Mark Twain grew up in the South, in Hannibal, Missouri. That is where my book, Palestine Is Coming, was published. He lived on the Mississippi River, witnessing the harsh racial discrimination of slavery, which most people there accepted. In his books, especially his classic novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he exposed such ills of majority opinion with deft wisdom, humor, and sarcasm. He once wrote, Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Twain Taught Critical Thinking in His Books
Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens. He didn’t mean that majority opinion is always wrong. He meant that the lure of comfort that is usually attached to consensus can make critical, independent thinking die.
Most people regard majority opinion as evidence of truth. The shallow thinking goes like this, “If most people believe that, it must be right.” But what most people believe often leads down the path of least resistance as opposed to doing the hard work of independent examination of the facts.
Majority opinion can be nothing more than lazy thinking. Some people just want to be told what to believe, not why to believe it. For them, that requires the hard work of having to think through things, thus doing some deep thinking. Embracing non-majority opinion requires one to not only own it, but defend it. All of this requires work, which lazy people would rather shun. It’s easier to just “go with the flow.”
If one chooses to question majority opinion, and such an endeavor becomes known to the majority, be prepared to experience punishment from such dissent. To buck majority opinion often results in rejection, if not persecution, socially and otherwise.
Jesus Said Enter the Narrow Gate to Find Life
Jesus spoke about this in his famed Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of his public ministry. He said, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7.13-14 NRSV). So, Jesus said the majority take the easy way that leads to destruction. But those who venture through the narrow gate and on the hard road find life.
Jesus Said Ask, Search, & Knock to Find Answers
Jesus also exhorted his listeners to this Sermon, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7.7-8). So, those who ask questions and search, will find answers. And if one finds truth that the majority does not have, there is great joy.
That’s What I Did in Finding the Real Jesus
That’s what happened to me. I tell about it in my little book, The Gospel Corrupted: When Jesus Was Made God (118 pp.). Due to my reading of the Bible, I began to question what the church had taught me, that God is three persons, a trinity, and that Jesus is one of those persons, thus he is God. How surprised I was when I bought a red-letter New Testament and read only the red letters, which were the sayings of Jesus. I was looking to find where Jesus had said he is God, and I found none.
What I call “my search for the real Jesus” became a 28-years study in which I estimate that I read about a thousand books about the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and search perhaps thousands of Bible commentaries to learn what they say about the matter. The result was that I continued to believe every major thing the church had taught about Jesus except that I did not believe Jesus is God. And I wrote a large, in-depth, comprehensive book about my findings entitled The Restitution: Biblical Proof Jesus Is Not God (570 pp.), in which I cite over 400 biblical scholars.
In this book, I have 100 pages of the history of church Christology. I feel that if unbiased people knew the history of how church fathers arrived at their conclusions that Jesus is God and God is three persons, they would seriously question this majority opinion. Why? For one, it happened due to political pressure. But then, when Jesus asked Peter whom he believed Jesus was, and Peter answered the Christ, not God, Jesus replied, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (John 16.17). Thus, a person cannot believe properly about Jesus unless God the Father reveals this to that person. And Jesus said of himself likewise on another occasion, “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Luke 10.22).
Before I learned this, for twenty-two years I believed Jesus was God and God is a trinity: Father, Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. I believed Jesus died for my sins, rose from the dead, and was trying to be a follower of Jesus. That’s what it takes to be a true Christian. That what it takes to receive God’s forgiveness of sins and salvation, thus the promise of eternal life. That is the gospel. It’s just that I came to know Jesus more fully.
What Is the Benefit of Knowing the Real Jesus?
All of this was because I did what Mark Twain said, and more so what Jesus said. And what did I get from it? Yes, I received rejection. But the great joy that I received from knowing the true Jesus—thus abandoning the church’s somewhat fictional Jesus about being a God-man—has been well worth the rejection and the hard work. How so?
If you really want to follow Jesus, why would you want to follow a somewhat false caricature of him? Jesus brother James writes, “God cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1.13). Then, if Jesus was both fully man and fully God, as the church says, how could Jesus have been tempted?
To realize that Jesus really conquered sin and temptation to become the man who God intended him to be in order to qualify to die on the cross for our sins as the most holy, unblemished, spotless, pure Lamb of God without sin, to me this understanding is worth more than all the gold, jewels, and money that anyone could ever muster in this life.
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