Einstein, Making A Rare Mistake, About Jesus

EINSTEIN SAID some of the most intelligent, indeed brilliant things ever, enough to fill a good sized volume. As Casey Stengal said: "You could look it up". Although his professional field was theoretical physics, Albert Einstein possesed a rare intelligence and wisdom across an extremely wide range of areas, from history to philosophy, to religion, political science, and nearly all areas of science. Although he said that he never bothered to commit anything to memory that he could look up in a book, he possessed an immense factual body of knowledge, straight from his abundant brain. He did, however, make a few head scratchers. For example, he evidently said that the description of Jesus Christ given in the four gospels is so compelling, so realistic, so convincing that Jesus could not possibly have been a myth. This comment leads undiscerning folks to make the false claim that Einstein was a "saved" Christian. This, of course, is simply not true. It may be that Einstein did not read enough good fiction, if he read any at all, to fully appreciate the ability of a great fiction writer to make fiction come alive, and seem as real as reality itself. Shakespeare, Joyce, Faulker, Steinbeck, are but a few of the seemingly endless number of great writers who have inspired millions to see reality in fiction through their excellent quality of writing. The four gospels are all that we have or know about Jesus, and their unknown authors never met him. Nor are they especially persuasive writers. They don't make for good fiction.They use virtually no literary techniques of a good fiction writer; imagery, adjectives, adverbs, allegory, metaphor; their recitation of the life and acts of Jesus are little more than a bare, ostensibly factual list of events. Their factual reliability is in fact quite in question, since all four of them contradict each other; there are far more internal contradictions that corroborations. In fact, all four depict an entirely different version of Jesus, with a different Christ personality in each one. The best scholars of the gospels have often pointed this out, along with their unknown authorship, and the great frequency with with subsequent writers and editors have amended and altered all of them, to the point where they are quite different from the originals. Again, this is according to scholars in the field. There is nothing convincing or persuasve about the four gospels. Good fiction can be convincing, can become defacto fact, because of its quality; bad history can seem like fiction, can arouse suspicions as to its authenticity, for the opposite reason, for its lack of quality, for its lack of external verification, its lack of primary source material, for its lack of confirmed attributed authorship. Such is the case with all four gospels. Rather than providing a convincing argument for the actual existence of Jesus, the gospels do precisely the opposite; they, with their serious shortcomings, invite any discrning scholar to question whether Jesus was indeed a myth, whether he actually existed, or whether he might have been a composite of many different people, mingled together with the passage of time and poor editing and record keeping. The Christian religion, built entirely upon the Jesus story, is called a "faith" for good reason; it utterly lacks independent, critical, scientific, historical confirmation. Making such an obviously profound leap of faith was not something Albert Einstein, who had a religious devotion to the scientific method, often did. It may be that he made his remark attempting to assauge people. His Jewish background, progressive political ideals, including his embrace of democratic socialism, and pantheistic personal religiosity were not popular among conservative Christians, in his adopted country of the U.S.A. His many detractors made their objections to Einstein's heritage and beliefs well known. On this basis, his departure from critical scientific rigor may be forgiven. Then too, even the great genius Einstein was capable of arriving at incorrect, unfounded conclusions when venturing too far afield from his primary area of expertise.