The purpose of this paper is to attempt to assess Jesus's own understanding of the meaning of his death. The perspectives of current liberal Roman Catholic Christology will be assumed, especially in terms of distinguishing between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It might seem audacious to try to deduce what Jesus himself thought of his death, and yet such an attempt is now not especially difficult, once one realizes that it is merely a question of second-guessing another human being, not of trying to read the mind of a god. Between the second and nineteenth centuries A.D., an era in which the divine nature of the Christ was foremost in Christian thought, it was almost universally assumed that Jesus was omniscient, and so must have had complete foreknowledge of his death and so of his resurrection. However, as modern theology has refocused on the human side of Christ's dual nature, it has become clear that Jesus could not have had such foreknowledge if he was truly human. If Jesus had not been so, had been a god pretending to be human, as the Gnostics apparently thought, then Christianity would be ultimately no different from, say, Hinduism (although perhaps there was such a person as Rama or Krishna behind the myths) or many other religions.
Christian tradition insists that Christianity differs from other religions precisely because Jesus really was human. As a human being, he perceived and thought by means of a human brain, which cannot hold infinite
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