In this review I only want to look at a single, very famous approach, because Philip Pullman's powerful new telling of the Jesus story reminded me of its tragic conclusion.
Historians have not been prepared to leave the matter there, of course, and one of the most fascinating scholarly enterprises of recent history has been what is called the quest of the historical Jesus: given that the Jesus we encounter in the New Testament is already the object of the church's faith and worship, can we get back to the man himself before he was identified as God, either honestly or fraudulently, depending on your point of view? As you would expect in such a controversial exercise, scholars of the quest have varied enormously in their claims. (Although we can detect elements of the process in the contrast between the undeveloped Christology of Mark's gospel, the first to be written, and the claim that Jesus was the pre-existent word of God of John's gospel, the last.) This does not help us much, because these documents assume, rather than prove, the truth of the claim: by the time they came to be written, the process of Jesus's divinisation was well advanced. The obvious first step is to turn to the gospels in the New Testament for evidence. After all, there have always been delusional people who claimed to be God, so how did so many come to think this particular claim was true? Setting both scepticism and credulity aside for the moment, it is worth pondering the history of such a move. Now, even if you believe that a Jew called Jesus, born around 4BC, was also the incarnation of God, it remains an interesting question how such an astounding fact was discovered. Christianity did not stop at its appropriation of the Hebrew concept of Messiah it went on to trump other religions by claiming that Jesus was God himself, entered into history.
And anyone interested in religion will know that the difference between Jews and Christians is that the former are still waiting for Messiah, whereas the latter believe he has already come in the person of Jesus: hence, Jesus Christ. The more informed will know that the second word is not a cognomen, but a title – Christ, Greek for Messiah, the agent of God in the Hebrew scriptures, who will one day enter history to redeem his people and bring justice on earth. P eople not in the know could be forgiven for thinking that the central character in Christianity had a first name, Jesus, and a surname, Christ.
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