While I don’t go around exclaiming “Bah! Humbug!” at this time of year, there will be some after reading the following remarks that may well see me in this light. And while Scrooge did come around, Dickens was careful to not entirely avoid the miser’s legitimate complaints about the season.

Who but someone like me that comes right out and says during the Christmas season “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a poor film would write of his doubts concerning the divinity of Jesus while Christmas trees are being decorated and the colored lights are popping up everywhere. But I think the spirit of Christmas, as Dickens emphasized and the Grinch discovered, is more to the point than dogma concerning the divinity of Jesus.

Ben Franklin never read “Elmer Gantry,” but he anticipated Sinclair Lewis’ novel by the admonition to his good friend the famed preacher George Whitefield not to attempt making Franklin feel indebted for what was offered in friendship alone without any religious obligation “in the name of Jesus.” Franklin along with most of the Founding Fathers owned their debt to the influences of Christianity for good, but some like Franklin would not be bound to any particular sectarian influences. It was one thing for those like Franklin to acknowledge a higher power, but something else entirely to pledge themselves to a particular religious belief involving the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus and the pneuma or plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible.

However, a part of Franklin’s shrewdness enabled him to understand he could not question the divinity of Jesus in his newspapers, and throughout the society of his time it was a subject to avoid. All Elmer Gantry had to do was confront the Zenith newspaper with this in order to get it to fall into line.

But long before the “Da Vinci Code” appeared I had begun to write several articles based on my own reading of the “lost books of the Bible” together with many other historical books and documents. A 5,000 volume personal library of the best of Biblical scholars contributed greatly to my research, and gradually despite my fundamentalist background and studies I became convinced there was no reason to either believe the Bible to be the literal word of God or that Jesus was “divine.” And while Dan Brown’s novel held no surprises for me, the possibility that Jesus had become a victim of his own press was a subject my mind refused to address for years. Still, the question would not go away and demanded attention.

It is easy for me to dismiss Mohammad as a delusional pervert and the believers in his religion of Islam victims of believing fairytales at best. But to call the divinity of Jesus into question is to invite many attacks by otherwise civilized people, and some of the very best educated among them I have known personally. But over a very long period of time the question remained of whether Jesus had in fact become a victim of his own press, and this question nagged at me for an answer.

While we read in II Peter “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty,” there remains the fact that the writers of the New Testament lived during an age of strongly held superstitions; and in Judea especially there was a long tradition of prophets of God speaking to people, imparting the very words of God. From the earliest history of humankind stories of miracles have been commonplace, and due to the lack of science such stories were encouraged in attempts to understand the natural world.

In a small village like Nazareth a man like Jesus with exceptional qualities might well make his mark; and for those steeped in superstitions of the time a very small thing can become quite exaggerated well beyond its actual significance and one could become a very large frog in a very small pond. But if someone should be susceptible to exaggerating their own importance out of proportion to the reality, then it is quite possible to exaggerate other things as well.

It has happened many times throughout history, where an exceptional individual has succumbed to the crowd. Such a crowd may begin with only the praise of a mother and father out of all proportion to the child’s actual endowments, but the child believing these things may forge ahead and gain a larger crowd as a result. An especially gifted child like Jesus would have no trouble calling attention to himself; but the danger is always there that such a person may actually become delusional. Wherever there is opportunity for individuals to gain prominence there is also the danger they may become victims of their own press; and nowhere is this so dangerous, for example, as the present White House that insulates itself from reality and demands strict obedience of “disciples.”

But the question of whether Jesus had become delusional because of the growing throngs seeking a messiah and shouting hosannas in his name is a legitimate one. The many stories of Jesus confronting the hypocrisy of his time, stories of overthrowing the tables of moneychangers and driving them from the Temple speak to the hearts of many today; however, was this a measure of his growing sense of power and invincibility rather than the work of God?

Unlike Sinclair Lewis, I have earned the right as a Bible scholar and one time believer and preacher of the Gospel to question the divinity of Jesus. While I credit Lewis for a great writer, while I applaud his efforts to call out hypocrites and commend his high regard for H. L. Mencken, the flaw in his novel was that of Robert Duvall in “The Apostle.” Since neither Lewis nor Duvall were ever true believers, their performance is too shallow in places that demand only true believers have a legitimate voice.

One has to experience being delivered from the tyranny of religion in order to understand the reality and depth of such tyranny. For this very reason there are far too many unqualified to address the dangers of a religion like Islam. While America has reaped the windfall of Christianity as a civilized religion despite the abuses of the past, the same cannot be said for the nations under the thrall of Islam.