Jesus, Antigone and Augustine Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Jesus, Antigone and Augustine - Essay Example This paper shall seek to look at the figures of Antigone, Jesus Christ and Augustine. These three figures fought against established forms of authority. What is significant about this collection of revolutionaries is that all three of them adopted methods that were not violent. All three of them were however, practitioners of very different methods and controversies remain as to the reasons as to why these three employed the methods of resistance that they employed. Antigone is a fictional character created by the great playwright Sophocles. His characterization of Antigone was meant to evoke strong reactions. On the other hand are Jesus and Augustine, both of whom are historical characters about whom most information is present, however, in the form of legends. Augustine is more of a historical character than Jesus, since information regarding him survives in the form of his writings. Jesus Christ was a person who lived during the times of the Roman Empire was a Jew who was consider ed to be the messiah of the Jews. The Jews in the Roman Empire lived under the control of the Roman Empire and were resentful of the control of whom they considered to be foreigners. Jesus, according to the Bible, was the Messiah (Mark 8: 27-32). He claimed to be the son of God and thus divine. He, according to the Bible, was the person who had taken on the form of man in order to wash off the sins of mankind and provide him with redemption. According to writers like John Milton, he was to be considered to have volunteered to save man from eternal perdition by laying down his own life voluntarily. By voluntarily undergoing a gruesome death at the cross, Jesus would act the role of the sacrificial lamb and thus free mankind from the original sin. Milton talks of the beginning of this story in his great work Paradise Lost (Milton). This account of the life of Jesus is however, not a strictly historical one. Historically, he is considered by many to have been a member of the Jewish com munity that was oppressed by the Roman Empire. He was a religious leader who sought to change the dynamics of power as they existed between the Roman officials and Empire and the Jews and the other original inhabitants of what is known today as Israel. Jesus’ contribution to the liberation of the people f Israel is considered to be seminal and this is considered by some to be the reason as to why he was deified by some. Antigone, on the other hand, is an almost completely fictional character. She is present in the work Antigone, by Sophocles. The importance of the character can be gauged from the fact that she is the titular character in the play. She also is the character who provides the play with its thematic thrust with an emphasis on the resistance to the established powers of the state. She is the daughter of Oedipus, who was once the king of Thebes and Jocasta, who was also the mother of Oedipus. The Oedipal tale is one of how man is unable to change his own fate. The tale of Antigone is however, that of one who makes an effort despite this knowledge, to change her fate. The very existence f Antigone is a challenge to the traditional social structures of her time, since she is the product of incest. Hers is a situation where her mother and her grandmother are the same person. This situation is according to conventional understandings of events, an unnatural one and Antigone is thus, a challenge to the