The Grand Coherence, Chapter 15. The Ethics of Jesus
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
No time to read? Try the (AI) audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a-rKkzQzop4ue8fGaa39YB9GI_4JIeRR/view?usp=drivesdk
We saw in the last chapter the riddle of the world and the Christian answer to it. Our business in the coming chapters is to understand that answer in more detail, and to look further into the evidence for it, in addition to the strong evidence for the Resurrection itself that we saw in chapter 3. Part of the Christian worldview is that all humans are sinful except Jesus Christ (and some Christians would add His mother, the Virgin Mary). This chapter focuses on the evidence for that claim, and what it contributes to the case for the Christian worldview as a whole.
I can't actually prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the only morally perfect human being in history. It takes a little leap of faith, in the end, to believe it. My argument here, if it deserves the name, will be hasty and shallow, and very inadequate to its thesis. And yet I'm rather confident of success because in most cases, I'll be pushing on an open door. Most people already admire Jesus without any help from me. They've heard good things about Him, and if they've ever cracked open a Bible and read for themselves, they've gotten an impression of a man like no other, a man limitlessly wise and perfectly courageous and full of love and forgiveness, a man in whom the tiniest yielding to normal human weaknesses and sinful
desires would be utterly out of character, a man on a mission, with purposes so lofty as to be almost inscrutable to His contemporaries and to the uninstructed, whose every action is motivated by that mission without the slightest taint of self-interest. Meanwhile, we say casually of others that "No one's perfect," meaning it to be applicable to everyone except Jesus. With Him, hardly anyone is audacious enough to find fault. I can't survey the history of human conduct to prove Jesus's unique moral perfection very thoroughly in a single chapter, and I should hardly expect to convince anyone who doesn't already half agree. But a lot of people do.
The teaching that Jesus alone was perfect is traditional, going back to Jesus himself, but I'm going to make it a little more ambitious. It's not only compared to all real, historical characters, but to all fictional characters as well, that Jesus stands out as uniquely morally perfect. This is important for apologetics, because it goes far towards proving that the Gospels were not forgeries or fictions. How would the evangelists, who don't seem to have been especially well educated or had great literary talent, have been able to invent a morally perfect character, when none of the greatest writers of history has ever succeeded in doing so?
It's convenient to stretch the thesis this way, because it spares us of the need to distinguish historical from fictional characters, which is often difficult. Some legendary figures may or may not have actually lived, while some purportedly historical accounts are quite fictionalized, and in other cases nominally fictional characters are inspired by real people. With my expansion of the thesis to include fictional characters, we don't need to sort that out. We can use historical, fictional, and legendary characters indifferently for comparison and illustration.
To make our moral audit of mankind manageable, I'll divide historic mankind into, and consider in turn, four categories of people, namely (a) primitive people from illiterate cultures, (b) the common people of known civilizations, (c) people of socially distinguished classes though not individually famous, and (d) famous people whose character we can to some extent discern from what history remembers about their lives.
In spite of a persistent myth, in the modern West, of the "noble savage," realistic anthropology reveals that primitive people are savage as often as they are noble. Much of life among primitive people enacts a grim sociobiological script, and consists of endemic fighting among men for control of resources and especially of women. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined provides one summary of the evidence. Murder and rape are far more common, to the point of normalcy, among primitive tribes and bands. Civilized people sometimes indulge in admiring barbarians from a safe distance, as did Rousseau, Diderot, and some other thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment. But closer contact, such as 19th-century Europeans had thanks to the steamship and colonialism, tends to convince them of the moral superiority of their own civilization to the "heathens" and "savages" of the wild places of the world. The attitude of contempt and horror expressed in words like "barbarian" or "savage" isn't mere chauvinistic bias, but the residue of the real victimhood of civilized peoples at the hands of primitive peoples when the latter have gained the upper hand. Thus the Chinese, Arabs, and Persians suffered pillage and massacre at the hands of the Mongols, and the late Romans at the hands of the Germans and Huns.
It shouldn't really be surprising that murder, rape, and other kinds of violence are common among primitive peoples, because they are rooted in human instincts, honed by evolution to maximize the market share of the selfish genes. Civilization has powerful customs, institutions, and socialization processes to tame and override the violent proclivities of fallen human nature. Without that, humans are more natural in some good ways but also in some very bad ways. Rape is natural, in the sense that men's selfish genes and instincts often urge them to do it. So is murder of sexual rivals, or murder to defend one's honor and superior rank and to frighten others into submission. So is domination of the weak. Civilization disciplines these evil instincts. Without it, they often run amok. Short of murder, there is hatred, one tribe or band against another. Short of rape, there is forced marriage and polygamy. There's plenty of virtue among pre-literate people, and we'll keep our ears open for rumors of exceptional individuals in pre-literate cultures who attained great virtue. But it doesn't seem, prima facie, like a promising place to look for moral perfection.
So let's move on to the second category, the common people of civilized societies. What are their moral characteristics? Like the barbarians, the commoners have had their admirers. The novelist Leo Tolstoy, writing in the agrarian, highly class-stratified society of 19th-century Russia, sometimes idealized the peasantry, for example in the figure of peasant conscript Platon Kareteyev, who, in the novel War and Peace, becomes the model of enlightenment for the nobleman and spiritual seeker Pierre Bezukhov, when they are fellow prisoners of Napoleon's army during its winter retreat through Russia. Platon's saintliness consists in yielding without resentment or bitterness in all circumstances. In western Europe, where industrialization was changing the nature of the lower classes, Karl Marx and his many followers made a kind of moral ideal out of the multitudes of factory workers in industrial cities, which they called the proletariat, and which they hoped would seize power in a revolution and institute a utopia. Of course, that was all wishful thinking, for which mankind has paid a terrible price. But Tolstoy was not a peasant and Marx was not a factory worker, and real peasants and factory workers and other commoners have always known that moral perfection was not characteristic of their kind of people. They have their foibles.
Meanwhile, I have to find fault with more or less all the common people of civilized societies for being complicit in a great deal of societal evil. They saw terrible things, and let themselves be powerless to resist them.
I used to think it was rather unfair of God that, in the Book of Exodus, the plagues God sends to punish Phaoroh for his cruelty and injustice to the Hebrews don't affect only Phaoroh, but the whole Egyptian people. Later, I realized why this was just. Phaoroh couldn't have oppressed the Hebrews so cruelly without the help of the Egyptian people. Where would he get the force? The Egyptian people were to blame for the oppression of the Hebrews because they either helped Pharaoh, or at least failed to overthrow him when they saw it. And so it is with the subjects of every tyrant and oppressor in history, down to the hideous Nazi and Soviet tyrannies of the 20th century. The common people are complicit. Let us not condemn, for we might have made the same moral compromises in the same terrible circumstances. But of course, while loving the sinners, we must hate the sin. Our natural disgust at cowed subjects silently obeying wicked rulers is wise and proper. And such cowed subjects comprise the vast majority of pre-Christian civilized mankind. We discussed in chapter 11 how the Golden Rule would demand that we rise above the social sin, the approval and complicity in socially accepted evil, that has been endemic to each age of history.
The evils that the common people are guilty of condoning and abetting vary much from place to place, though they are generally much less bad where Christianity holds sway. Suttee, the forced suicide of widows, was distinctive to India, and the murder of firstborn children to Carthage, while human sacrifice on a larger scale was characteristic of the pre-Columbian Aztec civilization of Mexico. We hear in the epic of Gilgamesh that Sumerian kings practiced prima nocte, where the ruler rather than the husband got to sleep with every bride on her wedding night. Some cultures practiced cannibalism. Prostitution was widespread and normal in most pre-Christian societies, and persisted long into Christian times, becoming rare to the point of irrelevance only in the past couple of generations in a few countries. Prostitutes are generally despised and treated almost as subhuman, their lives lacking any socially recognized purpose except the satisfaction of men's lusts. Cruelty to animals has been widespread in history. The Greeks condoned the sexual exploitation of young boys by older men. The Romans entertained the masses with spectacles of carnage in colosseums, where gladiators were forced to kill one another or were devoured by wild beasts. Above all, two evils have been essentially universal: slavery, and the glorification of aggressive war.
No advanced society before Christianity was without slavery, which was common among primitive peoples as well. Many slaves led miserable lives. It was usually routine for female slaves to be sexually exploited, and for male slaves to be worked to death. And while just war is possible, most of history's wars seem to have sprung from mere lust for power and self-aggrandizement by rulers. If the common people had resolutely and unanimously opposed and resisted these practices, they could surely have stopped them at any time by mere strength of numbers. Instead, they seem usually or always to have condoned and abetted war and slavery, cheering for the conquerors and disdaining the slaves.
Commoners typically look up to classes within their own societies who embody different kinds of excellence, including, depending on the time and place, some of the following: professors and teachers, with their knowledge; priests and pastors, with their piety; warriors and nobles, with their martial valor; entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires, with their hard work, productivity, and effectiveness; poets and writers and artists, with their genius; scientists and technologists and engineers, with genius of a different kind; and maybe rebels and revolutionaries, risking all for a better world. Most societies have had some kind of social mobility, and commoners of exceptional virtue can rise to fame, social distinction, or both. And even where social distinction is partly or wholly hereditary, the assumption, usually at least somewhat realistic, is that some kind of virtue is being passed down by nature and nurture from one generation to the next in the elite social class. It has often been believed that noble birth and education confer moral advantages. So let's turn to these elite classes and to see whether we find moral perfection among them.
For the moment, I'll skip over medieval knights and priests, who are heavily shaped by Christian ideals, and take a look at the Iliad, the great Greek epic which was to the Greeks a little like what the Bible became for Christians. It's a thriller, whose intricate and suspenseful storyline provides a framework for many eloquent speeches and a vast amount of battlefield courage and bloodshed, as well as many vivid glimpses of the gods of Olympus. The Greeks admired the heroes of the Iliad, and in one sense with good reason, for they certainly showed great courage in plunging again and again into bloody battles where they were likely to die.
And yet what scoundrels they were! Unlike King Arthur's knights, who never rape women, the Greek heroes took rape for granted, as the first plot twist in The Iliad makes very clear. King Agamemnon, a kind of first-among-equals of the Greek kings who are waging war on Troy, has taken to his bed a girl, Chryseis, whom he picked up on the warpath somewhere. She's the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Her father comes begging to get her back. Agamemnon says no: she will be "forced to share his bed" indefinitely. Then the priest prays to Apollo for help, and that god sends a plague that begins to destroy the Greek armies. The Greek hero Achilles, part of the army under the loose command of Agamemnon, demands that Agamemnon give the girl back to the priest, lest the armies be ruined by Apollo's plague, Agamemnon angrily gives way, but vengefully demands that Achilles yield, in place of Chryseis, his sexual prize, Briseis. Achilles protests that Briseis was fairly allocated to him by the army as spoils of war! Clearly the whole army is implicated in this system of rape.
One hopes that most of the pagan warriors of Greco-Roman civilization were less cavalier about rape than Achilles and Agamemnon. But it's not clear whence they could have derived any better principles. Again, the default attitude towards the epic heroes was one of admiration, not condemnation. And the enslavement of vanquished opponents in war, and the sexual exploitation of female slaves, seem to have persisted throughout pagan times, and remained to be confronted and condemned by Christian divines like St. John Chrysostom. Certain virtues came with the territory of being a pagan warrior, starting with courage. But they fought for mostly unjust causes, and often abused their victories. Warriors had more freedom of action than the common people, but they rarely if ever used it to make society more just or merciful.
Priests are another class that goes back to the dawn of history. They make their livings as guardians of, spokesmen for, and mediators with things beyond mundane reality. They deal in rites and secrets, claiming special knowledge and special divine protection. As such, they have often held even kings and emperors in awe, and could speak truth to power in ways no one else would have dared, like the priest of Apollo who demanded his daughter back from King Agamemnon.
But how often, one wonders, did pagan priests believe in the gods and mysteries they made their livings by? Pagan myths were far less evidence-based than Christianity. On the other hand, there is a charm, a kind of beautiful whimsy about old pagan mythology, which may gain a kind of plausibility by echoing a magic charm in nature. That's no excuse for worshiping pagan gods, whom the myths represent as very lustful, deceitful, short-tempered and unjust. In the Iliad, the gods are more beautiful than humans, and happier in that they are immortal, but they are just as angry and quarrelsome, and they are indifferent to the human suffering which they are greatly exacerbating by taking opposite sides in the Trojan War. The chief reason these gods were worshiped was not that they were admired but simply because they were thought to have power. Priests were the mediators of an exchange of sacrifice for divine favor. Their role as intermediaries with the gods sometimes gave them special immunities and freedoms, as when the priest of Apollo defied King Agamemnon. But they weren't really in the business of teaching ethics, and they hardly could have been, when the gods they worshiped were so unethical.
If there had always been a certain admiration of warriors and a certain awe of priests, another class has never been much admired before modern times, namely, merchants and bankers. They are not admired for an obvious reason, namely, that it's characteristic of them to serve nothing higher than themselves but to act only from self-interest. Moreover, it's very characteristic of merchants and bankers to be rich, possessing a superfluity of money, goods, or both. And as there has always been so much poverty in the world, the rich always stand condemned by their failure to share.
Christianity has done much to transform the perennial, necessary classes of society, reinforcing their characteristic virtues while overcoming their characteristic vices. Often it has rendered warriors merciful and merchants and bankers charitable, while giving commoners integrity, independence, and the courage to speak truth to power. Its priesthood teaches and often practices a high standard of ethical conduct. But Christianity has also clarified the sinfulness of all, condemning the past conduct of cruel warriors and greedy bankers and the priests of corrupt gods, and teaching Christian warriors and merchants and commoners, even as they perform their social roles in much more ethical ways, to be much more conscious of how they still sin and fall short.
It's time to move on to the famous people of history. They can serve on the one hand as a kind of representative sample of historic mankind, for they come from many ages, classes and cultures, and differ much in their temperaments, circumstances and adventures. At the same time, they represent a kind of cream of the crop, for it is often some sort of excellence that makes people famous. Of these alone, we know their stories well enough to make real moral assessments. If we don't find any exemplars of perfect virtue among them, it's likely that there were none.
So what do we find? What are the moral characteristics of the famous people of history? There were statesmen like Pericles, Demosthenes, Cicero, George Washington, William Pitt, Winston Churchill, and Vladimir Lenin. There were warriors and generals like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. There were lawyers and lawgivers like Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, Blackstone, and James Madison. There were philosophers and intellectuals like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, J.S. Mill, and Milton Friedman. And they all had their faults.
To cite some examples at random: Locke invested in the slave trade. Karl Marx seduced the family maid and refused to acknowledge his illegitimate son. Eisenhower presided over an America stained with racial segregation. Washington and Madison were slaveowners. Julius Caesar brutalized Gaul, overthrew the Roman Republic, and had an affair with the teenage Cleopatra. Alexander the Great dedicated his life to aggressive wars, and organized the forced marriage of thousands of Persian women to his soldiers. Churchill slandered his domestic political opponents as fascists to try to cling to power in 1944. Lycurgus developed a highly militarized and communist regime in order to maintain the dominance of Sparta over enslaved helots. Solon was an imperialist warmonger, instituted public brothels, and left Athens after making his laws so that it fell under a tyrant. Cicero killed Catiline without due process of law, was a wealthy slaveowner, and in middle age married an 11-year-old girl. Descartes had a French mistress whom he never married. Aristotle condoned aggressive war and slavery. Plato let himself be recruited as an advisor to a vain and hedonistic tyrant, Dionysius II of Syracuse, and got embroiled in a sordid civil war. JS Mill supported racist imperialism and had a love affair with a married woman. Napoleon ordered the murder of the duc d'Enghien, and also fled from his disintegrating army as it retreated from Russia in 1812. And so on, and so forth. If you don't know these stories, you can look them up, and many more. I don't particularly recommend it. It's depressing. And as no one seems even to claim moral perfection for anyone but Jesus, I'm not refuting anyone in particular. But there's something cumulatively impressive about all this sordid sin among the great figures of history.
Fictional people should get their turn too. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy was quite rude to Lizzie Bennet at the first dance; she in turn judged both him and Mr. Wickham much too quickly and quite wrongly at first. In War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov let himself be conned into marrying a shallow and dishonorable woman, Prince Andrei was proudly bored with the love of his good wife until it was too late, and Natasha Rostov consented to an elopement with a rascal, which was fortunately prevented. In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean stole from the good priest who alone aided him in dire need. In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price concealed what she knew of the character of Henry Crawford, leading to the ruin of her cousin at his hands. In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima, in youth, provoked a young husband to a needless duel out of jealousy for his wife, and Alyosha rebelled against the monastery rules and sought to plunge into degradation when the body of one he had loved as a saint didn't immediately show signs of miraculous preservation. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo falters at a critical moment-- I'll say no more or lest I spoil the story for those who haven't read it-- while Gandalf has to give the dangerous mission of destroying the ring to Frodo, because he can't trust himself to resist its corrupting power. This is a small sample, but I'm picking the most admired characters from a few of the most admired works.
And we can give a turn, too, to legendary and biblical characters, in whom some believe while others don't. King Arthur adulterously slept with his half-sister Morgause, queen of Orkney, and begot Mordred, his nemesis. Cuchulain the Irish hero was a fierce fighter who killed many, including his friend Ferdiad and his son Connla. King David slept with Bathsheba, the wife of his champion soldier Uriah the Hittite, then arranged for the latter to die in battle so he could marry her. Job complained and cursed with extreme bitterness in his misfortunes. Abraham twice (!) lied that his wife Sarah was his sister so that a ruler through whose lands they were passing would not kill him in order to marry her. I haven't been able to find fault with Robin Hood or Sir Galahad, taken in their own terms, but of course, Robin Hood lied and stole, even if he did it with lofty motives and by rather scrupulous means, and Sir Galahad, unlike Jesus, bore a sword and fought. Both figures are in any case clearly more legendary than real, and the fact that they could even be imagined reflects the influence on the medieval European imagination of the Christian saints.
In the lives of many Christian saints, no sins are remembered. Christian churches that have the custom of "canonizing" or officially recognizing selected saints (for it's understood that we don't know the names of all saints, that is, of all saved souls) don't claim that the saints were actually sinless, but rather that their sins are forgiven, and sometimes their sins are forgotten by history as well. But they had sins. The exception that proves the rule here is that the Catholics and Orthodox think Mary, the mother of Jesus, led a sinless life. But it was a life extremely sheltered from temptation, for she was dedicated to the temple at the age of three, then later married off to a very good man, Saint Joseph, and her one son was Jesus. In complete contrast, Jesus lived a life in the public square, which must have been full of both the most intense and the subtlest temptations.
In the West, the character other than Jesus who has been most admired as a moral exemplar is probably Socrates, whom we've met many times before in this book. Multiple schools of ancient philosophy took him as their role model. He stands out for his intense honesty, intellectual humility, and relentless pursuit of truth. Yet he doesn't really come close to Jesus. He fought in Athens' rather unjust wars. He showed no particular concern for the poor and needy. Sexually, he was married, yet in the Symposium he describes an oddly diffident affair with the famous cad and intriguer Alcibiades. He is condescending to his accusers and the jurors at his trial. He rather heartlessly orders his wife and other women to depart before his execution because he dislikes their sentimental tears. To assess Socrates is tricky because Plato's depiction, across many dialogues in which Socrates is the main character, may not be meant as biographical. Plato is probably just using Socrates as his spokesman much of the time, putting in his mouth thoughts of Plato's own that Socrates never said. If we do assess Plato's Socrates as a character, many of the political views he expresses in The Republic are despicable. He advocates an authoritarian and militarist regime, with aggressive censorship, which indoctrinates its subjects in lying stories. It is to be hoped that the real Socrates had nothing to do with such nonsense. But other sources with something to say about Socrates are often unflattering, notably Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, which represents Socrates as an irresponsible trickster who, for a game, delights to make the unjust cause seem just. It would be mere wishful thinking to assume that anything we don't like about Plato's Socrates was Plato's invention, while all the virtues of Plato's Socrates were real.
Still, it's interesting how Socrates' life foreshadowed Christ in so many ways. Like Christ, Socrates became famous as a thinker and teacher without writing anything, through disciples. Like Christ, Socrates was killed for his goodness, and not by a petty tyrant, but by some of the best institutions that mankind had ever devised, namely, Roman law and Jewish monotheism, and Athenian democracy, respectively. Like Christ, Socrates could have escaped execution, Christ by His miraculous power, Socrates by his wealthy disciples bribing the guards to help him escape. They didn't, because their deaths were making a point, proving key truths in the face of a wicked world. And yet the contrasts are striking too. Socrates was killed for insisting that he knew nothing, and by the way, no one else did either. Christ was killed for claiming He was God and knew all. Their deaths vividly displayed the sinfulness of man, for even some of the best societies in history could not face the provocation of such goodness as Socrates and Christ challenged them with, and killed them to put out its light. We discussed in chapter 11 how with respect to social sin, there have been some historical figures who in varying ways and degrees hold themselves aloof from it and/or denounce it. Christ and Socrates, along with a very few others such as the Hebrew prophets, avoid all complicity in the social sin of their times through the risky and lucid critical stance they take towards them.
To sum up, people disappoint. We haven't studied everyone, but the pattern becomes overwhelming. People, all people, believe in some sort of right and wrong in a muddled way, which can make sense only in light of the Golden Rule but fall short of that, but in their conduct they fall short, usually far short, even of the muddled ethics that they would advocate and expect of others, doing what even they know to be wrong. People's own moral failings are probably why no one before Jesus seems to have clearly, boldly, lucidly and consistently advocated for the Golden Rule, despite its overwhelming intuitive appeal and its seeming simplicity and obviousness. Their own sins made them unable to dare to state such a lofty moral truth. Everyone does some things that are just indefensible. And then there's Jesus.
Jesus taught and lived an ethics of astounding audacity and magnanimity. Not that it was completely new. While the Golden Rule was foreshadowed in the Old Testament law, Jesus came, as He said, not to abolish the law (of Moses) but to "fulfill" it, cutting through its compromises to reveal the nature of moral perfection. What this means is well illustrated by the change from "love thy neighbor" to "love thy enemy." "Love thy neighbor as thyself," which Jesus calls one of the two great commandments "on [which] hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:40), was taught long before in Leviticus 19:18. But Jesus says that, whereas "you have heard that it was said, 'love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy'," He taught instead that His disciples should "love thy enemy and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:43-44). Jesus's teaching might seem to contradict the old law, or at least to go beyond it, but it is truer to say that it "fulfills" it, by answering in the most expansive and generous possible way the question that was put to Jesus by a certain lawyer: "but who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29) Jesus answers this question with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that the man who acted as the neighbor of the one wounded by robbers on the side of the road, by helping him, was precisely an enemy, a Samaritan helping a Jew, when the Jews were known to hate the Samaritans. The category of neighbor was expanded so much as to include everyone, even or especially one's enemies, and so the law was fulfilled, in a way that no one could have foreseen, yet that once seen must be recognized at once as the only way to complete the ideal. And of course, Jesus loved His enemies, to the point of praying from the Cross for God to forgive them.
Similarly, where the law condemned murder, Jesus condemned unjust anger. Where the law condemned adultery, Jesus condemned lustful glances. His ethics had in the extreme a quality that we might sometimes call "idealistic" and sometimes "quixotic," wherein conscience pushes past all considerations of pride and propriety and prudence. No one had ever before dared to teach an ethics so totally generous and loving, so extreme in its mercy and meekness, but it was recognizably continuous with the ethics that they had taught, and all the compromises and half-measures that came before looked shabby in the light of the moral perfection that Jesus revealed. In this quixotic ethics of the Sermon of the Mount, the Golden Rule has its perfect fruit, for the good and the bad alike, for different reasons, desire that others turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and practice nonresistance. The good want to return gift with gift and love and love, while the bad want to exploit others' submissiveness and generosity for their own power and gain. Either way, the Golden Rule is satisfied, but to willingly let oneself be despoiled by the wicked without resistance seems ruinous, even suicidal. The strange thing is that a society founded in such an apparently impractical ethics should have proved so practical, for the Christian Church has lasted two thousand years and now has two billion adherents. Not that Christians practice the Golden Rule all the time, far from it! But to the extent that it has drawn them in its direction, it has strengthened, not weakened them, contrary to what the worldly-wise would think.
Jesus seems, as far as we can tell from the evidence of the Gospels, to have lived perfectly by His own quixotic ethics. For example, the Gospels give the impression that He hardly owned anything. While some think He had a house, Jesus Himself says that He "has no place to lay His head" (Luke 9:58). When He needs money, such as to pay the temple tax, it takes a miracle for Him to get it (Matthew 17:24-27). When He needs a donkey, it is given to Him for free (Luke 19:29-33). The only possession we hear about at His death is a mysteriously well-woven garment (John 19:23). He showed that He could withstand hunger during His forty days in the desert, just after His baptism, during which He was tempted by the devil (Matthew 4:1-4). Yet He didn't seem to go hungry once His ministry was underway, for He was so popular as a house guest that He was plausibly slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19). So much was His life dedicated to service that even eating seems never to have been done for His own benefit, but to keep company with others. Certain women patronized His ministry financially in some way (Luke 8:3), and there was some sort of money bag kept in common for the apostles by Judas (John 12:6). But we never hear of Jesus doing anything to earn money, although He is continually working for the benefit of others as mere gift. As He advised others to do in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to have sought first the kingdom of God, thinking no more than the lilies of the field of what He would eat or what He would wear (Matthew 6: 25-34).
As for "turn the other cheek" and "do not resist the wicked man," Jesus never used force, except on one revealing occasion. When He found the temple full of moneychangers and merchants selling doves for sacrifice, He wrought havoc, using a whip, and freeing the doves, and overturning the moneychangers' tables, until He had driven them out (Matthew 21:12-13). Clearly, the force used in this case was non-lethal, and protection of a sacred place from sacrilege was the motive. He never used or advocated force on any other occasion. In particular, when He was arrested, Peter drew a sword and began to fight in His defense, but Jesus told Peter to put the sword away. He would neither use nor condone violence in His own defense. The response of Jesus when He was literally slapped, for supposed insolence to the high priest, sheds light on what the teaching to "turn the other cheek" meant. We are not told that He literally turned the other cheek. Rather, He responded with a gentle reasonableness, asking why He had been slapped, meekly yet not cowed, in a way that was likely either to convert His attacker to sense, or to get Him slapped again. "If I have spoken wrong, bear witness to the wrong," He said. "If I have spoken well, why do you strike Me?" (John 18:23)
As He hung on the Cross, some onlookers marveled that Jesus had saved others yet seemed unable to save Himself. Surely the man who had multiplied the loaves and fishes, healed many, raised some from the dead, walked on water, and calmed a storm at sea, could have gotten Himself down from the Cross by miracle? But neither any of His miracles, not any of His recorded actions whatsoever, were for His own benefit. Just before His ministry, when He is tempted in the desert, and He is famished with hunger after forty days of fasting, Satan urges Him to turn stones into bread to sate His hunger. He refuses. But He will multiply the loaves and fishes to feed a crowd of hungry followers who have neglected to bring provisions in their eagerness to hear Him (Matthew 14:13-21). Nor does He work any miracle against anyone, or refuse or fail to do anything that is asked of Him by someone in distress. He has great power, but only to serve others.
Jesus was so brave and wise that He dominates every situation we see Him in in the Gospels. He is never afraid, never tricked, never puzzled, never at a loss for words, never hesitant or indecisive, with the one exception of the night in the garden of Gethsemane when He prays, on the eve of the crucifixion, "Let this cup pass from me" (Matthew 26:39). But he adds "let Thy will be done," and when the cup does not pass from him, He drinks it.
He gets the better of every exchange. He never speaks idly, never utters a platitude or a triviality, never contradicts Himself. He is never boring or predictable. He continually surprises others with His insights or paradoxes, but is Himself never surprised in an argument, never surprised, that is, by a cogent rebuttal or a claim or counter-argument He hadn't thought of. He does get surprised at times by the leaps of faith by which people believe in Him, or the stubbornness with which they resist. He is surprised by the faith of the centurion, and by the unbelief of His hometown.
The moral perfection of Jesus is not so simple an affair as to prevent the Gospel narratives from suggesting some lines of attack upon His character. Yet the criticisms don't survive the process of attempting to formulate them. Some might find it not to their taste that Jesus never laughed or joked in the Gospels. But there's no duty to joke, and He was busy with a very serious mission. Petty legalists in his own day complained that He violated the minutiae of Sabbath observance, but He understood the purpose of the Sabbath better than they. If He were alive today, He might be reproached by the petty moralists of capitalism. Why didn't He get a job, find an occupation, develop a career? Why was He, as an able-bodied man in the prime of life, living off of charity? But of course, saving souls is more important than producing consumer goods and services.
This is very inadequate. It would take a whole book, not so much to assess the ethics of Jesus as a whole, as to begin to tap the wisdom displayed in any single one of His actions or utterances. Hasty judgments won't do for a character so obviously profound. I can write boldly enough, as the self-appointed spokesman for the conscience of mankind, in saying that Agamemnon shouldn't have raped Chryseis, kings and conquerors shouldn't make so much war, men shouldn't own other men as slaves, an Athenian jury shouldn't have condemned Socrates, and Plato shouldn't have gone to be a counselor to a tyrant, or even that it was a moral weakness in Socrates to have fought in the rather unjust wars of his native Athens, or in Gandalf to have been unable to take the Ring, himself, to the fires of Mount Doom. I have enough moral authority for that, merely as a man, with as good a conscience as the next man's. But in judging Jesus, I'm out of my depth. I can't sustain the pose of me judging Him when it so obviously ought to be the other way around. I have to take it, as I have said, somewhat on faith that Jesus was morally perfect, and that if I were 10 times or 100 times wiser than I am now, I would still find no fault in Him. I can certainly sympathize with agnostics who decline definitely to affirm that Jesus was perfect. It's a hard question to settle intellectually. For me, it's more a process of being overwhelmed with wonder at His character, and finally surrendering to give Him my perfect trust.
If we accept the conclusion of Jesus's moral perfection at least for the sake of argument, it raises some interesting questions.
First, Jesus's moral perfection is all tangled up with His power to work miracles and His claims to be God. If Jesus was God, that might explain why He was able to lead a morally perfect life when no one else can. Moral perfection isn't exactly a miracle. Ought implies can. It must be possible, in principle, for us to live as we ought. Yet it's so difficult that it almost has the character of a miracle when someone achieved it, and suggests something more than human in the man who did it. And if He was God, it makes sense that He was also able to work other miracles. And the fact that even with all this extra power, He comes across not as a magician, not as a figure to evoke fear, but rather a figure to inspire love and hope and comfort, underlines His moral perfection, for if it's difficult to use natural powers well, it's even more difficult to use supernatural powers well. It makes sense that He worked miracles to show He was God, for it would hardly have been reasonable to expect people to believe such an enormous claim without miraculous signs to confirm it. And if He was morally perfect, He must have been God, or He would have been lying when He said He was. So you can't separate Christ's miracles, His divinity, and His moral perfection, so as to distill a merely human Jesus from the figure represented in the Gospels. Of course, we can circle back to the idea that Jesus's character was fabricated or fictionalized by the apostles both to be both morally perfect and to be full of miracles and claims of divinity. But then, again, how were they able to write such fiction?
Second, the moral perfection of Jesus stands out as a hopeful exception to the terrible law of the world that all Creation is vitiated by Fall. Human sin is a big part of the Fall. More human suffering is caused by human sin than by any sort of natural evil. Nature suffers much, too, at the hands of sinful human beings. Humans might, on the contrary, do much to mend the endemic evils of nature. Sinful as we are, we do that in small ways even now. We rescue the occasional wounded animal, and plant gardens as beautiful as natural meadows. But what might a morally perfect human race have accomplished? For now, the life of Jesus looks more like an exception than a cure. One man was perfect, but people in general are still sinful. Yet there seems to be a larger significance in the affair. We'll keep looking into that.
Third, Jesus's moral perfection makes the resurrection more likely. This will seem like a nonsequitur at first, but we already glimpsed the logic of it in chapter 6, in the debate between "Christian" and "Commonsense" about whether man is mortal or "mortal-if-sinful." In our ordinary experience, virtue does nothing to cure mortality. But our ordinary experience furnishes us with no examples of perfect virtue. And in general, wherever you find one odd thing, you're more likely to find another, because the pattern that excluded the one odd thing may, for all you know, be the same pattern that excluded the other, and the one odd thing shows that the pattern in question does not apply, as might have been expected, to the case at hand. If you find a seashell in the forest, you're more likely to find an arrowhead or a book in the same spot. If you're in a suit-and-tie business meeting and a clown walks into the room, a fire eater just might come next. If you find that Jesus was without sin, you shouldn't be so surprised that He was also not subject to the power of death. And that tips the balance. For if one resets one's priors about the likelihood of the Resurrection from near impossibility to moderate uncertainty, on the grounds that Jesus was strange in his moral perfection and therefore might be strange in other ways as well, then the ordinary, historical, eyewitness evidence of the Resurrection is more than enough to establish its truth with blazing confidence.
In a nutshell:
If Jesus were an ordinary man, he would have died and stayed dead.
But if Jesus were an ordinary man, his ethical principles would have been limited in their imaginative reach and consistency, and failed to satisfy the human heart's thirst for righteousness, and his conduct would have failed to live up to even his flawed moral principles.
But Jesus, alone in history, taught a morally perfect ethics, and lived up perfectly to His own ethical teachings.
Therefore Jesus was not an ordinary man.
And so any conclusions we've drawn from our experience with ordinary men may not apply to Jesus, and He may have risen from the dead after all.
And that's enough to tip the first domino of doubt, leading to a glorious cascade of evidence-based Bayesian updating that can only end in a calamitous crash into faith.