Jesus obscured

,1".klan Brien Life of Jesus Christ Lord Longford ‘')idgwick and Jackson E3.50)

Until the early years of the last century, little atte

L. rnpt was made to construct a realistic, mstorical study of Jesus the man. He was the '-'tine founder of the Christian religion, the buicial state ideology of all civilised Western Illations. Around his birth and death clustered a ass of legends and anecdotes, many not even erYphal but simply invented out of thin air vr borrowed from mythical man-gods of other ,,eeltures, often helped along by wholesale

'Qrgery.

But there began in Germany, among schoars, an urge to apply the critical, analytical jelethods at last to the person of whom it could b said, in Lord Longford's words, "no human has ever influenced history so profoundWithin a couple of generations, it has been tnated, there were no less than sixty

°usand Lives of Jesus. And still they come. I de

vr whether the most devoted student in a t■i,nf_etitirtle would be familiar with a hundredth of h1 But But those I have read, perhaps a score, nave one striking quality in common — they are all One tbi-ike Hamlet, Jesus is continually recast in e iinage of his commentator — or, perhaps r4.°re often, the image his commentator would _1e to project of himself. Renan's Life of Jesus 'Ind Lord Beaverbrook's The Divine Propagandist th, Malcolm Muggeridge's Jesus Redisco4ecl and Bishop Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ, atever their virtues or failures as literary Wce.hs, are all more revealing about the author a n the subject. Whatever they wish Jesus to h8 the been, he becomes. But as studies of how US came to be the figure who began a new

ge for Usele a third of the world, they are virtually

ss. evIhe proper study of mankind is man, but lean if man invents his gods, how better to i,.,tn about man than by studying his trentors? And the life of Jesus, on the basis of New Testament evidence, is so sketchy and `ontradictory, so full of oddities and ambiingliies. that it must intrigue and attract the

nori-religious curiosity.

ri 1:erhaps only a non-believer, at least in any 4.1d dogma, can really see what is being said. s'ebe best and most temperate study of the older ?ol was Albert Schweizer's Quest for the ett.7,`°rical Jesus, a quest which comes near to is —viug at the conclusion that Jesus-the-man seba will o' the wisp, though afterwards ButWeizer set out nevertheless to imitate him.

anYone who wants to have every detail of what can be known about Jesus scrutinised under the microscope of scholarship may prefer two massive later works, Charles Goignebert's Jesus and Marcell° Craveri'sThe Life of Jesus. I rarely open one of these two without some fascinating piece of detection leaping out and carrying my mind on into speculative fantasies. But the key to any understanding of why the Gospels are only minimally the portrait of personality but mainly a partisan argument for a new religion only thinly disguised as jottings for a biography, you must turn to the pioneering researches of the late Professor S. G. Brandon, notably his The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church. To crudely simplify, these lead to the probability that the Gospels are anti-Semitic, pro-Roman tracts, written by Hellenised Christians, proably all non-Jews, designed after the destruction of Jerusalem, to make the infant Church acceptable to the Gentiles.

But mysteries still remain. They cannot be solved by ignoring them, or conflating awkward disagreements. The techniques for understanding myth and legend, the misty areas where poetry and religion over-lap, have been highly sharpened and polished by LeviStrauss and Dr Edmund Leach. We now know that there are warning signals giving notice of buried treasure when the same story is told several times in parallel forms, or when similar names crop up in close proximity. So in the Gospels we are alerted when a totally un-historical privilege of releasing a prisoner is given' to the Jews at Passover and one is called Jesus and the other Jesus Barabbas. Barabbas can mean "Son of Abba," but also "Son of the Father," or "Son of God," or "Son of the Rabbi." Could Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus Barabbas have originally been the same person? Why does Jesus regard the Pharisees as his enemies when his whole teaching in style and content is deeply Pharasaical — the true Pharisees of Jewish history and tradition not the parody of them given by the Gospels? Why does the word "Romans" occur only once? These are only a few of the many provoking questions in a book written by a Jewish scholar, Hyam Maccoby in his recent Revolution in Judaea, a brilliant and exciting study.

But I must get round, not too late, to Lord Longford's Life. And I must say that no new Life is worth shelf-space to any intelligent and concerned reader if it does not meet any of the myriad points raised by Schweizer, Guignebert, Craven, Brandon, Maccoby and Carmichael. Lord Longford does not appear to have heard of any of them, though his bibliography lists Muggeridge, Renan and Bishop Sheen. I had hoped that Mr Maccoby at least might get a mention — a quick flip through would have saved Lord Longford from many howlers about Jewish beliefs and customs — as I sent him a copy as soon as I learned he was engaged on his task. But alas, starting from the unshakeable assumption that Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin, and raised from the dead, he seems blinkered against any other possible view. Where the evidence fails to support his thesis he passes it over in silence. He states as facts various dogmas of his own Church which are contradicted in the Gospels without any admission that they exist. For example, "James the Less, Jude, Thaddeus, and Simon (not Peter) were all related to Jesus, though certainly not his brothers." His glosses on the parables are footling and unhelpful. He tells us too often that Jesus is not saying things no one I've read ever thought he was saying — such that in the statement "man does not live by bread alone" we should note that "sex is noticeably not referred to explicitly."

There is no longer, if there ever was, much point in telling the Gospel story, carefully edited and tailored to your own preoccupations, in your own words. Especially if your own words are so banal, windy and irrelevant.

Alan Brien, formerly theatre critic of The Spectator, now writes for the Sunday Times.