I'm a little late in posting this, but it was too good to pass up.
In April, Andrew Sullivan quoted his friend Matthew Perry as saying:
If Jesus Christ had not existed, it would almost certainly not have been necessary for the Church to invent someone like him. What does the Church want with a man who plainly despised ritual? Can you imagine the man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey wanting anything to do with bells and smells and frocks, with gilt and silver and semi-idolatry, and repetitive chants and chorused inanities? The man who said he had come to break up families being paraded as a paradigm of family values? The man who had absolutely no interest in politics or administration and preached forgiveness, not 'the rule of law', wanting anything to do with the Conservative party or the Third Way? . . . if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented someone so much more convenient.
It certainly makes sense that if the church fathers were going to invent Jesus out of whole cloth, they would have invented someone more palatable to authoritarian leadership and conventional orthodoxy. I've been reading History of the World, Updated by J.M. Roberts. And according to Roberts, church leaders were already heading down the road of authoritarianism and conventional wisdom as early as 200 B.C.E. -- which is when most skeptics think they invented the Gospels.
However, the Jesus of the Gospels was an antidote to common wisdom, and the only thing that made him angry was authoritarian religion. Far from inventing Jesus, the Christian church has constantly tried to undermine and obliterate his memory. What's remarkable is that we still have the historical Jesus speaking his inconvenient truth through the Gospels, despite every generation's attempts to crucify and pacify him.
