Another Voice

If Jesus did not exist, the Church would not invent him

22 April 2006

Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed, plus 22 believers. Yet between almost all of them, including the atheist, a most arresting consensus arose: one which only Charles Moore and perhaps Fergal Keane seemed reluctant to join.

The atheist, Richard Dawkins, put it like this: ‘If the Resurrection is not true, Christianity becomes null and void and [Christians’] life, [Christians think], meaningless.’ St Paul (quoted by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor) put it like this: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.’

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Pete Midgley

October 17th, 2011 6:50pm Report this comment

I can't believe that nobody has seen fit to post an appreciation of Matthew's clever, provocative article here in 5 years!
I've got a lot of time for his point about how inconvenient 'the real Jesus' could be seen to be against the backdrop of institutionalised christianity; it's been the cry of the non-conformists throughout church history. I appreciate his fresh angle on the question of what is interesting to discuss in this area.
I don't agree that 'misapprehension' properly describes the understanding of the basis of other faiths by their 'competitors': perhaps 'ignorance' whether deliberate or otherwise - there is a strong tradition of the call to choose/repent, and a recognition of how easy human beings find it to believe what they want to. I agree however that ultimately somebody should be shown to have the truth...

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