Few years ago, I chanced upon a survey research by a London based Media organization. The renowned British footballer, David Beckham was then at the pinnacle of his career and the object of the research was to determine who between Jesus of Nazareth and David Beckham was more popular.
The media dispatched team of their correspondents around the world, from Asia to Africa, from North America to South America and Antarctica; and from Europe to Australia, to document how many people have heard about Jesus as against those who have heard about Beckham. These researchers traveled to countries populated by Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Shintos, atheists, African Traditional worshipers among others. According to their findings, there were many remote countries Christian influence was limited and where people never heard of Jesus. Contrarily, there were fewer countries where people didn’t watched football and heard of Beckham. From Africa to Europe, from Australia to Asia, to North and South America, people, including Christians, Moslems and atheists watched football and therefore knew about David Beckham. In the end, the team concluded that Beckham was more popular than Jesus of Nazareth.
That was many years ago. I remembered the Beckham story while I was working on a lecture on Marxism and bumped into a similar comparison between Jesus and Karl Max. In a section where the author profiled Marx, he described him as an obscure 19th century thinker whose idea came to rule the world. On his account, there was a time, when the over 7 billion people in the world were unequally divided between Marxists and others. By this estimation, more than half of the people in the world were Marxists such that there were more Marxists than there were Christians and Moslems put together. The conclusion here again was that there was a time in history when Karl Marx was more popular than Jesus Christ was.
How Popular is Jesus Christ?
I have no doubt that the aim of the authors of these comparisons was not to belittle the popularity of Christ. The intension, I assume was to use the popularity of Christ – the greatest person to work this earth – to show how popular and great both Marx and Beckham once were. Ancient rhetoricians employed this method to demonstrate the greatness of their subjects. The author of the Gospel of John used it in his prologue (John 1: 1-18) to show the greatness of Jesus by comparing him with the Baptist and Moses. By placing Jesus greatness above these renowned figures, the Evangelist showed his preeminence in greatness.
The only mistake here is that our authors used the wrong parameters in measuring the popularity of Jesus. Meanwhile, Jesus greatness is not measured in the number of people that have heard about him but on how much impact his personality has affected our history.
On February 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., preached a sermon during which he defined greatness in the light of love and selfless service. He Characterized Jesus as the model of greatness:
“I know a man. He was born in an obscure village, the child of a poor peasant woman. He grew up in still another obscure village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was thirty years old. Then for three years, he just got on his feet, and he was an itinerant preacher. He went about doing some things. He didn’t have much. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness. He had no credentials but himself.
Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history. All of the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life. His name may be a familiar one. Today I can hear them talking about him. Every now and then, somebody says, “He’s King of Kings.” And again I can hear somebody saying, “He’s Lord of Lords.”
That is Jesus, the Narazeren. His popularity does not come from how many people that know him but by how much of our history his life has come to shape. King also said of him: “Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but one day that same Christ will arise and split history into AD and BC, so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name.”
