W H A M !

"The Jesus who confronts us in the New Testament, and supremely in the Gospels, is not a phantom figure, whose only importance is meaning. He is very real, and so relevant to our world because He has lived in it". Dr John Drane.

So, this week I have to say thank you to Tom Holland and his new book, Dominion - not because I'm particularly comfortable with much of what he's authored there, but principally because it gave me a jolt to think afresh about why I am a Christian, and what is so easily taken for granted about the faith that's changed our world.

Let me unpack this a little.
Mark's Gospel begins by telling us that it's an account about someone who is simply remarkable - Jesus... and this is where we immediately find ourselves undone - "the son of God". What comes in the next 16 blunt chapters is nothing short of extraordinary, but what's important to note here is that it's the person at the core of these events and what He says and does that ignites and fuels something that was already spreading across the Roman world by the time we get to the conversion of Paul.

It's imperative to understand this chain of events. The reason there was a Damascus Road moment for Saul was because there'd been a martyrdom in Jerusalem of a man named Stephen who was preaching Jesus, and the reason for that was because the day of Pentecost had seen Jews 'from every nation under heaven' hear and respond to Peter telling them about the recent events that had happened in the very place they were now standing.

Christianity doesn't begin with Paul. However key he is to the growth of both the global expansion of the church and it's application of the good news towards the end of the first century (and he truly is), the fact remains that he was part of something that was already taking the world by storm.

I say all of this because Tom Holland's book, in some respects, makes any need for a real Jesus secondary to the creeds and  powers that came to bear or use his name. There's no denying that much of the surge and grandeur that came to define Christendom from the 5th to 12th centuries took place as he shows, but as other authors have noted, this was commonly at the expense of the very teachings and message of Jesus Himself, turning Christianity into a power which often brutally crushed any and all who sought to question or resist its worldly authority. The inquisition, as Peter De Rosa notes, was in so many ways the prototype for the Holocaust and the Gulags of the 20th century. The only truth to delight in here is that slowly, over the next 300 years, men awoke to the fact that the Gospel required something very different.

It's awakening to the message of the Gospels themselves that truly matters. Holland admits that behind the last two thousand years, there remains the remarkable 'myth' of the man they crucified, but it wasn't a contrivance or a story that so troubled those disciples who had travelled with him on that first easter sunday.

The original ending of Mark's short gospel concludes with these words:

"and they fled from the tomb (because of what they had seen), trembling and astonished, and said nothing to anyone, for they were terrified" (16:8).

Christianity begins with a moment of utter bewilderment and total astonishment.

It's hard for us to take in just how overwhelming this moment is, because so few events in our own lives come close, and even momentous historical changes really don't touch this,
because this, as Holland notes, is the genuine 'molten core' that drives the faith.
The world can never be the same again because of what happened on that morning at that empty tomb.

Dominion tells us of centuries of consequences of Christianity rising and falling, and no doubt much of what the author states here about the ramifications of that is true, but the real thing we need to understand is what Mark is saying about the man who was truly the Son of God. Everything else pales when we encounter Him.