Clipped cover of Jesus & Buddha: The Parallel Sayings by Marcus Borg and published by Ulysses Press in 2004 – an interesting book and also apt illustration for this special mention entry

(4) SAVIOR – JESUS & BUDDHA

By definition, mythic heroes tend to be saviors on a mythic scale, even on the scale of saving the world.

Jesus and Buddha are the definitive world saviors – indeed, so much so that one might wonder why I don’t rank them higher than this special mention entry.

Well, firstly and most fundamentally, Jesus and Buddha are world saviors as the foundational figures of the world religions named for them (or technically, Jesus’s title as Christ). Other heroes of mythology, notably those of classical mythology, may have had their cults, but the hero cults of Jesus and Buddha – if one calls them that, as at least one historian did when observing Christianity to be a Greek hero cult devoted to a Jewish messiah – persist in contemporary religious belief. Accordingly, as heroic figures they are regarded with reverence that requires them to be ranked separately, even uniquely – hence this special mention. Indeed, even ranking them together or among the heroes of mythology might be regarded as controversial to that reverence.

There’s another reason I rank them as special mention. Jesus and Buddha are similarly unique as heroes in that they are not saviors by the use of violence, even that violence used against the forces of evil or chaos that is characteristic of other heroes. Instead, they defeat those forces and save the world by other means, spiritual rather than physical – Jesus by belief or faith, and Buddha by enlightenment.

Indeed, it’s a plot point in Buddha’s legendary biography that he renounces his princely status – and the prophecy of more conventional heroic conquest, eschewing conquering the world for saving it. He effectively renounces it again when tempted in his fabled meditation under the Bo Tree by the forces of evil represented by the demon lord Mara. Jesus similarly renounces such things as all the kingdoms of the world when offered to him instead of his path to salvation, in his even more famous trial of temptation. Jesus also famously inverts the model of heroic conquest even more so than Buddha, saving the world not by conventional victory or violence but by self-sacrifice – the ultimate gambit of winning by losing, as it were.

Otherwise, they are so well known as religious figures, even outside their respective religions – albeit more so for Jesus due to the more pervasive extent and influence of his religion – that it would be redundant to recite further details, other than to observe that each could be the subject of their own top ten, indeed of many such lists.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)