SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
February 2005
Volume 12, Number 2
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Here We Go Again
-> Publisher's Note: A Tribute to Sam Francis
-> The Moving Picture (an electronic Exclusive)
-> The Real Historical Jesus
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Here We Go Again
(page 1)
{{ Material dropped or changed solely for reasons of
space appears in double curly brackets. }}
A few days before President Bush's second term
began, Seymour Hersh of THE NEW YORKER delivered another
of his bombshell reports: that U.S. and Israeli commandos
have been undertaking covert operations in Iran,
presumably to lay the groundwork for preemptive strikes
against Iran's suspected nuclear program.
The administration issued a weak denial, saying the
story contained "inaccuracies." No doubt. When you have
to ferret out facts a secretive government doesn't want
known, you're bound to get some details wrong. The real
question is whether the story as a whole is true.
According to Hersh's sources, Bush and his people
construe his reelection as a popular endorsement of his
wartime leadership and a mandate for more of same,
including a widening of the war -- if necessary, by
covert means and without consulting Congress. Though
polls indicate waning public support for the war in Iraq,
an issue that helped John Kerry in the election (though
not quite enough to give him a victory), Bush apparently
thinks he's popular enough to expand the war on his own
without paying a severe political penalty. He's being
encouraged to think so by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, and other hawks around him. Some
observers surmised that he would learn lessons from the
difficulty of occupying Iraq and dismiss the
neoconservative advisors who had counseled him in his
first term. But if Hersh is right, Bush may be about to
give these people the "World War IV" they have pushed
for: a campaign of "regime change" across the Middle
East, disabling or even toppling all Muslim governments
hostile to the state of Israel.
Such audacity hardly seems possible. Yet Hersh's
record as a reporter is one of the most distinguished,
most recently with his revelations of the tortures in the
Abu Ghraib prison. And the Bush administration has an
equally consistent record of deceit, evading the law,
seeking pretexts for military action, and sheer
hare-brained goals, untempered by prudent foresight about
adverse results.
At home, Americans have had second thoughts about
the Iraq war, and even loyal congressional Republicans
would hesitate to back a huge escalation in the region.
And if Bush doesn't have the public as well as his own
party solidly behind him, the Democrats won't roll over
again. Quiet qualms would become roaring opposition.
Militarily, Iran would be a far tougher target than
Iraq. It's much bigger, stronger, and by all accounts
more united against foreign threats than Iraq; moreover,
it has had plenty of time to prepare for an American
attack.
{{ In the print edition, the paragraph beginning
"Militarily," came before the one beginning "At home" --
ed. note }}
{{ Hersh reports that Rumsfeld will become even more
prominent in Bush's second term than in the first. It's
hard to believe that after the mishaps and embarrassments
of the last two years -- which have led even Republicans
to demand his dismissal -- he can feel flushed with
success; but maybe he thinks a blitzkrieg against Iran, a
quick aerial campaign against its nuclear facilities
(like the 1981 Israeli strikes in Iraq) without an
occupation, will do the job. }}
And then what? What if the United States does manage
to cripple Iran militarily? Worldwide opposition to, and
hatred of, the United States will be enormously
intensified. The long-term results are incalculable, but
surely China and Russia would take steps to meet, or even
prevent, any future American threat. It's a cliche to say
that the world is a "dangerous place." But the Bush
administration seems bent on making it even more
dangerous than it already is.
Publisher's Note
A Tribute to Sam Francis
(page 2)
What can I say in a few words of a friend of nearly
30 years who was abruptly taken away from us at the still
energetic age of 57? My dear friend -- a loyal compatriot
of SOBRAN'S -- columnist and author Dr. Samuel T. Francis
died suddenly on February 15.
We met in Washington, D.C., while we were both
working on Capitol Hill. Sam was the terrorism expert for
the Heritage Foundation while completing his doctorate in
modern history from the University of North Carolina
(Chapel Hill). From there he went to work as legislative
assistant for national security affairs for Senator
John P. East (R-N.C.).
After Senator East's death, Sam was hired by the
WASHINGTON TIMES in 1986, first as an editorial writer
and resident staff columnist, and later as deputy editor
of the editorial page. I had the honor of accompanying
him to a banquet of the American Society of Newspaper
Editors, where he received -- two years in a row -- the
Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing in 1989
and 1990. He stayed at the TIMES for nine years until he
was abruptly fired for speaking (on his own time) at an
American Renaissance Conference. The comments in his
speech were not at issue. The newspaper objected to his
appearance at the gathering.
Sam had been a syndicated columnist for the Tribune
Media Syndicate for many years. When his contract was not
renewed, he was carried for a short time by my Griffin
Internet Syndicate until he landed a contract with
Creators Syndicate, which also offers the column of his
close friend, Pat Buchanan. Sam was an advisor to
Buchanan during his presidential bids and greatly
influenced his thinking and policies.
Sam wrote several books, including POWER AND
HISTORY: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JAMES BURNHAM (1984);
and BEAUTIFUL LOSERS: ESSAYS ON THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN
CONSERVATISM (1993).
Brilliant and very witty, Sam could have me laughing
in no time by a clever turn of a phrase. He had just
signed on as an advisor and resident scholar of our new
Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. In addition Griffin
Communications was slated to arrange promotion for the
new book he just finished editing, RACE AND THE AMERICAN
FUTURE (Washington Summit Publishers, 2005).
SOBRAN'S was privileged to have Sam present his talk
"Unpatriotic Neoconservatives" at our annual anniversary
event on December 4, 2004. An audio tape of the event is
available and the video is in production.
As our hope is in the saving power of Our Lord, we
pray for the eternal rest of our good friend, Sam
Francis.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Fran Griffin
Publisher
"A nation, or even a planet, that recognizes no god other
than its belly will quickly start wallowing in the
ignorance, crime, corruption, and avarice that today
afflicts the United States, and it will find itself
unable to free itself of them."
-- Sam Francis
"This Land Ain't Your Land"
[A longer version of this tribute, together with
photographs from the 2004 SOBRAN'S Charter Subscribers'
Dinner, comments from SOBRAN'S readers, and links to
other tributes can be found on the SOBRAN'S website at
http://www.sobran.com/articles/francisTribute.shtml.]
The Moving Picture
(Exclusive to electronic media)
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of "equals"
signs around the emphasized words. }}
President Bush's second inaugural speech was one
more exercise in banal loftiness, full of the standard
urgent utopianism of presidential oratory. Our mission is
now to end tyranny everywhere because our own liberty
depends on universal liberty, and so on and so forth. If
that sounds like neocon boilerplate, well, Charles
Krauthammer reportedly chipped in some advice. By now I
suppose it would sound paradoxical, if not perverse, for
a president to suggest that our own liberty may depend on
tightly controlling our own government.
* * *
Still, White House officials rushed to assure the
press that the speech didn't mean a new departure in
foreign policy, just a clarification of the values
currently guiding the United States around the world.
Pro-U.S. tyrants can rest easy.
* * *
At the same time, Condoleezza Rice was confiirmed as
Bush's new secretary of state with only perfunctory
Democratic criticism of her role as war propagandist
(though the 13 nay votes she got were the most against
any nominee to the post since 1825). Doubling the boss's
Axis of Evil, she named six countries as remaining
"outposts of tyranny" -- Iran and North Korea are joined
by Burma, Cuba, Belarus, and Zimbabwe -- requiring U.S.
pressure, if not yet preemptive war and regime change.
* * *
After Seymour Hersh reported that U.S. commandos are
conducting secret missions in Iran, the Ziomaniacal NEW
YORK POST -- which has always held Hersh a lying pinko
un-American enemy of Israel -- ran a column by Rael Jean
Isaac blasting him on two counts: On the one hand, he
"endangers the lives of American commandos on these
missions" (it doesn't seem to matter whether such illegal
missions endanger the rest of us); on the other hand,
Hersh has a long record of "shoddy reporting" and is not
to be believed. In Hersh's defense, then, it would seem
likely, from what Mrs. Isaac says, that he's only risking
the lives of =imaginary= American commandos.
* * *
In a recent column, Bill Buckley writes, "What needs
to be said about oil is that it is worth fighting for;
you must be willing to die for oil." James G. Bruen Jr.
of CULTURE WARS magazine retorts, "Was a thirst for oil
sufficient justification for the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor?"
* * *
Johnny Carson's death at 79 drew forth a flood of
excessive praise, reminding us that he had been awarded
the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Nothing against
Carson, a durable entertainer in a fickle business, but
when you stop to think of it, this country gives out an
awful lot of honors.
The Real Historical Jesus
(pages 3-6)
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of "equals"
signs around the emphasized words. }}
Since the Enlightenment, Christianity has been
bedeviled by the idea of "the historical Jesus" -- a
purely human figure stripped of the divine and
supernatural qualities imputed to him by the Gospels,
St. Paul, and the early Church. In its popular form, it
appears in the common notion that Christ's "teachings"
are all very well, even morally edifying, but his
"miracles" are mere fables that can be safely dismissed.
And of course a Jesus who is merely human, not divine,
can't demand anything of us or require us to accept him.
This has a superficial appeal to the modern mind,
which seeks purely natural explanations for everything
and regards man as self-sufficient. But as we reflect on
it, a huge and fatal difficulty presents itself: The
Jesus we meet in the Gospels can't be reduced to ordinary
human dimensions. This is what all the skeptics,
scholarly and otherwise, fail to see.
The "Higher Criticism" that developed two centuries
ago with German scholars has sought to discover a real
Jesus behind the Gospel accounts. Charlotte Allen has
told the story of the development of this school of
thought in her recent book, THE HUMAN CHRIST: THE SEARCH
FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS (The Free Press). The leading
names in the great period of the Higher Criticism were
mostly German: Reimarus, Strauss, Schleiermacher,
Troeltsch, Dibelius, Harnack, and Bultmann.
Not all of them had subversive intent. Some had a
real residue of piety for Jesus and hoped to salvage a
core of fact acceptable to Christianity's "cultured
despisers" in an age of science and reason. But even
these assumed that most of the Gospels' assertions about
Jesus would have to be discarded. This method has come to
be known as "demythologization." By now, skepticism has
become a precondition of academic biblical scholarship.
No self-respecting scholar today wants to be mistaken for
a gullible believer!
As time passed, speculation about Jesus had its way.
He was variously portrayed as a mystic, social reformer,
megalomaniac, religious enthusiast, political activist,
Essene ascetic, liberal, proto-Marxist agitator, utopian
dreamer, feminist, and homosexual. As long as his
divinity was denied, no surmise was too wild to find an
audience (and a publisher). He could be freely modernized
-- or, as one might say, remythologized. We are in the
age of the gullible unbeliever.
Once the Reformation shattered the unity of Western
Christendom, all this was bound to happen. The early
Protestants hoped to substitute the authority of the
Bible for the authority of the visible Church, but the
many problems of interpreting the Bible prevented any new
and stable orthodoxy from emerging, until the authority
of the Bible itself came into question. Thomas Jefferson,
late in his life, produced a sort of Deist New Testament
by editing out all supernatural events and claims,
leaving only a skeletal "morality," which he called the
authentic message of Jesus (no longer Christ).
One of the earliest debunkers was an Englishman,
Thomas Chubb (1679-1747). Chubb was a glovemaker and
popular writer, not a scholar, whose aim was to reduce
Christianity to something conformable to "reason and
natural religion," the shibboleths of his age. He knew
neither Hebrew nor Greek and did nothing in the way of
biblical research. Yet, as Miss Allen notes, he created
what would be the "template" for future scholars of the
historical Jesus: "The 'historical' Jesus is =almost
always= a version of Chubb's: a nonsupernatural ethical
teacher born in Nazareth -- not of a virgin -- who
offended the reigning religious authorities in Jerusalem
and found himself in political trouble. Mark's is =almost
always= the first Gospel. Paul of Tarsus is =almost
always= the real founder of Christianity."
The reduction of Jesus has come full circle from
these humble beginnings. Some of today's prominent
Jesus-debunkers have no more scholarly credentials than
Chubb. The Jesus Seminar claims to separate Jesus'
original sayings from those later ascribed to him by the
Church (the original ones being those most congenial to
the twenty-first century, as determined by vote of
Seminar members). At the low end of the scale we find Dan
Brown, whose novel THE DA VINCI CODE has sold in the
millions, convincing myriad readers that the Vatican has
for millennia concealed the real facts about Jesus
(including his marriage to Mary Magdalene). Brown insists
that his novel is based on thorough research, a claim to
be measured against his assertion that the Catholic
Church "murdered" Copernicus. (Any children's
encyclopedia could have saved him from that howler.)
More important, all these versions of the Historical
Jesus lack the vitality of the Gospels' Jesus. The
explanations leave too many loose ends unexplained. We
never feel that anything has been gained by them; the
Historical Jesus is always a smaller and less satisfying
figure than the Gospels' Jesus, and not only, or even
chiefly, because he can't walk on water. He's almost a
nobody, not even a rounded character. We may also wonder
why, if the Historical Jesus never claimed to be the Son
of God, the early Church would have been so imaginative
and audacious as to have him speaking of the Holy Spirit
as well as of the Father.
There is something radically wrong with the very
conception of a "historical" Jesus (defined a priori as
merely human). It's both evasive and naive. Indeed
separating Jesus' moral teachings from his supernatural
claims and deeds has proved more complicated than the
early Higher Critics expected. Many of his recorded
teachings have had to be sacrificed along with the
miracles, until hardly anything is left.
As C.S. Lewis puts it in MERE CHRISTIANITY, the
Jesus of the Gospels combines the deepest moral and
psychological insight with the most extraordinary
assertions of his own authority any man has ever made. If
he is not what he says he is, he is either "a madman or
something worse." Lewis rejects as "patronising nonsense"
the notion that he was merely "a great human teacher":
"He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Jesus' teachings aren't just uplifting homilies
about social justice. One of his most central teachings
is that he has a special intimacy with God and speaks
with God's authority. "I and the Father are one." "No man
comes to the Father except through me." "Whoever has seen
me has seen the Father." When he told the paralytic,
"Your sins are forgiven," the Pharisees immediately
accused him of blasphemy, since "only God can forgive
sins."
In fact, as Frank Sheed writes in TO KNOW CHRIST
JESUS (recently republished by Ignatius Press), Jesus'
enemies, in contrast to the Higher Critics, didn't deny
his miracles, which they ascribed to diabolical power; it
was precisely his teachings they violently rejected! The
Gospels are quite clear on this. No skeptical reading of
them can plausibly argue that the "real" Jesus taught
innocuously and that the Gospel authors superadded
accounts of miracles after his death to create the
impression of divine power. One might as well argue (as
only a few extreme skeptics do) that Jesus never existed
at all, and that the Gospels are entirely fictional.
Sheed is far from the first to point out that four
amateur writers couldn't have invented the most original
character in all the world's literature. Not even a
Shakespeare could have imagined Jesus, as he imagined
such marvelous figures as Hamlet and Cleopatra. Jesus'
words have a power no other human words have ever had.
They ring with wisdom, authority, and mystery. They have
the stamp of a definite personality, totally unlike any
other ever known.
Replying to Freudian critics who have tried to
portray Jesus as hysterical or otherwise abnormal, the
French historian Henri Daniel-Rops, in JESUS AND HIS
TIMES (now, alas, out of print), observes "the perfect
balance of his character," its wholeness and integration.
He is consistent, yet unpredictable; he can be serene,
tender, tearful, piteous, stern, indignant, even furious,
as the moment warrants, but he is always "master of the
event." And he is marvelously quick-witted: When his
enemies try to trap him, he is never at a loss but, on
the contrary, always has an unexpected and decisive
answer. Jesus' words, Daniel-Rops remarks, have "the
unmistakable accents of a man who has only to speak to be
obeyed." He has, supremely, the gift of reaching people's
hearts in earthy language. He sizes people up, judges
their motives, and says exactly what they need to hear,
with a complete lack of the self-absorption and confusion
that usually impede human communication. He combines
spiritual authority with the keenest alertness to the
situation and the person he is facing at the moment. He
can win a disciple with the slightest personal attention
-- as when he astounds Nathanael with the simple words,
"I saw you under the fig tree." Only Nathanael knows what
this refers to; but it's enough for him. He believes.
It's striking how many of Jesus' sayings are quick
responses to his immediate circumstances. The Gospels
constantly show him in lively interaction with others. He
is always ready, never remote. It's easy to overlook his
sheer sociability, shown in his preference for humble and
even disreputable companions. We shouldn't forget that
such people accepted his company too, as they would
hardly have done if his manner had been aloof, priggish,
or pontificating. Evidently the holy Son of God wasn't
holier-than-thou.
On the other hand, even knowing his imminent ordeal,
he yields nothing when he faces Pontius Pilate. He speaks
with all his poise and authority -- still "master of the
event" -- when any other man would be cringing and
begging for his life, or at least struggling to keep his
dignity. He speaks to the mighty power of the Roman
Empire with the same totally unawed self-possession with
which he addresses the Samaritan woman.
My personal experience as a writer has given me a
special respect for Jesus' eloquence. I'm flattered when
people quote anything I've written even a year after I
write it. Imagine speaking words, many of them off the
cuff, that are quoted, even in translation, for thousands
of years -- and not merely because they are memorably
phrased, but because they penetrate the depths of our
consciences. Great as Shakespeare is, his words don't
have this kind of sovereignty over our inner lives; we
don't measure our very souls against them.
We can go further than Sheed. The belief that the
Evangelists could have created Jesus, giving him words of
such authority, assumes that they were trying to imagine
a perfect man. That is, they began with a conception of a
man like Jesus and then filled out their portraits with
details of what they thought such a man would say and do.
This idea has a fatal flaw: Jesus himself gave his
disciples a new, and shocking, conception of what it
meant to be perfect, one that could never have occurred
to them until they had known him. If the greatest
pre-Christian writers had tried to imagine an ideal man,
the result would have been nothing at all like Jesus.
Homer might have created a hero like the "godlike"
Achilles, or Hector, or Odysseus; Virgil an Aeneas.
Aristotle might have set forth his haughty, prudent,
honor-loving "great-souled man." These are all admirable,
as far as they go; but they all go in the same direction,
away from the example of Christ. They obviously deserve
an earthly glory that would be impossible if they were to
meet Jesus' crushing fate on Calvary -- the very fate his
followers eventually learned to see as the fulfillment of
a kind of glory utterly different from any they were
aware of.
Plato would have offered a Socrates, the closest
pagan analogy to Jesus. Socrates is wise, virtuous, and
courageous even unto death; but the analogy is still
feeble. He claims no divine nature, works no wonders, and
doesn't baffle his disciples with enigmatic sayings, such
as that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. He
is permitted a dignified death.
Not only would these authors have failed to imagine
Jesus; judging him by the outlines of his life, they
would have regarded him as anything but ideal -- a poor
man of low social status who preached loving your enemies
and who died the horrible and ignominious death of a
common criminal, after being spat on by a mob. Ideal?
Nonsense! Absurd! The Greek and Roman poets and
philosophers would have found his story not admirable but
simply repulsive.
Socrates also dies courageously, but his death is
decorous. It merely ends his life; it doesn't fulfill it.
There is nothing timely about it, in contrast to Christ's
death in Jerusalem, where not only Christ's life but the
long history of Israel is finally concentrated in one
event.
The crucifix gives only the faintest impression of
what crucifixion was really like. The early Church
regarded crucifixion as too hideous and degrading to be
represented; only long after the practice had been
abolished was its image adopted, more symbolically than
realistically. In Christian art the cross is so tall as
to appear almost to exalt the victim; in reality it was a
small stake whose crossbeam rested on it in the shape of
a T, while the victim writhed, impaled and suffocating,
in indescribable agonies. If Jesus hadn't risen from
death, his scattered followers would probably have
preferred to forget the whole thing.
Only his resurrection gives his crucifixion meaning.
The Historical Jesus doesn't rise, except in
hallucination. Why such a hallucination should be shared
by all his disciples -- not a sane man among them? -- is
never explained. Why the bitter persecutor Saul of Tarsus
should suddenly (and belatedly) experience the same
delusion we are also left to wonder; just as we are left
to wonder why all the authors of the Epistles sound so
matter-of-fact about having met Jesus alive after his
death. (They don't sound like either frauds or
hysterics.)
Even the most pious Jews couldn't imagine a Jesus.
Their ideal might have been a super-Moses or a
super-David, a great prophet or conqueror who would
restore Israel to glory. But how far they were from
imagining a Jesus is shown not only by their general
rejection of him, but by his own faithful disciples'
inability to recognize or comprehend what he was when
they actually met him and lived in his presence! As a boy
he mystified even his mother when he explained his
lingering in the Temple.
The Gospels' authors couldn't have made him up
because, as they themselves tell us, they didn't
understand him fully until after his death, resurrection,
and ascent into heaven; until Pentecost, actually. He was
anything but the realization of a preexisting ideal. Just
the opposite.
In crucial ways Jesus contradicted the ideals his
disciples had actually held all their lives. And this is
an essential part of the story they tell. Of his chosen
Twelve, all but John had deserted him at the very climax
of his mission. The story, as they tell it, does them
little credit -- additional reason to doubt they
falsified it. They could easily have shown themselves in
a more favorable light, or at least omitted their
shameful behavior.
Even in his miracles Jesus falls short of both pagan
and Hebrew models of heroism. His wonders are mostly
"little" ones -- healings and exorcisms, nothing like
spectacular physical feats of killing monsters or parting
seas. If the Gospels were fictions, wouldn't they have
given us something on a more epic scale than curing sick
people? Imagine Hercules healing lepers! Any mythmaker
would have outdone the Evangelists in mere scale; but
Jesus' miracles are of a piece with his teachings about
showing mercy to everyone, however humble. And instead of
glorying in his deeds, he tells their subjects, "Your own
faith has cured you," charging them to tell nobody.
Jesus' teachings themselves are miraculous. Nothing
like them had ever been heard before. If he hadn't come,
nobody else would ever have thought of them. This is why
they can't be prescinded from his deeds, as the skeptics
try to do.
After the climactic events in Jerusalem, everything
fell into place -- the hints of the prophets, the infancy
stories, St. Simeon's prediction that Jesus would be a
"sign of contradiction," Jesus' own dark words. He was
born of a virgin in Bethlehem, "despised and rejected by
men," and, most astounding of all, "God with us." He
changed our very conception of God. It would have been
remarkably ingenious of his followers, after his death,
to invent the Trinity.
It can't be too strongly emphasized that Jesus'
mission is =completed= by his crucifixion. If he were
anything but what he was -- a social reformer, et cetera
-- an untimely death would have been a mere unfortunate
interruption of what he was trying to do, leaving his
aspirations frustrated. But the opposite is true.
Everything in his life has pointed to this moment. Every
mysterious word he has spoken is illuminated by it.
It's not as if he'd left plans unaccomplished or
words unspoken. His death doesn't seem a tragic
abridgement of a career still full of promise, like the
death of Mozart at about the same age. Jesus had said and
done everything he had to say and do. His hour had come,
just as he himself had foretold. His life ended in what
the pagans would have regarded as the mortifying accident
of unjust execution, but he knew it was complete. And as
Simeon had predicted, he went to his death a sign of
contradiction, a sword piercing his mother's heart. From
the manger to the cross, the Gospel story is too perfect,
too coherent and consistent, too rich in unexpected
meaning, for any merely human mind to have designed.
"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will
not pass away." His words continue to have their original
power. Nothing in the last two millennia has made them
outdated; nothing he said has been superseded.
And to the skeptics he remains a sign of
contradiction. Again, the Jesus Seminar, not content to
leave his "teachings" intact, professes to distinguish
the authentic words of Jesus from words later forged by
his followers. As if his followers would have dared to
put words in his mouth! As if they (or anyone else) could
have fabricated words worthy of him, words convincing
enough to fool the Christian world for 20 centuries!
What's more, any such interpolations would have had to
meet a well-nigh impossible condition: Apart from
sounding like something Jesus might say, they would have
had to contribute to the coherence of the whole story.
If the pagan and Jewish writers couldn't imagine
Jesus, neither, in a sense, have Christian writers. Even
with the example of Jesus before them for imitation, the
greatest geniuses of the Christian era have never been
able to create a character who could speak with anything
approaching the power of Jesus' words. Few have even
tried. Milton's Christ, in PARADISE REGAINED, has all the
eloquence of Milton and none of the eloquence of Christ.
Scientific theories are often judged less by their
truth or coherence than by their explanatory power. Do
they seem to account for all the data? The various
versions of the Historical Jesus explain less than the
Jesus of the Gospels. In fact the very assumption of a
Historical Jesus begs the real question. It denies the
undeniably supernatural personality whose power we
ourselves meet on every page of the New Testament. If
Jesus himself isn't the source of those miraculous words,
who is?
NUGGETS
FURTHER READING: If the question of the "historical
Jesus" interests you, you may enjoy Lee Strobel's CASE
FOR CHRIST (publisher, $16.95, paper). Strobel is a
former CHICAGO TRIBUNE investigative reporter who had the
inspired idea of checking out the Gospels the way he used
to check out news stories. His interviews with dozens of
experts confirm that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John hold
up very well indeed from many angles. And this story has
legs. (page 6)
BAD GUY: Alexander Hamilton is back in vogue, with
several recent biographies and a big exhibition in New
York hailing him as "the Man Who Made America." The term
"fascist" is usually a mere term of abuse, but it fits
Hamilton pretty well: He favored the concentration of
power, wars of conquest, economic dirigisme, government
crackdowns on the press, the use of Federal troops to
collect taxes, and on and on. Jefferson called him "our
Bonaparte." Reviewing his career, you wonder why Aaron
Burr isn't on the $10 bill. (page 9)
VOX POPULI: The suspicion grows that we hold elections so
that at least some of our rulers can avoid the danger of
confirmation hearings. (page 11)
Exclusive to electronic media:
THE OTHER BUSH WAR: Europe has 87 prisoners per 100,000
people; the United States, 685. This is chiefly a
reflection of the first President Bush's War on Drugs,
which has had the effect of criminalizing countless young
men, chiefly blacks, most of whom are no threat to
anyone. You don't have to be a slobbering liberal to find
this tragic and outrageous. Prohibition, the War on
Booze, required a constitutional amendment. The War on
Drugs was launched by a mere executive order.
GETTING RELIGION: Since the November election, Democrats
have been changing their stance on abortion. Hillary
Clinton is just the latest to pull the long face about
the "tragic" nature of the act, professing her "respect"
for its opponents, and urging both sides to seek "common
ground" (i.e., on Federally funded contraception, of
course). She's taking a leaf from her husband, who used
to say abortion should be "safe, legal, ... and rare."
One wonders why the exercise of a constitutional right
should be rare. Do we call the exercise of free speech
"tragic"?
QUERY: Isn't it time the Old World issued its own Monroe
Doctrine, warning the Americas against butting into the
affairs of its hemisphere?
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* The Dark Lady, and Other Intellectuals
(January 4, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050104.shtml
* Magnifying the Enemy (January 6, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050106.shtml
* Osama and Jack the Ripper (January 11, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050111.shtml
* "What Will History Say?" (January 18, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050118.shtml
* The Utopian Conservatives (January 25, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050125.shtml
* Bush's Helpful Critics (February 1, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050201.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]