The Fabricated Christ: Confronting what we know about Jesus and the Gospels, by Paul Laffan

Author: Paul Laffan. Review by Jonathan Wooding

In the beginning was a folktale – a folktale about a holy man, a man of the people, cruelly done to death by the powerbrokers of the day. The man was impish and witty. Some say he was a bit of a devil, while others say he could have saved us, and the memory of his loveable brilliance and courage might see us all through to the end of time.

A good folktale can say all that. And you don’t have to be especially literate, or privileged, or witty to ‘get’ it. It’s a gift, in that sense: charged but no charge. It’s actually a bit of a miracle that this stuff has survived, given how time flies, how hard we have to work, how ill-educated we are, and how precious things are always being lost or burnt or messed up. A folktale is a lifeline. I wouldn’t give it up for the world, whatever scholars say.

Not all scholars are religious. Of those who are, I imagine a certain proportion must be Quakers. And I imagine too that, given our demographics, a greater proportion of Quakers are scholars than is true for other religious groups. Now, some scholars love propositions and probabilities, deductions, suspicions, empirical evidence and verification. If you’re one of them then you’ll love Paul Laffan’s scholarly tour-de-force, The Fabricated Christ: Confronting what we know about Jesus and the Gospels. But if you care about the religious enterprise then, be warned: Laffan is out to demolish it. It’s enthralling, incendiary stuff. In some ways it’s like the stories of George Fox rushing around the pulpits of 1650s England, lampooning the hireling ministers and speaking with the authority granted only by an inner Light.

I expect that our scholarly types at Woodbrooke and beyond are already studying this electrifying work. But Quaker librarians everywhere ought to have a copy to hand, expensive though it may be. Faith is in the dock. If your interest is in the quest for the historical Jesus, in conspiracy theories concerning the Vatican and the corruption of organised religion, in academic wars over historicity and truth – or in the defence of atheism before cruel and deceiving fundamentalists – then you cannot fail to be enthralled.

There is a sense of bleak and comfortless desolation in the book. It’s as pronounced as anything in Blaise Pascal, who wrote that we are equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which we emerge, and the infinite in which we are engulfed. Each of the ten chapters is a punishing hike through the foothills of some blithe (and blithering) biblical commentary. These concentrate on significant events in the gospel narrative, namely Jesus and John the Baptist, the Last Supper and the Resurrection. Laffan hacks his way, like a latter-day anti-pilgrim, through thickets of make-believe and fairy tale. He works his way past outcrops of self-delusion and inconsistency, and through the mire of anachronism. He wants to expose sleight of hand and imposture – fantasy and specious reasoning – in the gospels and in biblical commentary. He finds propaganda, political expediency, fabrications, plagiarism and wrong-headed interpretations of ‘the evidence’. It’s not that I couldn’t put it down, I had to put it down.

Are you feeling uncomfortable, or indignant? The author would find you naive. In Henrik Ibsen’s play Brand, the priest goes to a desolate, glacial place above the tree-line, having found no wood with which to fabricate an ark. Laffan tries to take us to the same place, concluding that ‘[Biblical] commentary… will never be able to talk to people honestly about the Gospels while it continues to assume it must salvage a religion from them.’ What does he mean by talking to people ‘honestly’? ‘Jesus had proclaimed the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God, and tried to bring it about with his procession to the temple. Instead he was crucified.’ To the author, this is all that can be retrieved with any certainty. All the rest is apocryphal. Any ‘unillusioned, informed reading’ makes this clear, he writes.

It occurs to me, however, that many Quakers will already consider themselves in an iconoclastic position with regard to traditional Christian doctrine and history. But make no mistake, Laffan is attempting a wholesale demolition of the tenets of the Christian creed. He argues that Christianity has, in effect, been at least a foolish error, and at worst a vicious lie that has caused untold harm. He resembles a prosecuting barrister in a particularly heinous criminal case – though I did sometimes wonder if his forensic methods and reasoning were more like Moriarty than Sherlock Holmes. While reading this kill-or-cure study I thought often of Pompey the Great, who in 63 BCE, at the climax of the Siege of Jerusalem, trespassed within the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple, only to be amazed at finding it empty of any treasure. The religious person may well declare: ‘Well, yes. That’s the whole point. God is no thing. A thing would be an idol.’ But Laffan does not explore this option. Some Quakers will find his iconoclasm to be more like the vandalism of reckless soldiers, during Oliver Cromwell’s interregnum, in churches and cathedrals.

Should a Quaker care about this? Throughout the book we follow a character called Miss Peters, a representative of the ‘thinking with which this book is concerned’. She is a religious education teacher of some half a century past, a believer from the Baptist tradition – a tradition in origin perhaps not that far from early Quakerism. According to Laffan, she ‘had the capacity to make one feel God was exactly what humanity needed liberation from’. His contention – and this is a highly polemical book, despite its aspirations to objective and impartial scholarship – is that the ‘commentariat’ (which seems to include most hireling ministers, as it were, as well as the historical critics of the Bible from the last 200 years) should have better educated Miss Peters and her like. They should have told her about their devastating discoveries, instead of finding fancy ways to deny or excuse all implications of godless ‘truth’.

No quarter is given to the notion that religious expression is indicative of a quest for truth rather different to that of scientific method. The prophetic tradition of which Jesus was a part uses parable, fable, legend, folktale, paradox, vision and poetry. It is not historicity or verifiable data, but carries unverifiable truths to do with meaning and value. When Miss Peters says ‘this literally happened’ it is a misreading of folktale and parable and fable. But when Laffan tells us ‘what really happened’ it is also a misunderstanding of how to read parable and expressive language. His does not seem to be a sensible way forward if we believe in the possibilities of freedom and reconciliation, or compassion and courage. And one particular ancient folktale certainly shows us that we might want to entertain those things. The authors of that particular tale want no particular eminence or privilege. But the right to speak out in the face of overwhelming odds must remain theirs. Theirs is not the voice of power and victory – only that of the failure, the victim, and the traumatised but courageous survivor.

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Comments

Thanks Jonathan. From what you have said, this books feels like it fits into broadly the same category on the library bookshelves as Dawkins’ “God Delusion.” The scientific method is about proving the fake; Karl Popper’s principle of falsification. ‘All swans are white’, is easy to prove as a fake because all you have to do is find a black one. Science is interested in what it considers facts. Facts are all that matter in science. However, it is never very good at big pictures, it needs detail. Detail that it can prove wrong.

Science is interested principally in the (supposedly) disinterested study of isolated, passive objects. As thinking, feeling human beings, we know by contrast the world is replete with connected, experiencing, active subjects. A sunflower experiences the sun after all, otherwise it would not follow it. And yet science continues to cling on to its focus of study in the face of data that increasingly disproves its central view! Nowhere is this more so than in the social sciences. 

In universities, where I worked for over 20 years, science is the new religion. It is held to be unquestionably true. Anyone who questions it is a heretic, and we know what happens to heretics in religions!! Notice what has happened: From questioning facts to being unquestionable truth. The only way to study even theology in mainstream research universities, accordingly, is ‘scientifically’. Even thought that is paradoxical. Science also upholds the tenet that such study should be value-free. While forgetting that all observation, all human activity is value-laden. It willfully ignores this. It willfully ignores the role of the observer in the observation.

The book you have reviewed brings with it - inevitably - a set of values, attitudes and beliefs that it is using science to affirm. Namely that only science can be trusted, only facts matter. Of course, I hope to have shown that even science cannot be trusted! But if you harness the power of science to the project of proving science as the new religion, of course you will convince yourself you have succeeded. 

As you have rightly noted, however, mystery is beyond it. Science misunderstands mystery as that which is not yet known. Whereas we appreciate mystery as endlessly knowable. To quote Richard Rohr, ‘another layer, another layer, another layer.’ Jesus’ experience is not a one off-miracle, which a scientist can ‘prove’ wrong to their heart’s content, but a universal archetype through which we know death of the old and resurrection as the new is a feature of all life. There is nothing fabricated about it.

Another scientist Neils Bohr once said, ‘the world is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we *can* think.’ As Richard Rohr has again noted, if we are in the Trinitarian tradition then we believe that the world was created in God’s image. That moment when God chose to manifest Him/Her Self we now know as the Big Bang and we are the first generation to know that. The irony is, science helps us here. Google the image of an atom and we find three particles in dynamic relation with each other. The universe is in God’s image.

Just as Dawkins’ delusion is that the God he seeks to debunk is nothing more than the God of the child, or at best the teenage Sunday school goer, so Laffan’s fabrication is that the mystery of God can be unpacked by the fervour of the scientific method. In both cases, the mystery of God is a bit more than that. Smaller than we think and, at one and very the same time, bigger than we *can* think.

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 10th July 2020 - 20:24

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PS. I should add that I take my inspiration in this from John B. Cobb Jr’s books “Back to Darwin” and “Jesus’ Abba: The God Who has Not Failed” and Richard Rohr’s books “The Divine Dance” and “The Universal Christ.” Both these great theologians teach us a) that the Christ was there from the beginning, b) that process (change) and relationality are inherent features of an inherently free, open and ever growing universe, and c) this is a panentheistic universe, i.e. God is in all things. For Rohr in particular, a mystery inherent in the word ‘Christ’ is that it is the Christian code-word for reality. In this view, if Christ is a fabrication as Laffan is arguing then, by implication, reality is a fabrication too. Which we can be certain he is not arguing! Science struggles with the question of an infinite giving and infinite receiving of Love, which is the Christian Trinitarian message. And yet once we swim under the waterfall of that infinite abundance, the modus operandi of science - counting, measuring, critically evaluating - just don’t matter any more. They are, quite literally, point-less.

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 11th July 2020 - 0:43

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