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I have always found it fascinating that so many high-powered and influential thinkers – philosophers, scientists, journalists, broadcasters, and writers – feel compelled to expend such prodigious amounts of energy on attacking Christianity. After all, there is no equivalent line-up of heavy intellectual artillery launching a similar bombardment upon astrology, magic, divination, or non-scientific medicine. So what is it about Christianity that so winds them up?
Looked at from the standpoint of objective history, and excluding any references to signs, wonders, and miracles, what was so remarkable about the life of Jesus? He was a working man born in a minor corner of the Roman Empire, of whom we know very little before he was thirty. He picked up a dozen friends and a wider circle of followers, none of whom (with the possible exception of Matthew the tax collector, who presumably could do accounts) would have got as far as the interview stage for a middle-management job, and who often found Jesus difficult to understand. It is clear, however, that he was a charismatic speaker who could spellbind audiences. He had a big popular following, especially around his native Galilee, though he provoked the religious and cultural elite, who had him executed, after he and his friends had been in the public eye locally for less than three years. Then his friends ran away in fear and hid.
It was then said that Jesus had come back to life. This somehow gave an unprecedented new fire and determination to his followers. These simple local men then went out into the world to proclaim the “Good News”, or Jesus’ rather odd ideas, to the whole world. And we know they did it, because that is how these ideas spread across the then known world like wildfire: into Greece, Rome, Spain, Mesopotamia, India, North Africa, and even to Britannia. Then, not much more than 300 years after the crucifixion, the Roman Empire adopted Jesus’ teachings as its official religion, replacing the old pagan gods, although already for several centuries past men and women of many nations had been willing to suffer torture and death rather than to deny him. And this “Jesus myth” travelled by “hearts and minds”, and not by armies; and its “power base” was the weak and the outcast! And it had the strange capacity to transform, empower, and redirect not only individual lives, but also the wider world; and it still does so today.
Not a bad achievement for a simple village joiner from nowhere, whose public career only lasted about thirty-three months. A local nobody, in fact, who deserves at best a ten-line entry in a classical encyclopaedia. And that as a peasant oddity. So why was it not as simple and clear-cut as that? And why did the Joiner of Nazareth come to influence the world in a way that the real-life New Testament character Simon the Magician, or (to give a couple of fictitious examples) Ahab the stonemason of Capernaum, Jeremiah the itinerant quack doctor of Bethsaida, or any other of the local nobodies whose “gift of the gab” could pull a crowd in the market place, did not?