The rationalists and the humanist had smiled at the wild claims advanced for himself by Jesus in the gospels, particularly in the gospel of John. But they had frowned at his sayings which divided the human family into two warring camps of believers and infidels. They had dismissed his miracles as stories meant for children or grown-up morons, but were pained by his lack of sense as well as sensitivity in drowning a herd of pigs and cursing the fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. They had found his parables quite commonplace except those relating to the burning of weeds, the reallocation of vineyards, and the compelling of people to come in, which they thought revealed a vicious mind. For them, the ethics he preached was either sanctimonious humbug (Sermon on the Mount) which worked to the advantage of the bully and the robber and the spendthrift, or quite brutal and inhuman (pluck out your eyes, cut off your limbs). In any case, he himself had never practised what he had preached. He was intolerant, short-tempered, and foul-mouthed, and went about cursing everyone who did not applaud his tall talk. His intemperate denunciation of the Jews had led to shrieking anti-Semitism down the ages. He was anti-work and did not want his followers to labour in the present or lay store for the future. He was also an anti-social character who asked his disciples to desert their parents, who disowned his own mother and brothers in public, and who proclaimed that he had come to set the son against his father and brother against brother. His behaviour in the temple at Jerusalem where he went violent, upturned the tables of the money-changers, and whipped people right and left, was cruel, reprehensible and uncalled for. The ugliest note he introduced in the belief system of his disciples was a cataclysmic end of the world, and eternal hell-fire for those who did not accept him as what his inflated ego had induced him to see in himself. Finally, his advocacy of missions for bringing the whole world into his fold, was a mandate for gangsterism and predatory imperialism.
The psychologists were not slow to note that the Jesus of the gospels was totally lacking in a sense of humour; he never smiled, not to speak of having a hearty laugh. He was suffering from megalomania when he indulged in all that tall talk about himself, and from melancholia when he feared persecution and death. The two moods are known to alternate again and again in serious cases of mental disorder. He struck a heroic pose before the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate, but broke down completely on the eve of his arrest as well as on the cross. In the psychological language of ancient Jews, he had been possessed by unclean spirits who had recognised him as soon as they saw him. We need not go into the details of the analysis to which the sayings and doings of the Jesus of the gospels have been subjected by a number of competent psychologists. It should suffice to say that most of the modern psychologists have found this Jesus an object of pity on account of his mental sickness, but an object of concern because he poses a serious threat to human brotherhood and social peace in the event of his teachings being followed by some fraternity or establishment. They cite the horrors of Christian history in order to clinch the argument.
Historians of Christianity saw the Jesus of the gospels inspiring theocratic states which extinguished all human freedoms, church hierarchies which killed and burnt at the stake millions of men and women after denouncing them as heretics and witches, and military missions which massacred whole populations and wiped out whole civilizations in course of the holy wars waged against the heathens in Europe, America, Asia, Africa and the Oceania. They also noticed how he had been aped by Muhammad not only in advancing the same sort of wild claims but also in perpetrating atrocities which those claims entailed inevitably. The quantum of crimes committed by Muhammad's Islam was only slightly smaller than that of the crimes committed by the Christianity of Jesus Christ. Unlike the armies of Christianity, the armies of Islam had failed to ride roughshod over the whole globe. It was only in Iran and India that Islam could emulate the Christian record. So the Jesus of the gospels could rightly be credited with the greatest crimes over the longest span of time in human history. The nightmare was not yet over if one looked at Islamic lands in the enlightened twentieth century. Historians could not but conclude that the world would have been a happier and healthier place if there had been no Jesus Christ, real or invented.
Social scientists in the wake of the First World War saw close similarities in the Jesus of the gospels on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. Bertrand Russell characterised Communism as a Christian heresy. There were any number of indications in the gospels that Jesus would have done the same as Lenin and Stalin had done if he had the same power. Communism was the Christian Church and theocracy reincarnated — the dogmas, the popes, the priests, the inquisition, the suppression of freedom, the witch-hunting, the brain-washing, the hymns of hate, the wars of liberation, the large-scale killings, and the rest. Only the verbiage used for mounting the macabre campaign was different.
The parallel between Jesus and Hitler was seen as still more striking. The Nazi creed as laid down by Hitler, did not sound much different from the Christian creed as preached by Jesus in the gospels. "I believe," said the Nazi creed, "in the revelation of the divine, creative power and the pure blood shed in war and peace by the sons of the German national community, buried in the soil thereby sanctified, risen and living in all for whom it is immolated. I believe in an eternal life on earth of this blood that was poured out and rose again in all who have recognized the meaning of the sacrifice and are ready to submit to them... Thus I believe in an eternal God, an eternal Germany, and an eternal life."12 Nazism had substituted the German race for God, and the German blood for the blood of Jesus. But the spirit was the same, and the same horrors followed as had been witnessed for centuries after the advent of Christianity.
The Nazi copying of Christianity did not stop at the theological level. It percolated to the rituals as well. "There were special Nazi feasts, especially 9 November, commemorating the putsch of 1923, the Nazi passion, and crucifixion feast, of which Hitler said: 'The blood which they poured out is become the altar of baptism for our Reich.' The actual ceremony was conducted like a passion play. And there were Nazi sacraments. A special wedding service was designed for the SS. It included runic figures, a sun-disc of flowers, a fire-bowl, and it opened with the chorus from Lohengrin, after which the pair received bread and salt. At SS baptismal ceremonies, the room was decorated with a centre altar containing a photograph of Hitler, and a copy of Mein Kampf; and on the walls were candles, Nazi flags, the Tree of Life and branches of younger trees. There was music from Grieg's Peter Gynt ('Morning'), readings from the Mein Kampf, promises by the sponsors and other elements of the Christian ceremony; but the celebrant was as SS officer and the service concluded with the hymn of loyalty to the SS. The Nazis even had their own grace before meals for their orphanages, and Nazi versions of famous hymns. Thus:
Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches over Germany by day and night,
Always caring for us.
There was also a Nazi burial service."13