If Jesus knew that he was going to be killed and yet he went anyway, is that suicide?

He’s the Son of God. It might have been a little different for him than it woulda for a human being.

That, and the whole message/sacrifice thing.

No, because he was acted upon by external forces. Then again, suicide by cop is the same situation. Maybe the difference is that he did not actively seek his death?

I guess technically it is a sort of suicide. But, I don’t think it is much different than Martin Luther King, Jr., or other people who have died or taken grave risk to fight for what they believed was right. Do you think of soldiers as being suicidal who go on dangerous missions? It is almost the same to me. Maybe there is an outside hope the inevitable won’t happen? For Jesus it was fulflilling some sort of prophecy I would think? I don’t know enough about it, but seems if he was who he said he was, he had no worries about dying.

Are you asking because Christians are not supposed to take their own life?

@JLeslie GP about the soldiers. Does seem somewhat similar.

It is not suicide, because you cannot predict the outcomes in truth, and you cannot control the outside forces.

It is not dissimilar to a young man volunteering to fight for his country; volunteering for the most dangerous “suicide” missions.

As said above, outcome was unknown. After all, his dad could have given him a pardon.

@Provlear “suicide by cop” is usually not done for any motive other than to escape the unbearable—a selfish motive.

No, it was obedience. He knew he was going to have to do it, and he was afraid and lonely, and he complained to his Father while he was hanging from the cross, because after all he was human. But he did it because it was his job.
And no one said Christians weren’t supposed to take their own lives; a Pope decided that, so it only applies to Roman Catholics.

@susanc Really? I did not know that. I made a bad assumption then. It seems to me the Christian faith is very negative about euthanasia so I assumed.

@JLeslie That is presuming to make a decision about someone else’s life. Some believe that is god’s prerogative.

@JLeslie – A lot of people are against euthanasia, and states are afraid to legalize it because it would make murder so easy. But Protestant churches don’t regard suicide as punishable by eternity in hell.

It is no more suicide than Crockett, Bowie, Travis and their men when they decided to defend the Alamo against Santa Anna.

Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want for the greater good. Even if you know the likely outcome is your own death.

“knew for sure” – that’s an important part.

Suicide is the intentional taking of ones own life. It can be argued that if you step in front of an oncoming train, believing that when it strikes you, you will die, you are attempting suicide. If successful you have committed suicide.

Add a cause to it and there is a convenient way around this however, martyrdom.

Well more people die on freeways than anywhere else, but is getting on I-40 get to work an attempted suicide? Suicide is pulling the trigger, not buying the gun.

Well, I doubt he wanted to die sooo >_>;;;;

He was only doing what he thought was right.

God doesn’t have to obey his own rules. If he did he’d be in big-ass trouble.

@Qingu Jesus is God the Son, and as an obedient child, He followed the words of our God the Father.

He didn’t commit suicide. He was so destined to endure, suffer and die under the hands of the Romans as was planned by the Holy Father. And to be Resurrected and Ascended into the Heavens to be with His Father for all eternity. It was probably a sort of show-and-tell to the people of the power of Faith.

It’s said that He was aware of his forthcoming death, and for a few moments in time He asked His Father if He could “let this cup pass from me”. He knew it was necessary for the good of all of the inhabitants of the Earth, so, obedient to the Plan, he willingly gave up his life.

As has been said by others before, it was sacrifice, willingly giving up His life, but not suicide, as He did not kill himself. Also not suicide in the sense that He knew that He would not be dead for long, then would be alive forever after that.

It wasn’t easy, and it obviously wasn’t fun at ALL, but He did it for the love he had for all of us, and showing obedience to His Father. He understood that it was essential for someone to do it, and was willing to be the one.

@njnyjobs, that is correct. Jesus was indeed destined by God, who is both his father and himself, to suffer and die as a sacrifice… to himself… so that humanity would not be punished for our sins… despite the fact that he would be the one doing the punishing in the first place.

I am wondering what drugs you have to take for Christianity to make sense.

destiny. we all have it.

@iam2smart99037 it is if you believe it will be and intend for that action to be lethal to yourself.

Perhaps he had should have asked fluther’s advice on the matter.I’m sure we would have put him right, probably.

No

That’s bravery.

Martyrdom looks like suicide but in the case of a true martyr unlike suicide bombers they do not pull their own trigger. They are just slaughtered for their truth. The world hates the truth.

If you read the text, you will see that he was a willing sacrifice. In the war on the heavenly plane, it was considered a master counter stroke.

Yes and no. Seeing as language is man-made it’s all how one defines the word suicide. It’s all semantics.

Soliders know they might die but they go anyway. Jesus wasn’t all that special, he was at war and he did what warriors do.

@Symbeline… you nailed it. :)

Suicide is an active process. Jesus quite explicitly remained passive throughout the ordeal.

Jesus the man knew his execution was a predictable outcome. He was knowledgeable about human behaviour and he understood that martyrs are long remembered and their deaths often ensure their cause and their message outlive the martyr. He saw his death as a sacrifice that was essential to strengthen the movement and to ensure it would continue beyond his lifetime. I suspect that even Jesus could not have anticipated how much his sacrificial act contributed to a religious movement that has persisted in a wide variety of forms for over 2,000 years.

Of course, his followers were smart to purge all the Jews who part of the Jesus movement in the early days. Those people were still strongly tied to Jewish law and the Torah and would not, in the long run, be good Christians. The roman citizens and former pagans in the movement were better suited to keep the fledgling religion going and they expanded the belief system to include mysteries and miracles that gave the new religion the trappings that make it easier to spread the faith throughout the world.

The periodic exploitation and slaughter of Jews and Muslims over the centuries helped consolidate the gains of spreading the faith and to line the pockets of European nobles who raised armies for the crusades to purge the Holy Land of those who did not accept the Christian faith. The Inquisition enriched the Church by seizing the property of Jews and Muslims who did not agree to being forcibly converted. It laid the groundwork for long-standing antisemitism.

Even in the 7th Century, Pope Clement actively persecuted Jews and continued to blame Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, even though the Roman Empire was run by Romans and not the persecuted Jews living under the heavy hand of the Roman rulers.

In fact up until Vatican II, the Church continued to hold the Jews responsible for the crucifixion. These notions were not discarded after the Protestant Reformation.

Even into the 20th these ideas continued to be repeated from the pulpits of many churches of most denominations at Easter services.

I believe Jesus was a man, a teacher and perhaps a prophet who may or may not have believed he was the Messiah. His followers certainly asserted that Jesus was the Messiah despite the fact that most of the ancient prophesies about what would happen when the Messiah come were not fulfilled. This lead to the promise of a second coming which would be the time when those prophesies would then be fulfilled.

While I am not a Christian, I believe that many Christians today have abandoned old prejudices against Jews. Of course there has been a significant rise in hatred and prejudice against Muslims as a result of 9/11 and the subsequent attacks on Iraq and the ongoing war due to the attempt to continue to occupy Iraq by the USA.

I am opposed to racial and religious hatred and persecution. Do you suppose Jesus felt the same way?

Sacrifice not suicide.

If He’s 100% human and 100% God, then suicide is outta the picture. He instead sacrificed, and risked his life to save us.

By the definition of the word, no. Suicide is dying by your own hand. And we certainly don’t accuse soldiers who stand up firing as an enemy advances of having committed suicide. They get a Medal of Honor for bravery instead, for laying down their life to protect their comrades.

@Dr_Lawrence Funny, that’s not how it plays out in the Bible…

@Dr_Lawrence Excellent post!

@MRSHINYSHOES Agreed. He sacrificed his life in order to give man the chance to be saved.

@Dr_Lawrence
Wow what a nice story. It almost seems quasi biographical. If I didn’t know better I would say you were a time traveling modern day Atheist sent back in time to have a groovy trip for the benefit of mankind. but hey maybe you do have a time machine….

@SeventhSense I wish I could travel through time, but that would be a discussion for another thread. I would go along with those that suggest Jesus willingly did not resist because he felt it would undermine his message of peace and love and would have undermined the support of his followers.

@Dr_Lawrence
I agree with much of what you said but likewise much is conjecture.

Most of what people think they know about people from over 2,000 years ago is conjecture. The Bible is not a history text although it does in places attempt to report the sequence in which events supposedly occurred.

@Dr_Lawrence – Jesus wanted to reform Judaism. He didn’t want to found Christianity.

@mattbrowne
Exactly good point. The scribes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were said to be have been devout Jews as well as followers of Jesus. It was only as the gospel was spread abroad to areas in Greece and the Roman Kingdom that there were adaptions made to the local traditions to assimilate the message to the local culture.

@SeventhSense, I’ve never heard of the Essenes (the people who wrote/collected the Dead Sea scrolls) being followers of Jesus. Where did you get that information?

Early Christians (and modern Christians) had a reverence for the Jewish scriptures so there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to point to out that some Messianic Jews were followers of Jesus and scribes. In fact the scripture of the early Christians was the Jewish Scripture-Torah.

Okay, that in no way answered my question whatsoever. I am having trouble parsing the logic of it, if there is any.

Because some Jews were followers of Jesus, the Essenes were followers of Jesus?

@Qingu
Do you think that there’s verifiable proof that the Essenes wrote the dead sea scrolls? There isn’t even verifiable proof that there were a group called the Essenes.

The Essenes are mentioned by several ancient historians… do you think they were just making them up or something?

Also, again, I’m not sure what your point is?

@Qingu
Much is circumstantial.