“Either Jesus never was or he still is"

From "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief":

Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.

As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”

Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.” ....

His moment of conversion came in 1967, while filming a BBC program on the Holy Land. It happened in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

As at the church in Kyiv, the faith of others stirred him. “Seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour’s nearness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic,” he wrote. “I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God.” His faith was still a work in progress. It “remained rather abstract, a useful counterpoint to his attacks on secular liberalism,” wrote his definitive biographer Gregory Wolfe. ....

In his last years, Muggeridge wrote about his deepening faith, culminating in the 1975 publication of Jesus: The Man Who Lives. The frontispiece of the original edition is a photo from a Spanish abbey of what may be a touchstone image for Muggeridge: doubting Thomas touching the wound of Christ in a stone bas-relief.

The Resurrection “seems to me indubitably true,” wrote Muggeridge at the book’s end. “Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost sincerity, I assert that he still is.” .... (more)

John J. Miller, "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief," The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2026.