"Jesus was a great moral teacher," Richard Dawkins said to The Guardian earlier this week. "Somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today." I love this kind of thing; I have a taste for the grotesque. Here is Jesus, a “moral teacher”, the authority of whose entire teaching derived, from the beginning, from the fact that he didn’t just believe in the existence of God the Father as a kind of add-on, compulsory at the time, but from the fact that he Himself and the Father were one: and Dawkins says that if Jesus had only known what we know today, he would have been an atheist. Of course, he is well aware of the “oxymoronic” nature of his statement; as he explained in an essaywritten in 2006, “In a society where the majority of theists are at least nominally Christian, the two words are treated as near synonyms. Bertrand Russell's famous advocacy of atheism was called Why I am not a Christian rather than, as it probably should have been, Why I am not a theist. All Christians are theists, it seems to go without saying.” (He later points to the example of an atheist bishop, the former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, to prove that it ain’t necessarily so, though the preposterous Holloway describes himself as a “post-Christian”, even as a “recovering Chistian”). All the same, one is entitled to ask, if this “intelligent” teacher would have been an atheist today, what would his moral teachings have actually been, and what authority would they have had in a non-religious world in which you can’t just set up as a “moral teacher” and expect to be listened to? Dawkins says Jesus’s teachings, in the context of their times, were radical, and certainly they were: