I come back, often, to my school motto: Ut serviatur — “to serve.” That has been the principle on which I have tried to build my life, even if I have strayed from the path from time to time. My father’s favourite song was “If I Can Help Somebody, My Living Shall Not Be in Vain.” It always seemed sentimental to me when I was younger, and yet it has been a lamp to my footsteps.
For me, learning does not come by shielding oneself against error, but by making mistakes and discovering through them. Mistakes are the best teachers. If there is a kingdom within, perhaps it is found in this: a readiness to serve, to learn, and to grow — more than in any system of dogma.
I have tried to make historical sense of Jesus’ life (and Paul’s too). First, I considered Jesus’ talk of the kingdom “within,” as a radical call to inner renewal. Then I looked at him as a kind of arch-anarchist in rebellion against Roman rule — not a terrorist, but a moral subversive whose authority undermined worldly power. Both readings make sense.
Yuval Noah Harari has observed that billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the centuries, and yet not one is an authentic likeness. They are imaginative reconstructions, devotional icons, projections of hope and fear. Abundance does not guarantee truth; it often buries it.
The same is true of the writings that followed Jesus’ death. The sheer existence of thousands of manuscript fragments, sayings, and alternative gospels shows that proliferation was real in the early decades. What made this man so topical? His followers proclaimed him Messiah — but in Jewish expectation the Messiah was above all a military figure, a king in the line of David who would overthrow foreign oppressors. Against the backdrop of Roman occupation, this carried unmistakable political weight.
The Jewish historian Josephus (Jewish War 2.259–263; Antiquities 20.97–98) describes several would-be messiahs and prophets in this period — figures like Theudas and the so-called Egyptian — who promised liberation or miraculous signs, and who were swiftly crushed by Roman power. Most left little trace. Yet the memory of Jesus, unlike theirs, sparked a flood of retellings and interpretations.
It may be that the Gospels themselves were already acts of sifting — choosing some memories, discarding others, shaping a portrait that was safe to transmit under Roman rule. If Jesus had indeed been seen as a political rebel, then the evangelists’ focus on parables, healings, and inner renewal may have been a way of masking that dangerous truth. In that sense, the Gospels could be read as a kind of ancient “fake news”: narratives crafted to redirect attention, defuse political danger, and ensure the survival of the movement.
But we should be cautious. In truth, we do not know why the Gospels were written. They are not straightforward chronicles, nor do they contain the atonement theology that dominates Paul’s letters. They occupy a different space: somewhere between memory, interpretation, and myth. What they offer is not transparent history but a vision shaped by the needs of their communities — and that, too, is part of the mystery. The more I look, the less I see.
Yet the traditional theology of guilt and atonement also “makes sense” in its own way. It gave the early church a functional explanation for why the crucified one was still God’s chosen — and it has lasted two millennia.
The truth is, we cannot choose one version and prove it against the others. The sources are too thin, too late, too infused with theology. Jesus remains a figure open to multiple interpretations, each persuasive, each incomplete. That means the issues are, in the end, irresolvable.
What I find more fruitful is not dogma, but the parable of the Sower. Here, the seed is good — infinitely good. What determines its fate is the soil: whether it falls among thorns, on rocky ground, or into rich earth. Humanity too is potentially good, capable of flourishing. What distorts or stifles this potential are the harsh realities of life: poverty, injustice, temptation, and oppression.
I find it difficult to accept the idea that man is inherently guilty. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin has cast a long shadow, but I prefer to think that people carry within them a seed of infinite possibility. The question is not whether we are doomed by nature, but whether we are given soil in which to grow.
This connects with how I think about God. I do not believe in a God defined as we are, in time and space — a kind of super-person “out there.” That externalisation of God makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by those who claim to know “God’s will.” History is full of priests, preachers, and rulers who invoked divine authority to bolster their own power.
As for “direct experience of God,” very few people have had it, and those who claim to may often be dealing with some form of delusion or altered state. To rest dogma on such fragile ground seems unwise.
But this does not mean abandoning the language of God altogether. For me, “God” is not an external being, but a name for the deepest reality we can sense: the flame of love, justice, and truth that flickers within human potential. It cannot be possessed, claimed, or packaged as “God’s will.” It is more like a horizon that draws us forward.
For clarity — if not sanity of mind — I don’t expect certainty about Jesus’ “true significance,” nor about the metaphysics of God. What I do believe is this: our task is not to worry too much about doctrinal puzzles, but to nurture the potential for goodness in ourselves and in others. That, to me, is more important than belief in dogma.
In the end, I return to a simple conviction. Christianity as we know it has been shaped more by Paul’s theology than by Jesus’ own words. Paul gave the church its scaffolding: justification, atonement, law and grace, the role of the Spirit, the life of the church. It was systematic, persuasive, and it endured.
But in trying to understand Christianity, Paul is of lesser use than Jesus himself. Fiction or not, embellished or not, the voice of Jesus still cuts through: the parables of the kingdom, the beatitudes, the insistence that love of God and neighbour outweighs every law. These fragments remain more compelling than any theological system built on top of them.
Jesus resists capture. He cannot be pinned down to one meaning or reduced to a formula. That is why mystics across the centuries have insisted that God is best approached in unknowing. The anonymous 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing counselled that God is beyond thought and can only be “struck down” into the heart by love. Meister Eckhart urged his listeners to let go of every image and idea so that “God may be God in us.” John of the Cross described the “dark night of the soul” not as despair but as the path to deepest union. And Rowan Williams, in our own time, has reminded us that faith is less about having answers than about learning to dwell faithfully in questions.
Perhaps that is where the truth of Christianity lies: not in Paul’s dogmatic edifice, but in Jesus’ radical openness — the kingdom within, the call to love, the refusal to bow to worldly power. Whether we take the stories as history or parable, Jesus remains the figure at the centre, asking us not to master mystery but to live within it.
