Responding to Jeremy Clarkson: Is Jesus a 'fraudster'?

Jeremy Clarkson continues to have his usual column in The Sunday Times. His theme was internet scammers, and his message was if you want to scam, "Go big." It was written with his usually waspish irony.

He ended his column with this finale: "Go big. That's my message if you are considering becoming a celebrated conman. Take a lesson from the biggest fraudster of them all: Jesus. 'I can walk on water. My mum was a virgin and my dad's God. And I'm going to start an industry selling this guff that will last for 2,000 years.' Top man."

My first reaction was offence and surprise. Offence at what Clarkson said about Jesus, and surprise that either he or The Times would publish something that would obviously offend Christians. Would he have said the same as bluntly about the founders of other religions?

However, my sense of being offended quickly gave way to other responses.

1. Honest and unvarnished

First, he is at least expressing his opinion of Jesus honestly and unvarnished. There is no bogus "respect." In this, Clarkson is right. Those who reject Jesus’ claims about Himself do regard Him as a fraudster. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ famous dictum that Jesus was either mad, bad or God. There are no other options; if you don’t believe He is God, there is no room to respect Him as a good moral teacher. That is just sentimental nonsense.

2. Disregard of evidence

Second, it made me wonder whether Clarkson, clearly an intelligent man, had ever bothered to look carefully at the evidence about Jesus. If he did, he would surely conclude that his statement was ludicrous. In the end, it reveals crass ignorance.

The historical evidence for Jesus is strong. The Gospels were written relatively soon after His death by people who either were eyewitnesses or had met the eyewitnesses. These accounts were received as truthful by a community of many other eyewitnesses.

Jewish and Roman historians also testified to Jesus and confirmed what His first disciples taught and thought about Him. Everyone attests that Jesus was a miracle worker. The question was what this meant for His identity. Was He demon-possessed, a prophet, the Christ, or the Son of God?

The evidence is strong that Jesus understood Himself to be the eternal Son of God, equal to His Heavenly Father. This was why the Jewish leaders wanted Him executed - they thought He was a blasphemer. There is no doubt that He was executed under Pontius Pilate, and objective non-Christian historians report at a very early date that the church worshipped Him "as a God."

Of course, it is possible that Jesus was deluded in His belief about Himself, but it is utterly implausible that He was a deliberate fraud or conman. He willingly allowed Himself to be executed and could have avoided the cross by disavowing any claim to be God. He gained nothing personally by His death. If His claims were a fraud, it would have been the most pointless fraud ever.

His death seemed to disprove His claim to be God conclusively, and yet within days, His disciples were proclaiming that He had risen from the dead and that His resurrection was proof that He really was the Son of God. Again, they might have been deluded or mistaken, but it is utterly implausible that they were setting up some kind of religious scam. They were clearly sincere believers, and most of the apostles died for their faith in Jesus, refusing to renounce Him when faced with torture and execution.

The idea that Jesus and the early church were motivated by money is equally ludicrous and historically unjustifiable. Jesus was a travelling preacher who had nowhere to lay His head. All the historical evidence shows Him serving others - healing, feeding and liberating - and doing it for free. He left nothing but the clothes He was wearing when He died.

His disciples similarly made nothing from their ministry, proclaiming Him to be God. Some were supported for their work of preaching, whereas others worked to support themselves. None of them were rich. The early church was not a money-making enterprise.

For centuries, until the conversion of Constantine, becoming a Christian was to choose to be marginalised in society, perhaps ostracised and rejected by friends and family, to lose your job or business because you would no longer worship at the temple, and to risk death in the sporadic times of persecution. Some scam!

It is, of course, true that many times over the past two-thousand years, the church has become corrupt, and people have misrepresented and misused Christianity and the name of Christ to scam others. The New Testament warns of false teachers motivated by money. The medieval Roman Catholic Church was immensely powerful and wealthy and ran a gigantic religious scam in the sale of indulgences and administering the Ponzi scheme of their sacramental grace. TV evangelists and prosperity teachers are likewise scammers who have often "gone big" with bogus miracles and millionaire lifestyles. Others have profited by cosying up to politicians and rulers, whether in Imperial Rome or the contemporary USA.

However, the fact that unscrupulous people have misused the name of Christ to scam others does not mean that Jesus was a fraud and a scammer. He did not set up an "industry selling this guff." Instead, He and His apostles warned against hypocrites who would use religion for this exact purpose.

A call to consider Jesus' claims

So, I ended up feeling sorry for Clarkson. No doubt he thought he had just written a good line, perhaps deliberately provoking controversy for attention. But his comment shows remarkable, if not wilful, ignorance. So many people in our society have similarly dismissed Jesus without ever having seriously considered His claims - perhaps influenced by the abuses they have seen in the church.

One day, Clarkson will have to stand before Jesus and give account for himself. He will see that His claims were no scam but that He truly is the Son of God. He will be forced to bow the knee and acknowledge Him as Lord.

Pray that he and many others will come to repent, recognise and confess Jesus as Lord before that day and that we might have confidence in the truth of the gospel message and the evidence for Jesus.