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Another Voice

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

Matthew Parris

Saturday, 22nd April 2006

Few would doubt that the figure of Jesus Christ familiar to modern Christians is at least loosely based on some individual who probably did live somewhere in Palestine roughly 2,000 years ago. What I ask, however, is whether the picture we have today of that individual is close enough to the man who inspired it for us to say we know who he was, and that he was; to say that — in the broadest sense — we can know him.

I am convinced we can, and do. Why? Paradoxically, it is because the Church founded in his name and the civilisations which have called themselves Christian have departed so fast and so far from him, and come to stand for so much the opposite of everything he was so plainly trying to teach, that he has never from the start been anything but a nuisance and a reproach to the movement he started. Yet they have not been able to eradicate him. Jesus is the fly in the Church’s ointment.

Look for the elements that don’t really fit. They are the least likely to have been made up. In the Church’s 2,000-year history, the character and teachings of Jesus are the bits that don’t fit. There is an annoying knot of gristle at the very centre of the Christian Church, and it is called Christ. Chew and chew though Christians do, time and again pushing this indigestible, discomfiting and in some ways unlovely object to the edge of the ecclesiastical plate, they cannot obliterate it. It is not least for this that I, an avowed atheist, feel such huge respect for him.

If Jesus Christ had not existed, it would most certainly not have been necessary for the Church to invent someone like him. What does the Church want with a man who plainly despised ritual? Can you imagine the man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey wanting anything to do with bells and smells and frocks, with gilt and silver and semi- idolatry, and repetitive chants and chorused inanities? The man who said he had come to break up families being paraded as a paradigm of family values? The man who had absolutely no interest in politics or administration and preached forgiveness, not ‘the rule of law’, wanting anything to do with the Conservative party or the Third Way?