Man, Myth, or Messiah?

History's Greatest Question

There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. — Albert Schweitzer

IT'S ONE OF THE STRANGE QUIRKS OF HUMAN NATURE that we tend to believe wild and absurd things while doubting and dismissing the credible and important.

This tendency to give credence to foolish and baseless speculations was satirized on the long-running US TV show Saturday Night Live. It ranks as one of my favorite comedy skits of all time. It was the one where there was an exchange between an angel and someone who had recently died and gone to heaven. The new arrival was quizzing the angel on all the unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries of his past existence. The dialogue went something like this: "What happened to the fifty-dollar bill I lost at graduation?" and "Who had a crush on me that I didn't know about?" You get the picture. Finally, heaven's newest inductee asked "What is the one thing that would surprise me the most if I knew it?" The character playing the angel dramatically paused and then said, "Professional wrestling is real."

I guess what struck me as funny is that I've actually met people who believed that TV wrestling was authentic (and not staged entertainment); my grandmother was one of them. Of course, there are many people who consider silly things, such as UFOs or Elvis sightings, to be real. As Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées, "The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion."

This highlights the tendency to deny events that should be believed, like the Holocaust or Americans walking on the moon and the fact that 9/11 was a terrorist attack carried out by radical Muslims, not a conspiracy of the US government.

Regrettably the amount of misinformation and rumor is rampant in an age where every outlandish viewpoint has its own website and Facebook page. Finding the truth becomes hard work. It also requires our being willing to accept it, regardless of our own personal preferences or biases. In other words, we must be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

While many spurious beliefs are relatively harmless and inconsequential, others could have devastating consequences, especially if real history is obscured or ignored. This was never more obvious to me than when visiting sites like the World War II Nazi concentration camps, such as the