C.S. Lewis on the Historical Jesus
Passage of the Week: Monday 15th January
The ‘historical Jesus’ refers to modern reconstructions of Jesus as a historical figure; often, though not always, as a foil to the ‘Christ of Faith’.
The miracle-working messiah of Christian confession — born of a virgin, dying for sins, rising from the grave, coming back to judge the quick and the dead — is substituted by a figure at once more shadowy and palatable to modern tastes.
There have been many candidates vying for this place: Jesus as humanist, Marxist, social-reformer, zealot, and apocalyptic prophet – to name but a handful.
Understandably, however, the so-called ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ is often criticised as an exercise in projection. As the old adage goes, Jesus scholars look down the well of history, only to find their own reflections staring back at them.1
Christ made us in his image; and we returned the favour.2
Our passage of the week – reflecting on the historical Jesus – is from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942), the work which projected him to international fame.
The Screwtape Letters is a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his trainee-demon nephew, Wormwood. Through the mouthpiece of Screwtape, Lewis makes it clear that he finds the attempt to locate a historical Jesus behind the Gospels deeply misguided – even diabolical.
Yet as we read through this passage, it is important not to mistake The Screwtape Letters for a systematic picture of Lewis’ views on the historical Jesus. At least one picture of the historical Jesus – that of Albert Schweizer’s apocalyptic variety – Lewis is inclined to accept.3
In this passage, however, Lewis perceives the primary threat of the historical Jesus as spiritual; that these historical constructions replace devotion to Jesus as Lord.
As he writes in my favourite poem of his, ‘Thoughts are but coins, let me not trust instead of Thee, their thin worn image of Thy head’ (An Apologist’s Evening Prayer.)
Here is Screwtape on the historical Jesus:
‘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…
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- one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought- a crank vending a panacea…
Our third aim is, by these constructions, to destroy the devotional life. For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced by men in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago. Such an object cannot in fact be worshipped...
And fourthly, besides being unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of this kind is false to history in another sense. No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into the Enemy's camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography. Indeed, materials for a full biography have been withheld from men. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had. . . . The “Gospels” come later, and were written, not to make Christians, but to edify Christians already made.’4
See George Tyrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: Longmans Green, 1909), 49.
As far as I can tell, this quote may be better attributed to the ‘historic’ rather than ‘historical’ Voltaire.
See C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1960), 95-96.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: with Screwtape Proposes a Toast (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 106-108. This abridgement is taken from a fascinating thesis which combines two of my great passions: Mark Edwards, “C.S. Lewis and the Quest for the Historical Jesus” (Florida State University, 1985), 136-137.