Monday, May 12, 2008

Einstein on Jesus

I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

Albert Einstein, 1929

4 comments:

Speaker for the Dead said...

C.S. Lewis would call it a "true myth."

John said...

Though the phrase was used by Tolkien in conversation with Lewis before Lewis was a Christian...

Casey said...

In 1954 Einstein apparently said, "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080513122249.m3ds3b6j&show_article=1

John said...

Oh, quite. I'm not for a moment claiming he was a Christian. For what it's worth, he was a kind of non-pantheist Spinozan deist.

But he found Jesus fascinating, in rather the same way that Gandhi did.