FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Hurrah for Scoundrel Christ!

Rant Number 391 1 April 2010

“Pullman defends ‘Scoundrel Christ’”. Thus The Independent newspaper. Quoting an aging writer blabbing banalities at some literary festival. Chap has a book out, you see, he desperately seeks publicity. Offending a few thin-skinned, naive Chrissies, that’s the way to push up sales – huh!...human, all too human.

Mr Pullman amuses me. Obviously, he takes himself very seriously. I wouldn’t dream of calling him a scoundrel. Actually, he is a middling, nearly non-existent writer. A pious atheist, with a diverting idée fixe: ‘to undermine the basis of Christian belief’. Given his title, ‘Scoundrel Christ’, no doubt the man fancies himself blasphemous, Byronic, maybe satanic. Actually, he has a point – thought not quite the point he thought he had. Malgre lui, this wise fool has intuited a tremendous truth - a revolutionary truth - about the Easter faith: the crime of Christianity.

A crime is an illegal or shameful act. An offense against the state, punishable by law. A criminal behaves in a scandalous, deplorable way. Does it ring a bell? ‘A wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’. A disreputable lowlife, one who consorted with harlots. I kid you not. Read it all in St Luke’s (7:34). Christ his enemies branded a criminal. A breaker of religious rules, like the hallowed Jewish Sabbath. More than that - his self-righteous, bourgeois enemies spitefully called ‘a Samaritan’. That means worse than a scoundrel – a Samaritan was a hated and despised heretic, a foreigner, a mongrelised non-Hebrew. A raving madman, one who ‘had a demon’. (St John 8:48) A magician, an impostor, one whose parental origins were dubious. All that, and more, the Gospels openly set out, in black and white. This atheist, poor idiot, doesn’t know it but he is just relating the plain Gospel truth. He almost writes as a good Christian apologist. That comical, infidel Anglican rag, Church Times, should serialise him.

God’s chastisement of this godless creep takes the form of a delusion. The fool thinks he is clever. He draws what he thinks is a neat, clever-dick distinction. Between two imaginary twins - ‘scoundrel Christ’ and ‘the good man Jesus’. The latter is a goody-goody, PC bloke, while the former is the fearful Christ of Christianity - a rotter, a fanatic, a deceiver, maybe an Islamist, who knows?

Poor, poor simpleton! Phil, have you ever heard of the Jesus Seminar? An ultra-radical theological think-tank in the US. Its members aren’t apologists for the Church, quite the opposite. They are tough academics who meet regularly and thrash out what radical hermeneutics tells them about the ‘Jesus of history’. The outcome is nothing like Pullman’s wishy-washy do-gooder. Rather, the Jesus revealed by the Jesus Seminar is like a Zen master. Zen master, geddit, Phil? If you have ever read about Zen masters, man, they are hot! I knew one once. Deshimaru Roshi his name was – check him out online. Scoundrel Deshimaru, Pullman might call him. If you crossed a lion with a lamb, you might get a Deshimaru. That old, bald Japanese sage was a mixture of angel cum concentration camp commander, yep. Like a riddling, laughing, unpredictable tiger he was. In the dojo, when he whacked you in the back because you did not meditate properly...boy, that hurt!

Was Jesus of Nazareth really like Deshimaru Roshi? A Jewish Zen master squared? Don’t know but this I know: like Pullman’s ‘good man’, Jesus was not.

A scoundrel’s disciples will be scoundrels, right? And so were Christ’s disciples – the world called them that from the start. St Paul boasts of it: ‘We are held in disrepute...we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless...we have become and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things.’ When reviled, the Christians blessed. When persecuted, they endured. When slandered, they tried to conciliate. A right bunch of scoundrels, weren’t they? Emperor Nero, the monster, threw them to the lions. He accused Christians of being cannibals, arsonists, revolutionaries. Of following a right scoundrel. QED.

Another pagan, an intellectual called Celsus, a Philip Pullman of his time perhaps, centuries ago penned a scathing attack of the Christians. Slaves, low people, servants, followers of a crucified criminal. Disloyal to the state, pacifists, antisocial dregs, anarchists...scoundrels all, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Dear Mr Pullman, originality isn’t your forte. Your likes have said it of the Lord and of his followers# many times before. Far from minding it, they have gloried in the pagans’ insults. The hatred of the wicked is always a good sign, today like yesterday.

Mind you, Jesus Christ is not the only founder of a world religion to be besmirched. Mal comune, mezzo gaudio, Italians say. An Arab controversialist called Wafa Sultan has uttered dreadful things about Muhammad. She called Islam’s Prophet a p...I won’t spell out that word, I don’t want to offend my Muslim friends. Guess she too has a book to plug. A mate of mine, Ehab, went ballistic the other day. ‘Look Ehab, we Christians are used to this sort of thing. Our faith is reviled daily in ex-Christian Europe. A violent reaction only fuels the flames. Be patient, OK? Allah ma’a assabirin – God is with the patient’ I told him. Hope he gets it.

Easter, the feast of the Resurrection, comes round again on Sunday. The greatest story ever told. The pagans try to get rid of the scoundrel, so they nail him to a cross. Serves him right. Wanted to destroy the Temple, subvert religion, confuse the powers that be. His followers, wretched, feeble folks too, are scattered. Darkness at noon. The right-thinking guys, the bourgeois, the good religionists, the collaborators breathe a sight of relief. The Establishment has won. The scoundrel is dead. Story over...no, not quite.

Easter. A tremendous proclamation of Good News. The criminal was dead but now he is alive. And he is out of the sepulchre. He walks amongst us. Again and again, Christ returns. True Christianity – a goodly fraternity of God’s scoundrels – is alive. And it issues a summons to rebellion, to revolt, to insurrection. To turn the world upside down. Now. Today.

Let our literary fat cats go on earning their thirty pieces of silver. Our comfortable, complacent neo-pagan establishment pays well. But let them also beware – scoundrel Christ is back. And his followers will not be tamed.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli