Jesus was a Big Jerk:

Truly Confronting the Galilean Carpenter


By Brian D. Wilson

A friend recently told me the following while we were waiting for dinner to be served at the home of a mutual acquaintance, “I think Jesus was a great moral teacher, but this stuff about him being God or God’s Son is ridiculous.” I wasted no time in my reply, “If Jesus really was just a nice man as you say then he was no great moral teacher at all. In fact he was a big jerk!” This sent the room into gasps of indignation. The irony was that I was the only Christian at the dinner table, while the other guests were either your typical Southern Californians with a strong interest in spirituality but none in religion, or atheists. The truth was that I was dead serious.

Just imagine the situation. Jesus is having the Passover dinner with his disciples and engages in one of the most humble acts ever recorded by any religious figure. He gets out a towel, fills a cistern with water, and begins to wash the disciple’s feet.

Then comes the kicker, after the foot washing the disciple Judas leaves to betray Jesus while Jesus tells the rest of the dinner party of his imminent arrest. However, the disciples suddenly become confused. Jesus says that he must leave them, by which he means that he is going to be crucified and afterwards join God in heaven. Perplexed, Thomas asks him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how can we know the way?” (John 14:5). Jesus replies, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6).

What kind of NUT JOB goes around saying that if you want to enter heaven that he is the only ticket in town? How arrogant of Jesus to say that Buddhists and those of other religions must go through him to attain heaven. Neither Gandhi, nor Muhammad, nor any great religious teacher in history made such an outlandish claim.

The arrogance, ironically, comes necessarily with the presupposition that Jesus was merely a great human teacher and nothing more. You cannot escape it. It is like ordering a triangle shaped table from a manufacturer and then upon delivery demanding from the customer service rep that he return it because you wanted a four sided triangular table. The universe does not work that way. You want a human teacher, fine, but an unstable lunatic who says he is the only way to heaven comes with the package, and that is the problem. Those who often quote Jesus never study him. They read that he washed the disciple’s feet which gives them warm fuzzes, but ignore the elephant in the room, his claim to be the only way to God.

This is no isolated incident on the part of this trouble making Galilean carpenter either. Throughout the New Testament this mere moral teacher as my friend calls him, only adds to the outrage of those willing to pay attention. “I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he shall be saved,” (John 10:9). “I am the true vine.” (John 15: 1) “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in him, may have eternal life.” (John 6:40).

Then there are his claims to forgive sins. Jesus enters the home of a man in the town of Capernaum. Immediately word goes out that he is in town and soon a throng gathers inside the house while others pour on to the streets. Four men soon arrive carrying a paralytic on a pallet. Now the crowd along with the Pharisees who have come to trip him up in his words are waiting for a miracle. The miracle indeed comes, but it is what Jesus says just before the healing that is surprising. Jesus looks at the multitude and says “But in order that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”- he said to the paralytic- “I say to you rise, take up your pallet and go home.” (Mark 2:10-12).

On another occasion Jesus is invited into the house of a Pharisee named Simon. A sinful woman, probably a prostitute, comes to where Jesus is sitting and pours precious fragrant oils on his feet to anoint him. When she is done Jesus makes a lesson of her to Simon, noting her devotion to him. Then he looks at her and says, “Your sins have been forgiven.” (Luke 7:48).

What? A healing is one thing, but twice now comes the claim by Jesus that he can forgive sins. The outrage is magnified when one considers that in ancient Jewish culture only God can forgive sins.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Suppose you come to me one evening and tell me that for the past year and a half you have been having an affair with my wife and I kindly reply, “I know what you have done and I forgive you.” I am sure you would be both relieved and surprised by my magnanimity considering that you had defiled the most sacred and intimate relationship between me and my wife.

However suppose you came to me and said, “You know our mutual friend at the office Carl, well, I have something pretty shocking to tell you. I have been having an affair with his wife for over a year and I feel pretty guilty about it.” Suppose I replied, “You have done a bad thing to your friend. But do not worry, your sins have been forgiven, I absolve you of those sins you have committed against your friend.” Not even a priest absolves sins in that manner, because the priest is taking your sin as a mediator to the Father and asking Him to forgive you. At any rate, you would be within your rights to call the men with the little white truck and long jackets to take me away if I ever said that.

Jesus was not telling the prostitute that he forgave her of any offense against him personally. He was saying that offenses she committed against others had been wiped away and he was the one who had the power to do it. No man who says that he can forgive the sins of others is a great moral teacher.

This of course will not do for those who wish to preserve the sweet gentle Jesus that they have constructed in their imaginations. They will protest these supposedly uncharacteristic words of Jesus with the retort, “The Bible has been translated, copied, and corrupted by individuals so many times over the years that you can’t trust it.”

There are a couple of problems with this answer. The first is that the only historical documents about Jesus with enough detail to even determine that he was a significant figure, let alone a great moral teacher, comes from the New Testament. So you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. If you toss out a corrupted Bible as indeterminate then you must forever surrender your admiration for the Galilean, because you have no historical grounds upon which to make the claim that he was a great human teacher.

Certainly you could get scattered info from the apocraphal literature, as well as church and secular histories, bet here again you are faced with the same dilemma; if you take such literature in it's intirity, and at face value, a mere human that did the sort of things Jesus did would not be a great human teacher.

Secondly, I find it strange that those who argue that the Bible has been corrupted, usually secular Humanists, always find that those pesky scribes made errors in precisely those places where they happen to disagree with the Bible’s theology. Isn't it odd that in 2000 years of copying and translating the New Testament all of the errors have to do with the doctrine of Hell, the Resurrection, Jesus' claim to deity, and the virgin birth among other things. Huh, those are just the doctrines that offend Humanist scholars most. What a coincidence.

People readily accept the Jesus in the New Testament who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God,” (Matthew 5:9), but reject the Jesus who said, “Do you think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s woes will be those of his own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36).

I think in the end it was C.S. Lewis, Oxford professor of Medieval Literature and author of one of the most beloved Children’s book series in history, The Chronicles of Narnia, who summed up best this apparent dilemma. “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 a 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 up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”[1]

In a Universe where contradictions like married-bachelors and square-circles cannot exist, it is in our own best interest not to lie to ourselves about this Jesus fellow. We ought to either accept him in his entirety or reject him in his entirety. The only alternative is to create a Jesus after our own image and desires, which if accepted means that we are the delusional ones, not the Galilean carpenter.


[1] Lewie, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952. Pg. 40.