You May Want to Sit Down For This

Phillip Pullman is about to startle the world with an absolutely brilliant and original new thesis that nobody has ever ever ever thought of before!

It turns out that Jesus was just a nice man but his followers (and especially Paul) transformed him into “the Son of God”. In fact, Paul was apparently *so* persuasive that he single-handedly managed to persuade people who had seen Jesus die in one of the most horrible ways possible that their old friend was not just a misunderstood rabbi who said a few things about love and peace, but that he was actually The Word of God incarnate.

A natural enough mistake. I had a high school history teacher I liked and after he died, I met a total stranger who had never met the man. The stranger, who had hitherto despised history, told me all about this experience he had (something involve ‘shrooms) where he suddenly realized he understood all of History and that my old high school teacher was, in fact, the living embodiment of God at work in the History of the world.

Boy! I can sure tell you my face was red when it dawned on me that this guy completely understood my old history teacher better than I did. I immediately started telling all my old classmates and they, naturally, totally believed the stranger as well (as who *wouldn’t*?) Pretty soon we were all on board with acclaiming my old history teacher as the Son of God and the Key to Salvation History and, oh, you know… Everything! And to think none of us who actually knew him when he was here on earth understood a word he said and need some total stranger to explain it all to us! I feel so *silly*!

Ahem: A reading from the Prophet Chesterton:

I am concerned only with the historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early in its history this thing became visible to the civilisation of antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation, it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas. If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon Christ. Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its perversion or disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew and says they taught him the doctrine of the Sacrament, and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The last limit of an early date for the extinction of true Christianity has probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit. What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the conscientious objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying conscription; and a little while afterwards his few followers meet together in an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all their lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They are always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the course of which they proceed to establish universal Conscription, to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling with artillery; the proceedings concluded with the singing of ‘Boys of the Bulldog Breed’ and ‘Don’t let them scrap the British Navy.’ That is something like a fair parallel to the theory of these critics; that the transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody’s commonsense would tell him that enthusiasts who only met through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish everything that he hated. No, if the ‘ecclesiastical and dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back to Christ.

It’s true that the gospels sometimes sound a bit like Paul. But the reason for that is that Paul is relying on apostolic tradition from the Twelve, not vice versa. All you need to do is note one simple fact and you realize that the gospels really are drawing on memories of Jesus, not fantasies of Paul: the title “Son of Man”. It’s ubiquitous in the gospels because it was constantly in the mouth of Jesus. But you never find the phrase in Paul. Why? Because the gospels are recording what Jesus said and did, not retrojecting Paulinism on to him in Pauline language. To be sure, Paul’s thought is detectable, particularly in it’s influence on Luke. But the notion that Paul somehow elevated a human rabbi to the status of God without his original circle of friends protesting and, in fact, with their supine cooperation is something only a highly educated fool could persuade himself to buy.