Jesus the Fallible
I am told there is a very interesting painting of an Jesus at London's Tate gallery called Christ in the Home of His Parents It depicts a 11 year old Jesus who has a cut on his hand, likely the result of attempting to pull out a nail from a piece of wood on the bench. He is being comforted by Mary and Joseph.
This brings up the question was Jesus fallible? To be human is to be fallible. We learn from our mistakes. Could it be when he was learning to be a carpenter, he made slightly wobbly chairs? Or if he learned to be a stone mason, his first attempts at building a wall were a little crocked? Could Jesus have stubbed his toe while learning to walk?
Did Jesus make mistakes? I would argue it was quite possible, but that does not constitute moral error on the part of Jesus. To me, he had to experience trial and error. It is a part of being human. I would say if he didn't we fall into the trap of Docetism which says Jesus only appeared to be human.
What are your thoughts?
(I linked to a video of that painting because it shows the depiction up close.)
This brings up the question was Jesus fallible? To be human is to be fallible. We learn from our mistakes. Could it be when he was learning to be a carpenter, he made slightly wobbly chairs? Or if he learned to be a stone mason, his first attempts at building a wall were a little crocked? Could Jesus have stubbed his toe while learning to walk?
Did Jesus make mistakes? I would argue it was quite possible, but that does not constitute moral error on the part of Jesus. To me, he had to experience trial and error. It is a part of being human. I would say if he didn't we fall into the trap of Docetism which says Jesus only appeared to be human.
What are your thoughts?
(I linked to a video of that painting because it shows the depiction up close.)
Comments
Mind you, there are other ways to read the texts, such as Jesus doing this deliberately to teach a point to the disciples, etc. I think that may be the problem with the question. What may seem like Jesus' fallibility may look different from another perspective. For example, the marriage at Cana. Yes, Jesus turns water into wine, but he makes it a far superior grade of wine than what had been served. Mistake? Deliberate? It could easily be argued either way.
I think most people would think of Jesus’s fallibility and infallibility, and of Jesus’s perfection, as being related to wisdom, his relationship to/with God and to sin—he was tempted in every way we are, but without sin. And I don’t see what any of the examples you give have to do with sin, wisdom or relationship to/with God.
Like @stetson, I’m afraid I don’t really see any actual topic of debate here.
Meanwhile, I think the nail wound in Jesus’s hand in “Christ in the Home of His Parents” has a lot more to do with the crucifixion than it does with any reflection of error or fallibility on Jesus’s part.
Matthew changes the gentile Syphoenician woman to a Canaanite woman and his Jesus does not cross into gentile territory, and even his feeding of the 4000 remains in the Jewish territory.
This is consistent with the Matthean Jesus sending his disciples only to Jews, but some gentiles being able to be admitted to Israel through their faith.
I quite agree. I think it is safe to say that none of the stories are about Jesus being fallible. My point was just that, depending on the perspective the reader brings to the story, certain things could be thought of as mistakes made by Jesus. ("He chose Judas as an apostle? Whoa, misjudgment!") It has more to do with reader bias than with Jesus.
Of course not everyone would agree that Matthew “changed” events that are reported in his gospel at all. I know this is your position, but I think pointing out that not everyone believes this, and that so far as I know the Christian Church has not traditionally taught this, is important.
Would it be possible for Jesus to be subconsciously prompted into sin? To take the most everyday example of psychoanalytical shenanigans...
Suppose Jesus is engaged in consolatory prayer with a
man who has been shunned by his family for obesity, and instead of saying "We ask you, Lord...", he says "We ask you, lard", thus augmenting the victim's initial humiliation.
Assuming Jesus said "lard" because some part of his lower iceberg wanted to, is he guilty of a sin? Or is the scenario impossible because Jesus' subconscious would never want that in the first place?
Though I think you might be mixing up another issue, which is the question of whether it’s a sin to hurt somebody’s feelings (or always a sin to do so, intentionally or not). I’m sure he caused hurt feelings to some people, but I don’t think he ever did it because he took pleasure in the pain.
Is there such a thing as the Christian Church's traditional teachings,?
Haven't there been many differences all along? Maybe one group took predominance with Constantine, but more splits occurred later anyway.
Haven't there been many changes within the multiple branches on things like creation, the earth being the centre of the universe, the age of the earth, the doctrine of discovery, evolution, gender differences (that's OTTOMH).
I think scholarly analysis of the literature of the canons(sic) of the bible is yet another part of Christian Unrest, which is the subject of this site.
Well, that's why I used the example of someone being mocked for their weight. If you consciously do that to someone in a way that you know they'll find insulting, I think it's pretty clearly a sin.
(When Jesus hurt people's feelings by telling them not to be hypocrites or vainglorious in their worship styles, that was quite a different matter.)
“Matthew changed the gentile Syphoenician woman to a Canaanite woman.” I took that to mean Matthew substituted one woman for another woman, much as if Mark had said “a French woman” and Matthew had changed it to “a German woman.” It’s clear from his reference to whether “Matthew ‘changed’ events” that @ChastMastr took it that way too. And I’m not aware of any Christian tradition that has said that.
Nor is that what I understand modern criticism and analysis to say. Canaanites were gentiles. And my understanding is that the difference between “Syrophoenician” and “Canaanite” is that the former identifies where she’s from/where she lives, while the latter identifies her ethnic background. Both words can be used to identify the same person.
Both Mark and Matthew want to convey to their different audiences that this woman should be seen as an outsider. Mark does this by focusing on where she’s from and her culture (Syrophoenician and Greek) because he knows his audience will understand those descriptors to mean “outsider.” Matthew focuses on her ethnicity (“Canaanite”) because he knows that’s what will say “outsider” to his audience.
But there’s no changing of the woman. The changes are to how she’s described.
Seconded!
And @Lamb Chopped’s too! ❤️
Yes, spot on in each post here.
I've seen the painting of Christ in the home of his parents in the Tate on numerous occasions. It's obviously meant to prefigure the crucifixion.
Are we going to argue that getting himself crucified was a 'failure' on Christ's part?
I think @Gramps49 has answered his own question by saying how we need to avoid Docetism.
Once we've agreed that then I'm not sure what else there is to say other than to second Nick's insightful comments.
In the history of Christianity, docetism was the doctrine that the phenomenon of Jesus, his historical and bodily existence, and above all the human form of Jesus, was mere semblance without any true reality. Broadly, it is taken as the belief that Jesus only seemed to be human, and that his human form was an illusion.
Life on the Ship requires a larger and larger vocabulary!
Are such beliefs fallible? Was Jesus as ignorant about the nature of the universe as his contemporaries? And does it matter?
My answer is probably not. In the dictionary, “fallible” does include the meaning of being wrong. But I sense the intention of the word in scripture is “capable of sin” rather than capable of factual error about the nature of things.
Jesus and the Gospel writers had to use the language of contemporary understanding.
We may have to recontextualise to make sense to our contemporaries.
The Greeks had already determined the earth was round in 500BCE, but for all we know Jesus was not concerned about the circumference of the earth.
😉
Well, in truth, I was a little confused as to LC's response myself. I had mentioned the Greeks pretty well knew the earth was round well before Jesus was born, but I did not think Jesus was focused on that fact. Dafyd mentioned Augustine was not convinced, but he doubted the liberal Roman education would not have included that factoid. Then LC said hers did not.
That was a straight man's--or gal's, in the case of LC--for GG's reply. I had thought about making that reply too, but GG beat me to the punch.
I can assure you that my certainty that the world is not flat has absolutely nothing to do with me understanding the evidence for that from a mathematical standpoint. That doesn’t mean I’m not certain the world is not flat. But the math is over my head.
But yes, I was teasing as @Gramps49 recognised.