Jaspers' "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus"
Elizabeth Hubbell
Jaspers seems to deal in various different -- perhaps contradictory? --
ways with these four paradigmatic figures.
For instance, when it comes to Jesus, Jaspers generally reflects the
more modern scholarship that has focused increasingly on certain
parallel sayings in Matthew and Luke as "Q Gospel" remnants and on the
earliest Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts of the earliest extant
Gospel, Mark.
Yet recent similarly focused scholarly studies on the other three
paradigmatic figures covered here don't seem reflected in Jaspers' book
to the same extent.
Personally, I am not as disturbed as some may be by applying modern
scholarship to the Gospels. That's fine. Rather, what I miss is the
same strictness applied to the other three written traditions covered here.
Confucius, for example, is eventually described as having held high
office only when we get to relatively late texts in the Confucian
tradition. Yet Jaspers accepts this description of him without
question. In fact, if, as Jaspers does by inference in his Jesus
chapter, we are to set some of what we read in the Gospel of John aside,
then oughtn't we set aside similar texts describing Confucius as having
had conspicuous political success? If the "Q Gospel" passages in
Matthew/Luke and the earliest manuscript tradition for Mark are to be
highlighted as delineations of the "historical Jesus", then only
Chapters 3 through 9 of the Analects of Confucius, generally regarded as
the earliest stratum of Confucian text, should be the primary basis for
the kind of modern philosophical scrutiny Jaspers purports to offer.
Jaspers' Confucius chapter does not confine itself to the kind of
wandering, almost homeless, figure found in these seven earliest
chapters. To be consistent, shouldn't it?
While it's useful for Jaspers, at the outset of his Buddha chapter, to
single out the Digha-Nikaya collection as the earliest stratum of Buddha
sermons, the rest of the Buddha chapter goes well beyond the
Digha-Nikaya collection, even flirting occasionally with Buddha
traditions lying outside the Pali tradition altogether, let alone the
Digha-Nikaya collection!
There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it becomes inconsistent
in the light of Jaspers' tacit adoption of certain tenets of modern
historical criticism in his Jesus chapter. (To do Jaspers justice, he
never explicitly offers quite the detailed textual background on the
Gospel tradition that I attempt here.)
What, IMO, might prove a more creditable effort -- since I would agree
that these four figures indeed emerge as the most strongly verified
human beings in history to live an essentially blameless life oriented
toward an entirely self-made, and therefore inherently courageous, ethic
-- would be a survey based exclusively on those fifteen or so sermons in
the Digha-Nikaya regarded by modern scholars as the earliest for Buddha,
on Chapters 3 through 9 of the Analects for Confucius, on the earliest,
least "spun", Plato dialogues, such as the Hippias Minor, the Charmides,
the Euthyphro, the Apology and the Crito, for Socrates, and on the
Vaticanus/Sinaiticus Mark tradition plus the "Q" passages in
Matthew/Luke for Jesus. It is unfortunate that Jaspers' book, with all
its modern trappings (not in itself a bad thing, IMO), fails to do this
rigorously.
Jaspers should be given credit, though, for a worthwhile start at the
important task of evaluating as a group perhaps the four finest human
beings ever to walk this earth.
Cordially,
Geof. Riggs