Every now and then, I meet someone who tells me that they have admired my books. I glow. There would be a form of pride in not taking pleasure from having fans. Goethe’s lofty disdain for the besotted readers of his work – Ihr Beifall selbst macht meinem Herzen bang – is insufferable really. (It means, even their applause makes my heart quake!) But there is an exception. Sometimes people come up and say they really admire my JESUS book, published in 1992. Sometimes I am brave enough to say that I am sure I would not write such a book now. Sometimes I am even brave enough to say I wish I had never written the book. Sometimes, I am a coward, and thank the admirer.
I wrote that book when I was in the grip of a school of thought which now seems to me almost crazy. The most eloquent exponent of it was a friend of mine, called Geza Vermes, a Hungarian scholar of enormous personal charm, who had made a lifetime study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He moved on from the scrolls to the study of the historical Jesus and wrote such books as Jesus the Jew. There are hundreds , probably thousands, of academics who pursue comparable approaches to the Gospels, and it is perhaps no surprise that I should have found them persuasive. The origins of their approach are to be found in the Enlightenment, and in the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson wrote a version of the New Testament which excluded all mention of miracles. Tolstoy, about whom I wrote a biography, did something very similar, and propounded a version of Christianity which was devoid of the concept of Grace. Instead, Tolstoy believed the Gospel to be a set of moral teachings, a manifesto of pacifist anarchism. I want, in future essays, to return to this, and to say why I still find Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Gospel TEACHINGS persuasive. Teachings, that is, about how human beings should conduct themselves; what should be their attitude to war and to money, to Governments and to possessions.
For the time being, however, I want to concentrate briefly on the “historical Jesus” phenomenon, and to lay out a plan for reading the New Testament in a rather different way.
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