Every year at this time, you can guarantee it, there's some kind of controversial article or book that's published about some aspect of the Jesus story that will ostensibly shock or shake the long-held assumptions of Christian faith. We've had the DaVinci Code, the Talpiot tomb, the counterfeit Shroud of Turin, The Gospel of Judas, Thomas, and others…each trying to some way to challenge the history of Christianity or show the church in a conspiratorial light. Never mind that the authors of such material rarely, if ever, deal with actual evidence or accepted historical method. In these days of the internet, if someone publishes something there's a certain segment of the population that will take it as gospel, regardless of its origins.
This year's conspiracy du jour is found in a new novel by bestselling British author Philip Pullman (who wrote the atheist-tinged The Golden Compass). In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Pullman speculates that Jesus had an evil twin brother named Christ who secretly records and embellishes his good brother's teaching and appropriates them for nefarious ends (i.e. establishing the Church as a power broker). The book is part of a series called "Myths" which is being written to "rework" famous "legends."
Some Christians are very threatened by such works, even to the point of venting their anger and threatening authors like Pullman. That's regrettable and wrong, of course, mostly because it makes the point that Christians are often so wrapped up in defending the faith that they become disconnected from it through acts of anger and violence. It's like the oxymoronic placement of the words "Christian" and "militia" together–not a biblical idea and certainly not one of which Jesus would have approved.
I, for one, have come to realize that these annual pokes at Christianity can be a wonderful source for discussion and to focus people on what they really believe and why. Pullman's work, for example, is really a re-imagining of the kinds of things liberal Jesus scholars have been saying since the 19th century–that the historical Jesus and the Church's Christ are two different entities. Such a claim forces us to look deeply at the Scriptures and early Christian history to understand how the early church came to be in the first place and how Jesus' death and resurrection were the real catalytic points for the movement. When Christians say things like, "Jesus died on the cross for my sins" or quote John 3:16, often they do so without knowing how that works theologically or historically.
Rather than writing screeds and threats at the Pullmans of the world, we should be engaging them reasonably, demonstrating that Christian faith has a historical foundation and witnessing to a deeper connection to history using, as far as possible, evidence and reasoned arguments. One of my primary roles as a pastor, I believe, is to help people be able to not only have faith, but to understand the reason and history behind that faith–to think as well as feel.
