Jordan Peterson’s struggle with Christianity raises a wider question: do human beings live by truth, by happiness, or by the narratives that give life meaning? This reflection argues that stories can guide or mislead us, and that the deepest relief lies in finding the source of goodness within ourselves and following it.
Behind the vast theological edifice of later Christianity lies a very different figure: a Galilean teacher whose sayings in the Synoptic Gospels preserve a startling moral clarity largely absent from the metaphysical Jesus of John and the cosmic Christ of Paul. Recovering the historical Jesus requires peeling away these later layers and listening again for the radical ethical voice that once challenged his hearers to transform the inner life rather than speculate on the nature of the universe.