[from The Screwtape Letters, Number 13]

Many [scholars] think that Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine of its Founder, at a very early stage. [Hence] the conception of a 'historical Jesus' to be found by clearing away later 'accretions and perversions'.... The advantages of these constructions, [changing] every thirty years or so, are manifold.

In the first place, they all tend to direct our devotion so something which does not exist, for each 'historical Jesus' is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new 'historical Jesus' therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another.

In the second place, all such contructions place the importance of their Historical Jesus in some peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a 'great man' in the modern sense of the word... We thus distract people's minds from Who He is, and what He did. We first make him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all the other great moral teachers...

Our third aim... is to destroy the devotional life. For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago. Such an object in fact cannot be worshipped. Instead of the Creator adored by its creature, you soon have merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and finally a distinguished character approved by a judicious historian.

And fourthly, besides being unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of this kind is false to history in another sense. No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into the Enemy's camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography... The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had - and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a 'great man', but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers.