Several years ago I read a book called "The First Coming" by Thomas Sheehan, a professor of philosophy at Jesuit Loyola College in Chicago. That book was premised on the notion that modern Christians have a highly distorted view of the teachings of Jesus. Sheehan argues, convincingly, that Jesus message was simply that we should love each other, and that if we did so then we would discover happiness. Virtually everything else that has built up around Jesus: the miracles, the resurrection, the virgin birth, doesnt stand up to a careful scrutiny of the original texts from which the Bible has evolved.
Needless to say, this is a controversial view among Christian scholars. However, in his analysis Sheehan never questions the existence of Jesus as a religious leader of some significance . This, even more controversial, line of inquiry has been taken up in Jim Crace's 1997 novel Quarantine.
I picked up Quarantine at the Vancouver airport. It had an attractive cover, and won the Whitbread novel of the year for 1997. It was also nominated for the Booker that year.
After I had finished it, I did a search for reviews on the internet and found several good ones. You can get to them by following these links.
Washington Post The Independent The Straits Times
I am not a religious person, but for reasons I cant explain I find investigations into and speculations on the life of Jesus to be fascinating. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the Christian belief rests on a man, who endured a horrible death ostensibly so that the rest of us didnt have to. By believing that Jesus death was a sacrifice made on our behalf, we can also [somehow] believe that our own death is simply the beginning of a new and permanently wonderful life.
The problem that I have with all this is that there is very little which would lead one to believe that anything in the life of Jesus actually bore any resemblance to the story portrayed in the bible, much less the popular folklore which many of us confuse with real bible stories.
As an aside, one of my favourite examples of the inconsistencies in the bible comes from the very first pages of Genesis. We are told that God, being omnipotent and perfect and infallible had instructed Adam and Eve that they mustnt eat from the tree of life, for if they did, then they would surely die. We are expected to believe that God knows what he is talking about, after all he was the one who made Adam and Eve and the tree and everything else. But before long, both Adam and Eve have disobeyed God and nibbled on the forbidden fruit. Now they must die, right? Wrong, of course. They live to ripe old ages, albeit outside the gates of paradise. The very first lesson of the bible is either that God doesn't know everything or that he cannot be taken at his word. Some god.
Much of the New Testament is equally riddled with contradictions and so is not to be trusted as a source of the truth. Perhaps it isn't necessary to believe that the bible is "true" in order to be a Christian, many Christian scholars seem to be reconciled to the fact that the bible is a set of stories which contain an important message. The fact that they purport to be fact, but are really fiction, doesn't seem to bother them. It bothers me.
Crace tackles this problem head on in his book, and provides an interesting twist. His Jesus is neither divine or particularly wise. And yet his influence cannot be denied.