Criticism of Jesus

Jesus is the central figure of Christianity and Christians believe that he was (and still is) God. Since the time of his life, a number of noted individuals have criticised Jesus, some of whom were themselves Christians.

Criticism by source

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was critical of Jesus' failure to keep his promise to deliver humanity from sin; he wrote:

Many sins have been committed since Christ's death, and are being committed daily. It seems that we were not delivered from sin by Christ's death.

He then offered a response to his own objection, saying that Christ;

by setting up the cause of our deliverance, from which cause all sins whatsoever, past, present, or to come, could be forgiven: just as if a doctor were to prepare a medicine by which all sicknesses can be cured even in future.

In the Summa Theologica Aquinas posed questions, which he answered by critical objections and counter-arguments replying to these objections. The Summa Theologica contains a comprehensive list of criticisms related to Jesus and replies to these criticisms. When Thomas Aquinas was alive in the 13th century.the Vatican was very powerful and was rather intolerant of dissenting views. However Aquinas was able to criticise Christianity, the concept of faith and indeed Jesus, by presenting two sides of any given argument, which means that his own personal views are not obvious. During his lifetime he was certainly regarded as a Christian theologian with generally good relations with the Vatican and not a heretic.

Thomas Paine

In his treatise entitled The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine stated:

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost, under the impious pretence, (Luke i. 35,) that "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee." Notwithstanding which, Joseph afterwards marries her, cohabits with her as his wife, and in his turn rivals the ghost. This is putting the story into intelligible language, and when told in this manner, there is not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche has many criticisms of Jesus and Christianity, even going so far as to style himself as "The Anti-Christ." In "Human, All Too Human", and Twilight of the Idols for example, Nietzsche accuses the Church' and Jesus's teachings as being anti-natural in their treatment of passions, in particularly sexuality; "There [In the Sermon on the Mount] it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out." Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept ... the Christian who follows that advice and believes he has killed his sensuality is deceiving himself: it lives on in an uncanny vampire form and torments in repulsive disguises."

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell

In Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell pointed to parts of the gospel where Jesus seems to be saying that his second coming would occur in the lifetime of some of his listerners (Luke, 9:27). He concludes from this that Jesus' prediction was incorrect and thus that Jesus was " not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise."

Regarding Jesus' moral teaching Russell has the following to say:

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation.

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis was a Christian apologist; however in his influential book Mere Christianity, he was critical of considering Jesus simply as a moral teacher. He wrote:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens is very critical of Jesus and of religion in general. Regarding Jesus' teachings on hell, Hitchens wrote:

The god of Moses would call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead.

Hitchens is critical of Jesus' apparent inconsistency:

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?

Hitchens is unimpressed by Jesus' treatment of his mother:

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was a well known Catholic nun, renowned for her charity work, particularly in Calcutta. However privately she struggled with her faith, in particular with the veracity of Jesus; she wrote:

How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, ... What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true

See also

• Criticism of Christianity
• Jesus as myth
• Rejection of Jesus
• Historicity of the Gospels

Further reading

• Toledoth Yeshu, translation of Morris Goldstein (Jesus in the Jewish Tradition) and Alan Humm.