Where did Jesus get His morality from?

[jason56]

Where did Jesus get His morality and ethics from?

The people who created him. The same way that Homer Simpson is at heart a nice guy.

It's good plot development.

[Anomalocaris]

I am not sure issuing trite beatitudes while pretending to be god bespeaks of any discernible morality.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Where did Jesus get His morality and ethics from? Even atheists can not mock Jesus's morality, there is even a group of atheists called, 'Atheists for Jesus.' So the question begs, where did His thinking come from?

Assuming Jesus existed, he was a Jew an an Orthodox rabbi who admonished his follower to keep the law. His ethical code is Jewish and based on the Torah,which in turn was largely lifted from the Sumerians,along with their nasty little desert god, 'EL'(he).

I have never met a person who calls themselves a Christian who does not cherry pick what teachings they will actually follow when it comes to their daily behaviour.

The moral code of Jesus doesn't carry much weight with me.Nor does any other system of ethics based on absolute moral imperatives. I can and do mock Christian morality as simplistic and naive, as well as often cruel and hypocritical.

Christianity? Probably a good idea. Somebody ought to try it. (George Bernard Shaw)

[solja247]

Socrates was written about by Plato and Xenophon. This puts him two legs up on your non-existent godboy.

Have you ever read any of Plato's work before?

Not really, the gospel stories go out of their way to exonerate the Romans and blame the Jews for the miscarriage of "justice." As Jews became more and more unpopular throughout the late 1st and early second centuries AD this make more and more sense.

You have zero crediblity.

Also both men knew Socrates personally, while I doubt any of the authors of the New Testament (Paul especially) knew Jesus personally.

Try again mate.

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The moral code of Jesus doesn't carry much weight with me.Nor does any other system of ethics based on absolute moral imperatives. I can and do mock Christian morality as simplistic and naive, as well as often cruel and hypocritical.

Hos is it cruel?

[Minimalist]

Sol, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

And yeah - I read Plato in college. Boring shit. But better than your fucking bible.

[DeistPaladin]

I think it's fair to say that evidence for Jesus is held to a higher standard that for Socrates based on the claims made of each. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mundane claims require little evidence and may be accepted at face value.

Socrates was some guy who was a philosopher and founded a school in Athens. Pretty mundane. Not much required to buy into the idea he really existed.

Jesus was one of many doom criers and Jewish faction leaders who apparently was so insignificant that no one noticed him in his time. He waited about 30 years before doing anything and then went about performing miracles that no one paid any attention to. He founded a ministry that "spread like wildfire" into the surrounding provinces, and yet failed to get a mention by theologians and philosophers of the time (including Philo). He wrote nothing of his own teachings and nothing was written about him for at least 40 years. Then, generations later, he became the towering icon of numerous splinter factions, some of who believed he never existed in the flesh (see 1John 4:1-3 and 2John 1:7).

There's a lot to the Jesus story that doesn't add up. The only detailed accounts we have are the Gospels, and these are riddled with contradictions. Even if he existed, we can't know anything about the true story. And if he was a godman who performed miracles, how come nobody noticed him during his lifetime? And if he wasn't a godman performing miracles, his real story would bare little or no resemblance to the legend, and would be so different that we may as well say he never existed.

I hold Jesus to a higher standard than Socrates.

[Minimalist]

I hold Jesus to a higher standard than Socrates.

I wouldn't. If a contemporary writer (Greek/Roman/or Jewish ) had made reference to him....or even to some fantastic rumor of a crucified criminal coming back to life in 3 days I would credit it as evidence that at least people believed something had happened in the early first century.

But they didn't.

And some Greeks did write about Socrates.

[solja247]

Socrates was some guy who was a philosopher and founded a school in Athens. Pretty mundane. Not much required to buy into the idea he really existed.

Mundane and extradonary are subjective terms. Perhaps Socrates was more extraordinary than Jesus. He has shaped philosophy and how people think for over 2000 years!
Jesus was just a Jewish peasant who claimed He was the messiah.
So perhaps Socrates was less likely to exist?

[Minimalist]

Except for the fact that contemporaries spoke about Socrates and about your god boy.

That is a significant difference.

[solja247]

Except for the fact that contemporaries spoke about Socrates and about your god boy.

That is a significant difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

Forming an accurate picture of the historical Socrates and his philosophical viewpoints is problematic. This issue is known as the Socratic problem.

Socrates did not write philosophical texts. The knowledge of the man, his life, and his philosophy is based on writings by his students and contemporaries. Foremost among them is Plato; however, works by Xenophon, Aristotle, and Aristophanes also provide important insights.[4] The difficulty of finding the “real” Socrates arises because these works are often philosophical or dramatic texts rather than straightforward histories. Aside from Thucydides (who makes no mention of Socrates or philosophers in general) and Xenophon, there are in fact no straightforward histories contemporary with Socrates that dealt with his own time and place. A corollary of this is that sources that do mention Socrates do not necessarily claim to be historically accurate, and are often partisan (those who prosecuted and convicted Socrates have left no testament). Historians therefore face the challenge of reconciling the various texts that come from these men to create an accurate and consistent account of Socrates' life and work. The result of such an effort is not necessarily realistic, merely consistent.

Plato is frequently viewed as the most informative source about Socrates' life and philosophy.[5] At the same time, however, many scholars believe that in some works Plato, being a literary artist, pushed his avowedly brightened-up version of "Socrates" far beyond anything the historical Socrates was likely to have done or said; and that Xenophon, being an historian, is a more reliable witness to the historical Socrates. Parsing which Socrates—the "real" one, or Plato's own mouthpiece—Plato is using at any given point is a matter of much debate.

However, it is also clear from other writings, and historical artifacts that Socrates was not simply a character, or invention, of Plato. The testimony of Xenophon and Aristotle, alongside some of Aristophanes' work (especially The Clouds), can be usefully engaged in fleshing out our perception of Socrates beyond Plato's work.