My dear Wormwood....
You will find that a good many Christian-political writers think that Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine its Founder, at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again the conception of a ‘historical Jesus’ to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical.
The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new ‘historical Jesus’ therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it)
on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, and new Swifts, in every publisher’s autumn list. In the second place, all such constructions place the importance of their historical Jesus in some peculiar theory
He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a ‘great man’ in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought —a crank vending a panacea. We thus distract men’s minds from who He is, and what He did....
The ‘historical Jesus’ then, however dangerous He may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged....
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
You will find that a good many Christian-political writers think that Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine its Founder, at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again the conception of a ‘historical Jesus’ to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical.
The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new ‘historical Jesus’ therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it)
on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, and new Swifts, in every publisher’s autumn list. In the second place, all such constructions place the importance of their historical Jesus in some peculiar theory
He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a ‘great man’ in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought —a crank vending a panacea. We thus distract men’s minds from who He is, and what He did.... The ‘historical Jesus’ then, however dangerous He may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged....
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 123-124, 126.
