Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse.Īs an admirer of Jefferson and Renan and a strong nonadmirer of Lewis, I am bound to say that Lewis is more honest here. He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of hell. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. Lewis maintained in his classic statement Mere Christianity: That is the one thing we must not say. Writing to John Adams in 1813, having taken his razor blade to the books of the New Testament and removed all the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, Thomas Jefferson said the 46-page residue contained the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking Life of Jesus in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings. It begins:īelief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and belief in the virtue of his teachings are not at all the same thing. Readers who admire Hitchens, as I do, will find of interest his New York Times review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (requires registration). Among the realities these respondents missed is the fact that a Christian might be drawn to pray for Hitchens not because he’s a prominent atheist but because he is a certain kind of atheist. A few readers of my Prayers for Christopher Hitchens made the astounding charges that praying for him, and for his conversion as well as his deliverance from cancer which are both forms of healing is uncharitable or presumptuous.

Philip pullman the good man jesus