The empires that have lasted have always been empires of the mind, particularly the religions. As with philosophies, artistic traditions, the architecture of different civilizations, so religions were all started by somebody. Judaism by Abraham, Islam by Mohammed, all divinely inspired no doubt. But it required an individual man to start them off. So with Jesus and Christianity, the most sacred Christian doctrine insists he was Man as well as God. In every instance it required a man to get things moving. And every one of us is a man of his time; he can only talk in the language of his country of origin, even if he knows a few foreign languages as well. He can only think in the thought idioms of his country, which of course are largely dictated by the culture of that country at the time. Everyone recognises that to judge the great men of the past by today’s standards of behaviour is both ignorant and wrong.
So Jesus Christ in many ways was a man of his time. He dressed like a Bedouin, was steeped in the literature of his nation, and knew little outside it, and was wedded to the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, which was prevalent at that time. To take the very simplest illustration: Jesus will almost certainly have thought that the sun revolved round the earth. Aristarchus (310-230 BC), by doing work on the eclipses of the moon, established that the sun was much bigger than the earth; and advanced the theory that the sun remained unmoved, whilst the earth revolved in orbit round the sun, which is a likely consequence of the sun being much bigger. However his astronomy was far in advance of his time; most people held the view that it was the earth that remained unmoved, and Ptolemy’s exposition of this view in about 130 AD lasted until the 16th century. To suggest that Jesus, whose learning was largely confined to what we call the Old Testament, had heard of Aristarchus, and much preferred his opinion to the prevailing view, is to stretch credulity to breaking point. And to suggest that Jesus had an inkling that Newtonian gravitation would one day triumphantly vindicate Copernicus’ espousal of Aristarchus’ hypothesis, is to turn Jesus into a magician, which he most emphatically was not.
It may be almost impossible for us to conceive what life was like in 1st century Palestine, but we can at least recognise that Jesus was a man of his time, as we all are; and that his general knowledge will have been that of a well informed carpenter in Galilee. Any deeper knowledge will have come to him through prayer; a medium that is after all available to us too, even if we seldom make much use of it. So if we pay lip-service to the idea that he came down from heaven, and was the Word through whom all things were created, he did not bring with him a detailed knowledge of modern cosmology. At least I cannot believe it.
Religion Rewritten, a religious view of nature and the universe.
Essay 1 - Jesus' Unique Message.