At the very end of his new book Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of World-Making, Don Cupitt puts a note reference to this, the book’s final note.
I end with a brief note of the general hypothesis about Christian origins that I have worked with for the past decade or so. It is a philosopher’s hypothesis, and therefore follows the general rule that a naturalistic explanation is always to be preferred.
The original Jesus (ca. 4 BCE to ca. 30 CE) was a secular moral teacher. His ‘Dream’, as I have called it, was in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, such as Jeremiah 31:31–34. He announced the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. He personally acted out some of the traditional signs of its coming, and urged his followers to begin living its life by anticipation, so as to help to make it all come true. One should become completely open and available to others; one should live according to love, without any ressentiment at all; one should practise solar living, not seeking to escape from temporality, but affirming it. We pass away singing.
The small circle of Jesus’ followers was very badly shocked by his violent and ignoble death. As often happens today in such cases, a few of his devoted women followers, including Mary of Magdala, may have had hallucinations in which he seemed to be still alive. Groups of Jesus’ followers continued to meet in Jerusalem, where they were led by James the Lord’s brother; in Galilee, where they were led by Peter; and perhaps in a few other places, such as, possibly, Syria or Egypt. They preserved some good oral traditions of Jesus’ teaching, in units of not more than a short sentence in length.
In the late 40s, tensions over the leadership of the community had begun, the main rivalry being that between Peter and James. Picking up on Mary of Magdala’s reported vision, Peter and his allies began to claim that Peter had seen the Lord. Jesus was exalted to heaven, was now the Messiah-designate, and would in due course return in power to complete his work. The claim caught on, and the visions spread – to all the apostles, to five hundred brethren at once, to James, and (last of all) to Paul of Tarsus.
The date is now around the year 50, and the infant religion has suddenly undergone a major change. Jesus’ message was ethical and this-worldly. He did not encourage any special veneration of himself. But now the believing community became absorbed in looking towards the supernatural world, to the glorified Jesus, and to purifying themselves as they waited for his return in glory. Meanwhile, Peter and the other apostles were becoming a ruling-class elite within the Church. They had the keys of the kingdom, the power of forgiveness. They controlled doctrine, worship and discipline. It was a completely new religion, and the historical Jesus faded out of it at once. The historical traditions of his teaching and his earthly life were soon extensively revised so that they could be read as endorsing the new faith. Just a whiff of the original, pre-50 Jesus remained; enough to keep alive a minority, dissenting tradition within the Church. Interestingly, it re-emerged briefly in the Franciscan movement of the early thirteenth century, which actually won papal approval. Today a Latin American pope has taken the name of Francis, and has suggested the possibility that even at this date there may still be a chance of reintroducing the ethical outlook and world-view of the original Jesus into Christianity.
This may suggest that I am or could be a liberal protestant Christian reformer, of the nineteenth century type that hoped to use a rediscovered historical Jesus as the keystone and principle of a New Reformation. Not so, alas: It is much too late for a conservative reformation. Since 1650 critical thinking has led to a huge knowledge-explosion in science and history, in technology and in medicine. Not even the most-assured Islamist really supposes that we could give all that up and go back to an early-mediaeval technology and world-view. We are stuck now with our own culturally-mediated form of naturalism, and to an outlook therefore whose religion must be ethics-led and purely immanent. Roughly, radical humanism, combined with a mysticism of secondariness or transience: a view that remains close to the original Jesus, and admires him without any cult of him. ‘Authority’ is dead, ‘revelation’ is dead, and the old two-worlds, mediated kind of religion is dead too, now. So my remaining ‘faith’ is purely philosophical, with a dash of loyalty to Jesus, and to the ancient humanitarian strand in our own cultural tradition. Goodbye!