Chesterton on the Real Jesus

G. K. Chesterton said something like this:

People sometimes have the impression that “Christianity is something weak and diseased”. They think that “Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world.” They imagine that Christianity belongs to the “dark ages of ignorance” and that “superstitious” people who are “still strongly religious… are weak, unpractical, and behind the times”.

“I only mention these ideas to affirm… that when I looked into them independently [for myself] I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the [supposed] facts were not facts.”

“Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like a an angry god – and always like a god.”

“Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His “how much more” is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea.”

“Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used even wilder words of the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.”

“We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac…. Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside one another [or so it might seem]. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from his supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.”

Ch 9, ‘Authority and the Adventurer’ in Orthodoxy (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996, first published 1908) (pp217-218)