What About Those Neo-Gnostics?

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

Nothing more confirms our bondage to sin than war.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

You touch my mind and my heart.
You touch my body and my soul.
You touch my consciousness and my unconsciousness.
You touch my conscience and my soul.
I love you with all of them.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Love makes the world go ‘round.”

[He might have said something like this, but imagine if He said it just like this: What do you mean, it goes ‘round? The world doesn’t go anywhere. And if it did, it would not go around…]

D. Blog: Pagan Christ?

Some current writers have published books claiming that Jesus did not exist as a physical person in Palestine, but was a Jewish manifestation of ancient mythology about a savior figure, a Christ-type who first appeared and was most prominent in Egypt. A historical Jesus, they argue, was not what the Gospel writers sought to portray and in Paul’s writings, they say, there is nothing about the life and teachings of a man Jesus, only the symbol of the Christ who dwells in each of us, or, more often, in whom we dwell.

Their claim is a re-emergence of Christian Gnosticism, a merger of ancient “pagan” belief and elements of Hebrew religion. One of the principle ideas in Gnosticism, as I recall my seminary instruction, was that one reaches salvation through the secret knowledge about divinity within us, but that, logically, no divinity could/would actually become a human person, because humans are obviously imperfect.

There are some orthodox (no capital O) Christians who quite adamantly and somewhat stridently counter the claims and questionable scholarship of the neo-Gnostics.

Now, I have only one major question in this as we encounter this supposedly revolutionary notion that Jesus never existed in human form: Why does it matter? I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter, I’m just asking why it matters. Rather than a defensive response, I'd like some reflection. As we go through our lives, what difference does it make whether Jesus existed as a human or as a mystical Christ-type?