The words above were spoken, of course, about the great Ferris Bueller. But they could just as easily describe the person whose horrible torture and death that Christians celebrate this week–Jesus Christ. As the mysterious founder of the predominant Western religion, Jesus Christ remains a figure of fascination for philosophers, artists, and politicans–and no doubt will for centuries. Indeed, one particularly interesting thing about the history of western thought is that many great minds appreciate Jesus in his own right–but keep him very distinct from the Church that shares his name. Given that, I thought it would be appropriate this week to share a smattering of some of the great unorthodox appreciations of Jesus Christ that have been written over the past few centuries.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Believe it or not, even that most anti-Christian of philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, did not have bad things to say about Jesus Christ, even in his seminal religious work, The Anti-Christ. Indeed, Nietzsche famously contended that “The last Christian died on the Cross.” In other words, the Church twisted and tore Jesus’ words and thoughts until they were unrecognizable. Here’s an excerpt from The Anti-Christ explaining this very concept:

“If I understand anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths’, only inner realities — that he understood the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasion for metaphor. The concept ‘the Son of Man’ is not a concrete person beloging to history, anything at all individual or unique, but an ‘eternal fact, a psychological symbol freed from the time concept.

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But it is patently obvious what is alluded to in the symbols ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ — not patently obvious to everyone, I grant: in the word ‘Son’ is expressed the entry into the collective feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness), in the word ‘Father’ this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity. — I am ashamed to recall what the Church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of Christian ‘faith’?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson also spoke quite highly of the ethical philosophy of Jesus Christ. Perhaps his best characterization of this was in his address to the Harvard Divinity School, excerpted here.

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.”

Nick Cave

Singer/songwriter Nick Cave sings songs about death, love, murder, heartache, revenge, Greek mythology–and religion. Here’s some of his thoughts about Jesus from his Introduction to the Gospel of Mark.

“The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. Christ, it seemed to me was the victim of humanity’s lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.

The Gospel According to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source of my spirituality, my religiousness. The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid ‘Saviour’ - the man smiling benignly at a group of children or serenely hanging from the cross - denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in Mark. Thus the Church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps ‘praise’ but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark’s Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.

Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity - our ordinariness, our mediocrity - and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to fly. In short, to be Christ-like.”

Ayn Rand

In forming her philosophy of Objectivism, Ayn Rand disavowed all notions of the supernatural and religious. Still, even she had admiration for Jesus, as she wrote here in a letter to a fan in 1946.

“Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism — the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means — one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one’s soul — (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one’s soul?) — Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one’s soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one’s soul to the souls of others.”

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, who you may recall as being the President of the United States, among other things, was an avowed deist. Still, he had a great admiration for Jesus Christ himself, and even wrote a “Bible” in which he excised all of the supernatural elements of the Gospels in order to present Jesus’ ethical philosophy. Here are some of his thoughts about Jesus from a letter to Joseph Priestly.

“I should proceed to a view of the life, character, and doctrines of Jesus, who sensible of incorrectness of their ideas of the Deity, and of morality, endeavored to bring them to the principles of a pure deism, and juster notions of the attributes of God, to reform their moral doctrines to the standard of reason, justice and philanthropy, and to inculcate the belief of a future state. This view would purposely omit the question of his divinity, and even his inspiration. To do him justice, it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines had to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard them from him; when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in every paradoxical shape. Yet such are the fragments remaining as to show a master workman, and that his system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers. His character and doctrines have received still greater injury from those who pretend to be his special disciples, and who have disfigured and sophisticated his actions and precepts, from views of personal interest, so as to induce the unthinking part of mankind to throw off the whole system in disgust, and to pass sentence as an impostor on the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.”

Joe Bob Briggs

Last but certainly not least comes an excerpt of one of my favorite essays about Jesus Christ, written by the great redneck and movie critic Joe Bob Briggs.

“At any rate, since this ‘What would Jesus do?’ thing is apparently not going away any time soon, let’s make a list of what we know he would do:

He wouldn’t own anything.

He wouldn’t care what he ate or drank.

He wouldn’t give any thought to what he was going to do or say today, which pretty much rules out petition campaigns and worries about commuting. It’s that whole ‘take no thought for the morrow’ thing.

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He never spoke against the most cruel government in the world–that would be Rome–and in fact urged cooperation with it. ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ he said.

He didn’t care much for family values. He said, in fact, that you need to first hate your family if you’re to follow him.

The only use he had for the environment was that the plant kingdom was a perfect way to illustrate spiritual parables. Faith is like a kernel of wheat. Christians are like the fruit of the vine. If you asked him what the purpose of the environment was, he would probably say, ‘Simply to see something more important than the environment.’

I should throw in one more for the pro-life people. He didn’t speak against abortion at all. This was in a culture that not only had abortion, but the practice of abandoning babies to die of exposure if they were discovered to have physical flaws or diseases.

In other words, he wasn’t a political sorta guy. He was the Son of God. If you really wanna ask what he would do, I hope you’re prepared to go the whole nine yards. After all, the most important thing he did . . . was die.”