Trent Horn - Counterfeit Christs : Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors

It was a crisp morning at the University of New Mexico, where I was engaging in pro-life evangelism. At the time, the campus medical school was teaching students how to perform abortions, so the images of aborted children we displayed garnered a fairly hostile response from the campus population. One students response still sticks out in my mind.

After angrily arguing with us in the morning, he returned in the afternoon wearing a tunic and fake beard. He then shouted as loud as he could, Dont do this in my name! Dont do this in my name!

And who are you supposed to be? I asked.

You know me. I am your master and I demand you stop imposing your values on other people. It offends me!

Oh! I said with enthusiasm. You must be Jesus. Im a huge fan but I have a question. You love everyone, right?

You shall love your neighbor as yourself! he shouted back as loud as he could.

Right, so are babies in the womb my neighbor? If Im supposed to love unborn children, shouldnt I try to get people to stop killing them?

He looked at me for a second, turned around, and walked away shouting over and over again, Not in my name! Not in my name!

Its funny that this man didnt condemn Jesus along with Christians who stand up for the unborn. Instead, he believed that if Jesus were really present he would have agreed with him that we were the problem, not abortionists.

It seems like everyone wants to have Jesus on their side.

Sometimes, people are willing even to ignore or re-write history in order to make that happen.

For example, in 1813 Thomas Jefferson composed The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (later known as the Jefferson Bible) by using a razor to cut out sections of the New Testament that, in his view, described the real Jesus. Jefferson was a deist who rejected the idea of God intervening in the world, so the miraculous parts of the New Testament ended up on a literal cutting-room floor. What remained was the story of a wise moral teacher who was tragically killed and then buried in a tomb.

Jefferson would not be the only explorer in what would later be called the quest for the historical Jesus. These questers came to include both scholars and popular sensationalists claiming to have discovered the identity of the historical Jesus who became obscured by the traditional Christ of faith worshipped by Christians. But is the Christ of faith a mere fantasy that must yield to what historical research says about Jesus? Or is the Jesus whom Christians worship the same person as the Jewish carpenter who lived in Palestine 2,000 years ago?

This is an essential question, because the foundation of our eternal salvation is rooted in events related to the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, For biblical faith the historicityand thus the facticityof the Incarnation is indispensable. Faith demands that we consider Jesus as approachable by historical research.

St. Paul agreed that our faith must be rooted in fact. As he declared to the Christians in Corinth: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (1 Cor. 15:17).

In this book I have set out to show how historical research and sound biblical exegesis refute the many incorrect views people have about Jesus Christthe phony, fictional, counterfeit versions of Jesus that they have devised for their own ends. Entire books have been written on some of these counterfeits, but my goal is to identify and expose these impostors in a brief and straightforward way that everyone can understand.

Well organize these different views of Jesus according to groups of people who share similar beliefs.

First, there are the non-religious, who believe Jesus was just a non-judgmental teacher whose real life story was replaced with later legends. Among these people are committed atheists , some of whom take pride in trying to show Jesus never even existed at all.

But even among religious people you can find plenty of counterfeit Christs. These include the Jesus of non-Christians religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduisma Jesus who may be a wise teacher, even a prophet sent by God, but is himself not God incarnate. This group also includes members of quasi-Christian religions, like Jehovahs Witnesses, Mormons, and Oneness Pentecostals, who deny essential elements of the traditional Christian faith.

Some people object to the idea that one group of Christians can define who is and who is not a Christian, but even atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens agreed that in order for the word Christian to be meaningful it must relate to specific supernatural claims regarding Jesus Christ.

For example, in 2012 Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Sewell interviewed Hitchens and chided him for not engaging more liberal Christianity. Sewell considers herself a Christian and believes that Jesus was merely a model of social justice and that salvation is a metaphor for how one can go from being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life. In response, Hitchens bluntly said, If you dont believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, youre really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

I would add that belief in the atonement and in Jesus resurrection are certainly necessary conditions for being Christian, but they arent sufficient. At a bare minimum, a Christian is someone who has received a valid baptism and believes in the Trinity. When it comes to Jesus, this means believing that he is one divine person who fully possesses two natures: one human and the other divine. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC):

Christs human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it. Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from one of the Trinity. The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity (470).

Nearly all of the counterfeit Christs we examine in this book have their origin in a denial of Jesus identity as an eternal, divine person with a fully divine nature who became man by assuming a fully human nature through the Incarnation. But some of these counterfeits err, not in their Christology, but in their decision to hitch the real Jesus to a moral or theological error or ideology. These include moral errors like the affirmation of homosexual behavior and communism as well as theological errors like prosperity theology, Calvinistic determinism, and the denial of Christs presence in the Eucharist.

To put it plainly, if you get Jesus wrong, theres nothing of equal importance to get right that can make up for such an error. Thats why I pray the Holy Spirit will use the evidence in this book to both prevent people from abandoning our Lord and also break the hold any of these counterfeit Christs may have over souls that need to know our true God and Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13).