some virtuous heavenly being was "promoted" to Jesus Christ by God. If one accepts Pauline scripture as earlier than the gospels, and if Paul was writing about a spiritual JC, then all of this happened in heaven. Then, as the church grew, demands were placed on the story so that it became a real man. As it grew further demands were placed on it, so that instead of becoming the Son of God at the resurrection, or the crucifixion, or the transfiguration, or when baptized by John etc finally he was God before he was even conceived.

So the resurrection and the ascension are the same ie Jesus being elevated to God status, which could account for some of the artificiality you detect.

It also explains why the gospel authors following Mark had trouble with many of the stories, such as the baptism. The legend had outgrown scripture.