neither Jesus or Buddha was trained as a priest or theologian, and they each lived in a time and place where people were trained...
neither Jesus or Buddha was trained as a priest or theologian, and they each lived in a time and place where people were trained as priests and theologians
Buddha was in fact a trained theologian according to the stories. Before his enlightenment he spent years being initiated into the various monastic orders of the time and gaining the very highest level of proficiency in their teachings before growing dissatisfied with each one in turn.
As for Jesus he was God so theology would just be the study of himself.
Well fair, when challenged I notice this is me projecting backwards my particularistic sense of what a “priest” or “theologian” or even “training” is, and just how much that depends on institutionalization, that’s worth exploring.
Like, yeah Buddha moved among a circle of sages who knew Vedic texts and pitched their own ideas by reference to them.
And Jesus too showed not only awareness of Hebrew scriptures and priestly practices but of his contemporaries in the local indie spiritual scene - John the Baptist most famously.
I do think of “priest” as fundamentally connected to the notion of “ritual officiant” and of clerical status though, and the fact that both figures made a point of not performing rituals and of not being born or inducted into a priestly class is too big a strike against that
Theology… that’s tougher and now that I think about this I’m not sure I can defend it. It’s like, are people just thinking about the nature of the world doing philosophy? If they’re drawing on something they were taught that wasn’t labeled Philosophy, are they trained philosophers? If you add divinity does it work the same as theology?
Because yeah they hung with gurus, but Life of Brian had a point with the marketplace, if people are people then “independent spiritual figures” covers street preachers or just crazies yelling about God about the same as the street preachers and crazies we have today. Are those guys theologians?
Maybe at the higher end it includes weirdo geniuses who offer cutting insights and critiques about social systems too degraded for them to tolerate and thrive within. I’m one of those guys. I even talk about and critique and reinvent religion sometimes. Am I a theologian? If you took something you read from me and worked it into a worldview would that mean you’d been trained in theology? I don’t see it.
I admit I’m not sure about how to understand transmission of Vedic ideas - even if I’m trying to impose models from my own home culture, there’s precedent for apprenticeship models of professional (in the traditional sense) education - I suppose I would consider someone who started out as a law clerk and then “read for the bar” in the 19th century to have been trained as a lawyer, and the unlettered preachers of American low church Protestantism… well they boast of being untrained, that’s the point.
So I guess Buddha counts as theologically trained but in a tradition neither he nor the theologians who explicate his own tradition preached.
I think the important thing is I think of theologians interpreting a corpus of some sort, texts or stories or traditions, and their basic function as articulating things with that corpus. And of priests as practicing rituals of some sort.
And I guess the point is that’s a thing that was already being done when these guys showed up, a route they could have taken but didn’t in favor of being I guess the role I’d define against “priests” or “theologians” is prophets, who establish the traditions theologians explicate, in the name of whose charisma rituals are conducted.
Because that was kind of the point of that post, to remind my fellow weirdo geniuses (incl. myself) to buck up, the world is young still and they’re really not that far off from the greats. Same as that Machiavelli post.
Was also thinking of pointing out that Karl Marx was an obscure essayist who hung out in the Victorian equivalent of Wikipedia reading and making epistolary blog posts when he wasn’t working on his opuses about how when you apply his interpretation of his influences (Hegel’s well known, but I also vibe a lot of the physiocrats in his attempt to quantify the immaterial aspects of political economy) to the things he’s noticed in industrializing London and the Rhine valley it actually explained the whole of history.
Also I do wonder if Buddha’s teachers would have been considered particularly relevant or wise if they hadn’t led to him. Honestly, we only know of John the Baptist at all, let alone as a worthy figure because he influenced Jesus, if not he’d have been some forgotten weirdo dunking people in a river. (Would we think Socrates mattered if not for Plato if not for Aristotle?)