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There is more to Jesus Christ then what comes with attributing elements of a hero story to him. There are the scriptures preceding him that came from writing for over a thousand years that were uniquely preserved and used for study, with a great number of prophecies, with fulfillment being found otherwise, but many of them for the Messiah, which are fulfilled in Jesus.
The only heroes I think deserve their title are those who make no claim to being heroes. You know, Jon Snow, not Daenerys Targaryen. The former doesn't make claim to his own greatness, whereas the latter has half a million titles for what ultimately came down to the most unwilled thing of all, her birth.
The hero that marinates in his own greatness takes credit for something that isn't his own. He ignores the genetic and phenotypic (intelligence, muscles, etc.), familial, upbringing, social economic status, and other variables that make him who he is. Yes, the best hero is the one who asserts his will the most, who takes the most risks. But who can really measure that given the complicated inner world of any particular person? What I see as an amazing act of will might really be an act with the highest motivation and a hidden payoff. The younger Arnold Schwarzenegger is indubitably a hero of bodybuilding, but he's also the guy who said that working out is like reaching an [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]. Why should he be a hero compared to the average Joe who puts in eight hours a day and gets no praise?
But there are definitely heroic acts. A man who risks death to save an anonymous child is unambiguously heroic, even if the man himself isn't a hero in the fuller characterological sense. Yet how many people consistently commit heroic acts like this, where the hero genuinely makes a risk over and over again? These types of heroes are short-lived for obvious reasons.
The hero is a flower lavished with praise without considering the garden and soil that made him possible. He as the individual may indeed put in the sweaty will-based work without which he wouldn't achieve the status he has, but this is only the tip of an iceberg, the rest of which is a collection of givens, and no outside person can truly know how hard the hero has worked to attain his status given these givens, centering on motivation, which always pushes a person and so makes willing easier.
The best hero is the one who gives away his status as hero. The hero of humility who reflects back his heroness to the family and upbringing and ultimately the very universe that placed him where he did at the time it did. He realizes like the poet Pablo Neruda that life is a borrowing of bones. You didn't create the prerequisites to becoming who you became. A hero is just someone with a lucky set of prerequisites and not even necessarily a strong will, or any will at all, to actualize them into his heroism.
I cringe every time someone refers to an athlete as a "hero". The Olympics are a hard time for my shoulders.I couldn't agree more. Why call a person a "hero" for simply doing their job and doing it well? Professional athletes come to mind here.
I cringe every time someone refers to an athlete as a "hero". The Olympics are a hard time for my shoulders.
variant said:You mean that the Jesus hero story followed the Jewish hero story and fulfilled all their prophecies of their ultimate hero?
But since I was already skeptical of the general middle eastern hero story, and the general Jewish hero story, as I am skeptical of the modern day hero story, the whole thing seems rather artificial.
In fact, if one does a bit of browsing of the various middle eastern heroes of the day you will find quite a bit of parallel story telling to those things attributed to Jesus.
Actually I say that the writings of the Bible show a really great reliability, including with prophecies written that were fulfilled afterward, and with accounts written with realism that has no parallel found any other of such ancient writing. There isn't compelling reason for me to doubt it, even if others convince themselves that what is depicted is doubtful.
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