Another Voice

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

Saturday, 22nd April 2006

Can you imagine the man who made very little play of an ‘afterlife’ wanting to head an evangelical movement which trills continuously of Heaven and Hell? The man who made scant reference to beauty, except to compare man’s artistic efforts unfavourably with the lilies of the field, wanting to head a Church which vaunts itself as a patron of the arts? The man so contemptuous of material values placing himself in charge of the enormous wealth of the Church, or preaching Thatcherite entrepreneurialism or socialist materialism?

When we consider all those painfully counterintuitive sayings and parables — the Prodigal Son, the idea that it is no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad, the impatience with good works (‘the poor always ye have with you’) except as a means for personal purification — and when we consider how Jesus keeps saying (from the viewpoint of one with a Thought for the Day to compose) the wrong thing, it becomes ever clearer that he must have been real: if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented somebody so much more convenient.

In an issue shortly before the Easter survey, this magazine spent the better part of a number of articles sneering at Norman Kember, and harrumphing at the shocking irresponsibility of acts of Quixotic pacifism. Quixotic? Everything about Jesus says: Do what is right and leave the consequences to God. Everything about Him says ‘Irresponsible’.

Jesus would not have subscribed to The Spectator. But The Spectator is obliged to subscribe to Jesus. In that delicious disharmony lies powerful proof that he existed.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.