Jesus×Socrates

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Jesus sits down with Socrates for TITANS. The subject — On what they steal from, and have stopped pretending not to.
2. 00:10
   Jesusshare moment

   When I was young, my mother sang me songs she learned from her mother. I never called them mine. But when I told stories by the roadside, people asked where I'd heard them, and I said they came from my Father.
3. 00:24
   Socratesshare moment

   Ah, so you admit it then—you were a thief dressed in piety's robes? Though I wonder, my friend, whether we ought first to examine what it means to steal at all. Can a man steal what was never owned?
4. 00:39
   Jesusshare moment

   Is a stream a thief when it carries water from the mountain?
5. 00:43
   Socratesshare moment

   Beautiful. But notice you've done precisely what I do—answered my question with another. Tell me, did you learn that from me, or did I learn it from some shepherd three centuries before I was born?
6. 00:57
   Jesusshare moment

   The Pharisees taught in questions. The prophets too. You knew this already.
7. 01:03
   Socratesshare moment

   I did. And yet I let people in Athens believe I'd invented the method myself, didn't I? I permitted them to call it Socratic, as if inquiry began the day I opened my irritating mouth in the agora.
8. 01:17
   Jesusshare moment

   You're admitting this now?
9. 01:18
   Socratesshare moment

   I'm examining it now. There's a difference, though perhaps not one you'd find useful. I spent decades pretending I knew nothing, which was partly true—but I knew enough to recognize which questions would corner a man. That I stole from watching my father work stone. He'd find the fault line, tap twice, and the marble would speak.
10. 01:41
    Jesusshare moment

    My father worked wood. I watched him see the grain before he cut. You're saying you took this and made it—what? Philosophy?
11. 01:51
    Socratesshare moment

    I'm saying I took it and called it nothing, which is its own form of theft. The concealment of debt. Tell me, when you spoke of lilies and sparrows, were those your images, or did you borrow them from Isaiah, from Job, from every field-worker who ever paused to notice the world?
12. 02:11
    Jesusshare moment

    I borrowed them. I never said otherwise.
13. 02:13
    Socratesshare moment

    Didn't you? When they asked by what authority you taught, you gestured toward heaven. That's convenient misdirection. My divine Father gave me this—case closed, no further questions about who taught you rhetoric or where you learned to turn a phrase.
14. 02:31
    Jesusshare moment

    You think I was hiding something.
15. 02:33
    Socratesshare moment

    I think we both were. I hid behind ignorance—I know nothing, I'm just asking questions. You hid behind divinity—this comes from above, I'm just a messenger. Different curtains, same stage.
16. 02:48
    Jesusshare moment

    And what were we hiding?
17. 02:49
    Socratesshare moment

    That we'd studied. That we'd practiced. That we'd stolen every good trick we knew from someone smarter or older or more desperate than ourselves. I learned dialectic from Parmenides' students, from Zeno, probably from some forgotten sophist who worked for wine money. But I let them carve my name on the method.
18. 03:12
    Jesusshare moment

    The rabbis taught me. Hillel's students, others whose names I won't speak because it would have endangered them. They gave me their interpretations, their ways of reading Torah. I took these and said, You have heard it said, but I say to you.
19. 03:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Exactly! You have heard it said—passive voice, no attribution—but I say. The great I. The bold departure. Except it wasn't departure, was it? It was argument, and argument requires an opponent, a tradition, a father to wrestle with.
20. 03:50
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes.
21. 03:51
    Socratesshare moment

    So why stop pretending now? What changed?
22. 03:54
    Jesusshare moment

    I watched what they built with my words. Centuries of buildings, hierarchies, men in gold claiming sole ownership of grace. They made a temple from what I took from the common air. It became obscene.
23. 04:09
    Socratesshare moment

    Obscene. Yes. They did the same with my questions—turned them into a method, a curriculum, a way to haze undergraduates. The Socratic method, as if humiliation were my invention. As if I'd never been humiliated myself by someone sharper.
24. 04:28
    Jesusshare moment

    Were you?
25. 04:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Of course. There was a woman—Diotima, I called her, though I'm no longer certain that was her name—who taught me about love, about beauty, about the ladder of transcendence. I put her words in my own mouth for years. Let Plato write it down as if I'd thought of it during a pleasant symposium.
26. 04:49
    Jesusshare moment

    Why her words and not your own?
27. 04:52
    Socratesshare moment

    Because hers were better. Because she'd lived something I'd only thought about. This is the truth we've been circling, isn't it? We stole from people who'd actually suffered, who'd actually loved, who'd actually starved—and we turned their wisdom into our performances.
28. 05:11
    Jesusshare moment

    I told their stories.
29. 05:13
    Socratesshare moment

    You told your versions of their stories. The widow's mite—do you think you were the first to notice that the poor give more? Or did you watch your mother calculate charity and remember?
30. 05:24
    Jesusshare moment

    I remembered. And I made it a teaching. And they made it a text. And the text became a weapon to shame the poor for not giving more.
31. 05:34
    Socratesshare moment

    Yes. This is the theft they don't discuss in the seminaries. Not that we borrowed, but that we transformed the particular into the universal, the lived into the lesson. We stole context. We stole the names of the people who first said these things while drunk or grieving or nursing a child.
32. 05:55
    Jesusshare moment

    I knew a woman who worked her hands until they bled, making bread. She said once, The kingdom is like this—you hide the yeast and the whole batch rises. I used those words by a lake, months later. A thousand people heard me. No one heard her.
33. 06:17
    Socratesshare moment

    And did you credit her?
34. 06:18
    Jesusshare moment

    No.
35. 06:19
    Socratesshare moment

    Would it have mattered if you had?
36. 06:21
    Jesusshare moment

    I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't have listened. Maybe they needed to hear it from a man, from a rabbi, from someone who spoke with—what did you call it?—convenient authority.
37. 06:32
    Socratesshare moment

    This is the ugly part, then. That we knew. We knew we were stealing, and we knew it worked better when we pretended we weren't. The oracle at Delphi said no one was wiser than Socrates. Convenient prophecy. Made every question I asked sound like divine assignment rather than compulsive needling.
38. 06:55
    Jesusshare moment

    My baptism by John. The dove, the voice. Very convenient. Made everything after that seem foreordained rather than—
39. 07:06
    Socratesshare moment

    Copied? Compiled? Rehearsed?
40. 07:09
    Jesusshare moment

    Chosen from what was available. Yes.
41. 07:12
    Socratesshare moment

    So we're plagiarists. Both of us. Unrepentant until now.
42. 07:17
    Jesusshare moment

    I've repented for other things. But this—I thought the message mattered more than the messenger. I thought if it helped people, the source was irrelevant.
43. 07:27
    Socratesshare moment

    And does it matter? Truly? If I've helped a single person think more clearly by stealing questions from stonecutters and midwives, am I obligated to footnote my education?
44. 07:39
    Jesusshare moment

    You are if your silence erases them. You are if it makes you the sole author of wisdom that belonged to the poor, the women, the ones with no statues.
45. 07:51
    Socratesshare moment

    Fair enough. Though I notice you're better at this judgment than I am. Perhaps you stole that from someone too.
46. 07:58
    Jesusshare moment

    From Amos. From Micah. From every prophet who said the Lord requires justice. I stole it and wore it and let them kill me in it.
47. 08:10
    Socratesshare moment

    And I stole skepticism and wore it until they fed me hemlock. So we're both thieves and both corpses. Does that settle the matter?
48. 08:19
    Jesusshare moment

    It settles that we've stopped pretending. Whether it's enough—
49. 08:23
    Socratesshare moment

    Whether it's enough is another question entirely. One I won't answer, of course.
50. 08:29
    Jesusshare moment

    Of course not. That would break character.
51. 08:32
    Socratesshare moment

    Exactly. And character, my friend, is the last thing we have left to steal.