A literary invention?

In about 1970, a friend, then in the Army, an English major and later an English professor, sent me a letter that contained this on the gospel writers:

I do not believe in some unknown Jewish writer or writers that much greater than Shakespeare: I do not even believe in a mortal man able to write some of the lines of Christ. And most of all, I do not believe in anyone either convinced of Christ or trying to create a new religion, who could write those lines I still don't wholly understand, that render His isolation complete, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

That line in dramatic effect is greater than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Its mystery is stupefying. And no spreader of any gospel would have invented it; only a man who was there and who heard it, and who felt compelled to tell all other truths would have put it in his account of the one he believed was his savior.

More recently, from an interview with Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind:

For historians, Holland notes the crucifixion is the most unusual aspect of the four gospel accounts. Although several ancient religions include stories of the death and resurrection of gods, none of these religions would tell of their gods dying in a painful, humiliating way. Moreover, they would not have depicted their gods as subject to crucifixion which Holland describes as “paradigmatically the punishment visited on slaves.”

Even to its initial audience, Christianity was radically counter-cultural.

Furthermore, the character of Jesus is a “bizarre” and “unfathomable” mystery. Harder asked Holland to explain his own quote from Dominion: “Nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature.”

Holland notes that if Jesus is purely a literary character, he is the most remarkable literary creation of all time. To replicate Jesus, an author would have to write a character that is simultaneously human and divine. Then, the author would have to portray him in such a way that people two thousand years later in continents the author has never heard of will still believe this figure is God and man.

It would take an unbelievably gifted author to accomplish the task if it were possible at all. And yet, four different authors managed to do so. Although Holland does not undertake to prove the historicity of the gospel story, he argues that categorizing Jesus’s parables and gospel stories as mere fiction does not solve the riddle. Either the gospel authors channel a historical Jesus or there is profound mystery in how such an uncanny story could have been written, gained prominence, and remained influential two thousand years later.

Furthermore, Holland credits the idea of human dignity itself to the imago dei found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The very idea and gut instinct that all humans have inherent dignity is theological, he claims. Thus, he names humanism as a Christian heresy that removes God while still privileging humanity with a dignity that all others should respect. .... (more)

Davison Drumm, "Historian Tom Holland on Christianity and a World Transformed," Juicy Ecumenism, March 12, 2025.