I read this CNN story about Osama bin Laden’s relatives wanting proof of death and was smacked with the 2×4 of irony.
It’s in this sentence, quoting writer Jean Sasson, apparently a ghostwriter to the family:
You know how it is in the Middle East so many times: They really need proof or people start believing — this has been discussed by a lot more people than me — that many people will not believe that he’s dead…
So if the Romans had dropped that troublesome prophet guy in the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago instead of leaving him up on the cross, there would have been no Christianity? No witnesses to the allegedly empty tomb? It certainly would have affected the character of the religion.
That’s pretty much what Josiah Ober argued in the essay he contributed to What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. Well, technically, that was a meditation on what would have happened had Kleopatra and Antony been victorious at Actium (which I contest*) but he then goes on to muse that since the Ptolemies already had 3 centuries worth of experience in dealing with the Jews, they would have known how to handle them better than the Romans who only encountered them at the tail end of the Hellenistic period. The Ptolemaic administration would have just exiled Jesus instead of crucifying him, and probably not provoked the religious confrontation in the first place. The remainder of Jesus’ days would have been spent as a respected rabbi and he’d mostly have been forgotten by history. Without the traumatic event of his death for people to rally around Christianity never would have evolved. Though, quite illogically, he then posits a universal church that differs from the church we know only in that the descendants of Kleopatra are the hereditary “popesses” of it. Needless to say, I don’t agree with that either.
* Much as I love Antony and Kleo, changing the outcome of Actium wouldn’t really alter anything: their position had already eroded too far by that point. Besides which, Actium only seems like a watershed event in hindsight (and because we like our history in simple, easily digestible nuggets) they actually continued fighting Octavian from Alexandria for almost a year. But no, if you want to alter history you have to go further back and grant Antony a victory against the Parthians. Because that campaign failed he started losing support from his allies, was forced into desperate measures such as the Donations of Alexandria (which played into Octavian’s negative PR campaign) and increasingly erratic behavior.
No, I haven’t spent hours and hours thinking about this subject. Why ever do you ask? 😀
Drawing on my fannish background in TV, movies, thrillers, and such, I’d always thought that the disposing of a body in the deeps was so that others, perhaps opponents, would not know–in a timely fashion–that X was surely and undoubtedly dead.
So disposing of bin Laden’s body off a ship, I imagined, was to serve that general purpose. Who could be certain, without his body?
Yes, but being Yemenis, I think they’re probably not thinking of Jesus, but of the 12th imam, considered by the Shia to be in “occlusion”, ready to appear at any time.