In some of its issues, the journal The Atlantic asks its readers various questions. For example, a recent question was “What book or article would you make required reading for everyone on Earth?” First came Fahrenheit 451 with 42% endorsement followed by Silent Spring with 22%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
In this September issue, the question was “Whose untimely death would you most like to reverse?” Some of the answers included: Abraham Lincoln’s; Yitzhak Rabin’s; and Martin Luther King’s. Two figures not mentioned would have been my likely choices: Alexander the Great and Jesus Christ? Both died at about the same age, around 31-33 years old. They also died in the Middle East, Alexander the Great in Babylon and Jesus in Jerusalem. Their deaths were separated by 1,181 km. in distance and 356 year in time.
Had Alexander the Great lived into a mature age, he might have turned direction and campaigned westward into Italy, the Gaul, and even Spain and Britain. That could have forestalled or at least delayed the ascendancy of Rome and produced a much different Hellenistic world after his death. The fractured empire of Alexander, due to his premature death, gave us new intellectual centers, like Alexandria with its Library and Museum. Would this be possible under Alexander’s concentrated and capricious rule? Or Alexander might have resumed his advance to the East and after crossing India, his armies could have made contact with China and its vast land and populations. That would have accelerated China’s interaction with the Western world by 1,600 hundred years instead of waiting for Marco Polo to reach China at the end of the thirteen century CE. The globalization process of the then known world would have been more complete and no one knows what the cross-fertilization of the West and Far East would have meant for human history all the way to our times.
Christian theology teaches that Jesus’s life and death were preordained by God’s will – part of God’s plan to establish a second Covenant with humans. Therefore, from a theological standpoint, a “what if” question about Jesus’s death is a mute question. Setting this belief aside, however, it is worth speculating what might have happened had Pontius Pilate (or Pilatus) had spared Jesus’s life. Would Jesus go on teaching his moral parables or instead interest in him would have eventually waned and he would have retired to a quiet private life? Around the time of Jesus, the Middle East was a fertile ground of self-proclaimed prophets and messiahs, some of them meeting violent deaths. But none of those pious people captured the imagination of their followers the way the life, teaching, and death of Jesus did for his disciples. Had Jesus lived longer we would have a better idea whether he meant to be another Rabi to his contemporary fellow Jews or the founder of a new religion. And if, after a life of moral teaching, Jesus had died as a common man, would his teachings carry the same weight with men as they do now under the belief he was divine, God’s Logos (Word)? Which confronts us with Socrates’s question: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Or put differently, “Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?” (This is the Euthyphro dilemma in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro.)
The answers I read in The Atlantic, just like my own, highlight our tendency to choose known historical figures. What if someone had answered instead that his or her choice of an untimely death to be reversed was that of an anonymous young father or mother who never had the chance to see their kids grow. We can never know whether the child of an untimely lost parent would have grown to be someone as important as anyone like those in The Atlantic’s answers had his or her parent lived long enough to nurture them.
Let's Reason 
Really enjoyed reading these thoughts.very interesting and thought provoking.
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