In the present crisis facing Christianity it is important, it seems to me, to separate the man Jesus from the story we have of Jesus. It is confusion between the two which has led to the recent spate of books and TV programs concerning the historical Jesus. There can be no doubt, I think, as to their purpose; the authors do not want to destroy Jesus as some of their critics suppose, they only want to show that he was a man – simply a man, and they are frustrated that they can’t find the man.

Indeed they have come up with so little on the man that some question his very existence while others claim that they have found his tomb, and still others speculate that he might have married Mary Magdalene – that is, they steal from and embellish the Story of Jesus, because there is nothing - absolutely nothing about the man, other than his Story.

As for professing Christians, many of them insist that the Story of Jesus is history, that every word spoken or written concerning Jesus and his Story is true up to the point where the biblical narrative ends - then there is nothing more to be said. They feel the need to insist that it is factual, that it all happened exactly as described even when it is described in somewhat different ways each time.

Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian and one of the founders of Existentialism, said that all it was necessary to know of Jesus was that there once lived a man of such perfection that those who knew him best believed him to be the son of God, that is to say – from God. He says the Story of Jesus compiled by those who wrote what they knew and heard about him attests to this fact, but only that. There is nothing subjective in Jesus’ Story, nothing by Jesus about Jesus except what we infer.

Similarly we are told that there was a real Hamlet – a Prince of Denmark – but no one has the least interest in that fact or in him. It is Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet that the world cherishes; Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet’s cruel dilemma that he could have the truth and destroy the lives of all those he loved, and probably his own, or tolerate evil and wear a crown. Shakespeare, an artist with a unique compassionate spirit and mind, gave Hamlet’s story form – a moral dimension, a universal relevance.

That is how Jesus’ story is, or was, composed. It is neither true nor untrue. It is an illumination and we are its beneficiaries. Jesus, by his life, energized millions upon millions of human beings, century after century, to seek to describe and emulate his goodness – to seek moral and spiritual perfection as a guide to a better life. We are supposed to add to the Story of Jesus, as the saints and martyrs did, not relapse into spiritual sloth because we can’t bring ourselves to share the noblest of all human adventures, making ourselves better, and thereby the world.

Searching for the historical Jesus or the historical Buddha is likely to be an evasion – a search for a reason not to accept the demanding message their lives delivered to us just as we ignore the message that most of us receive concerning the existence of the ethical, the awareness of right and wrong, good and evil, which is the only intimation we have of immortality either for ourselves, or for whatever it is we strive to accomplish while alive. Does life have a purpose, or does it not?

The virtuous state sought by all the great religions is the mother of civilization, which might be described as the sum total of commitments and institutions that succeed in establishing trust among us – trust in the future, trust in the meaningfulness of the present, and the relevance of our past. Without meaning, insisted upon by all the great religions, there is no unifying principle to provide a basis for trust, or indeed, belief.

And the improbability of God is not the problem: the word and the concept “Love” is every bit as abstract and elusive as the word “God”. Love cannot be seen, measured, weighed or objectively defined, yet each of us would be offended if we were told we had never loved, or were incapable of loving. Why? Because we have experienced love, and it is for precisely this reason that religion exists. Most men and women have experienced God if only in the certainty that they and what they do, matters. Instead of demanding that the existence of Jesus be proved, we might better contemplate how much more miraculous His impact on history would be if in fact he never existed.

A mother has no *reason* not to kill her child to save herself, nor a father any reason not to kill them both if similarly threatened, though that is not how either of them behave with or without religion. The existence of each of us, the result of hundreds of millennia of protective maternal and paternal love is a testament to a faith that seems to be innate, that life has a purpose and a meaning. Far from being an illusion, such faith is the bedrock of our existence.

Scientific facts, which today’s skeptics demand, are for the most part both useless and meaningless except in the context of a civilization created long before those facts became known. It therefore follows that civilization’s existence is not dependent on such information but by a shared spiritual reality. Why spiritual? Because the shared reality is based on belief rather than knowledge. The fact that Sirius is 2,347 light years from Earth tells us nothing we need use, nor for that matter did the discovery of the circulation of the blood until someone learned how to make use of that information. Life, treated as something miraculous has far more validity than the idea that everything we experience is exactly as it appears, self evident but without meaning.

In contrast to that notion, consider the use Jean Vanier makes of the miracle of Lazarus being raised from the dead, which he links to the Crucifixion.

The story he sees is that it is precisely this ultimate miracle that persuades the people of Jerusalem; Jews, Gentile and Roman, that Jesus is God, or of God, and this supplies the reason for His crucifixion. The story thus describes our resistance to any higher reality which would interfere with our fateful and inevitable love of self.

The raising of Lazarus isn’t a “star turn” placed there to illustrate the greatness of Jesus nor are any of the other biblical miracle stories told for that purpose. Any insistence on the literal truth of these stories obscures their meaning which is presented to us to free us from our dependence on the physical and instruct us in the spiritual.

The weakness of all critiques of religion by science is that the ultimate passion of man is not to know, but to be, or perhaps to become. The life force manifests itself as growth, the realization of a destiny. The Story of Jesus helps us glimpse what we hope and pray that destiny might be – compassionate, loving, unafraid, perfect if not in every way, in what matters – pointing the way to what matters, an enabler not a scold. Whatever it is that makes us want to be a mother, a father, a hero or a saint, in the full archetypal meaning of those words, raises Hamlet’s and Kierkegaard’s existential question - to be or not to be. As Kierkegaard makes clear, choosing boils down to one choice only. To deny life’s ultimate meaning is not a choice, but a non-choice - a refusal to embrace life’s larger possibility. Jesus’ story represents in compelling form the necessity of choice – to be or not to be – to choose meaning or oblivion.

Science deals with what is knowable, religion with what is not. Science aims to produce answers, religion ponders questions that have no answers. Religion is concerned with the subjective reality that shapes our unique individual consciousness. Science seeks to create commonality of opinion concerning what is known – objective truth, valid until its next revision. Religion seeks to contribute to each individual’s consciousness of our own nature, and thereby promote a sense of purpose and direction.

The primacy that must be given to the Story of Jesus over the man Jesus arises because the Story is something the man cannot be – contemporary, available, placing Him among us so long as the earth shall live.