Now I spend most of my time in spiritual engagement rather
than apologetics, that is, talking to people who are already believers rather than
who aren’t. What I talk to those believers about is a different matter, as,
rather than anything very religious, it tends to be their ailments, the
weather, or why did Slimming World leave out all the tables and chairs in the
church hall so that the cleaner had to work around them rather than packing
them away like usual? This means that my ability to deal with the questions
non-Christians might ask is actually a bit rusty and I am not as agile as I
really ought to be.
Tim O’Neill’s version of how Christianity came about is a
very familiar one, and goes like this. There was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher
called Yeshua who went about first-century Palestine telling everyone who would
listen that the end of the world and the victory of YHWH was imminent. When he
was put to death his traumatised followers began seeing him in phantasmal form,
because that’s what traumatised people do, and then they reformulated his
teachings to give themselves something to keep them going and explain what had
happened, because that’s what believers in UFO cults and the like do,
and finally invented a set of stories to back them up. I’m not going to get
into examining this in any detail, because I can see three massive books on my
shelf by Tom Wright essentially doing exactly that and taking about 1500 pages
to do so, but as soon as I read it I found myself thinking, What do I actually
think about this? I ought really to have an outline response, not anything
detailed but just enough, to hand. I suppose it helps to posit a rival
narrative, which is not just to assert that the picture the Scriptures paint is
simple and uncomplicated fact: but that the early Church came to believe things
about Jesus which were completely outside the boundaries of Second-Temple Judaism
– not only the Resurrection, but the account of the Last Supper in which Jesus
says things no Jew would ever say – and that the events in the atheist narrative
are inadequate to explain this. Yeshua the Jewish preacher is an invention of
the commentator, not a figure depicted in the texts: an imaginative deduction
designed to preserve a point of view. We’ve been here before in this blog, and
I should strive to remember.
You don’t normally expect to have these slightly fazing encounters with people who do go to church. Yesterday while doing a couple of chores in the middle of the day I met an older couple looking around, who told me they attended an Anglican church not far away. The man described scriptural debates he had with his sister-in-law. ‘She says Jesus is God’, he mused, ‘But I say that he points the way to God. He never claimed to be God. It was only other people that said that about him.’ Here we have again the idea that you can get behind what the Church said about Jesus to a reconstructed ‘real’ Jesus behind them. I raised the matter of the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus and how they amounted to a statement of divinity, but I could feel the words rather withering on my lips: quite apart from it being quite an abstruse point, you can always argue it was part of ‘what people said about Jesus’ and subsequently put into his mouth when the texts are written. The man wasn’t listening anyway, because he just repeated his earlier point. I should have started a completely different conversation. That, I tell myself, is what the Lord would have done. Assuming any of my ideas about him are true at all.
P.S. I used this photo after Googling 'Lego Jesus', but what's he wearing? Is that some kind of Best Messiah of the Year award?
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