I decided to write this blog because I have to admit that I’m not only fascinated with the historical, and narrative anomaly that is Christ but also the near-universal underinvestment that goes into understanding this anomaly.
If Jesus was a myth or a madman, then he deserves no more of our modern-day attention than the possibility of another season of Tiger King. However, that’s the problem; I don’t think this individual can be so easily dismissed either as insane, nonexistent or just a good teacher, and most attempts to do so seem to struggle to hold water.
“Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Muslims say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscient, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows … normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man, a secretive or self-cetered monomaniac … for nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the parable of the prodigal son was a monster with one mad idea like a Cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all” – G.K Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
I’m starting to believe that the greatest flaw in modern society, the chink in our ‘high-tech armour’ that poses a more significant threat than cold wars or global warming ever could, is the seemingly undersupported assumption that ‘we know more than that of our ancestors’. While certain individuals certainly know more than Newton did about Mathematics and Physics, as they stand upon his immense shoulders, I, and I suspect most, do not.
The philosophers and couch philosophers know the trap of ‘chronological snobbery’ all too well, as pretty much all significant progress in philosophical thought that I’m aware of, at least pertaining to meta-narratives, has been made by men whose graves are now icy cold. And I think here lies the problem, most form major identity-defining beliefs on what can only be described as very little information or even willing-fantasy, often espoused by others or gurus who often know far less than they let on. But this process is popular because sound bites are easy to digest and then re-employ to build quick, convenient and comfortable beliefs.
Religion is one of those topics that everyone ‘knows all that there is to know’, but few have ever read the books to. It seems as if most over the age of 20 have formed their conclusions and have successfully put any “silly” religious questions to rest. Anecdotes from movies, impressions from the friendly old scripture teacher, the quacky spiritual friend through to the most outspoken atheist “comrade”, combine to produce a comfortable yet often patchworked mirey meta-narrative formed to vindicate actions and sedate the conscious. And while this may be fine in a universe that has no meaning or story greater than any other, it consequently has to be a time bomb in one that does. In a universe where truth matters, only one meta-narrative is right, and I think that should be far more terrifying than most correctly entertain.
I think Christ, if he’s correctly understood, is often considered offensive not because he’s mere fantasy to the likes of the Easter Bunny or Santa, but because this man threatens the comfortable patchwork of otherwise under formed and grotesquely inadequate meta-narratives that we desperately cling to, as it serves to fend off the thought of bearing our consciences and yielding our will to that which might have a right over our lives.