since the tone of your thoughts nicely echoes those of Rev. James Allan Francis’ 1926 sermon which has since been anonymously reworked into the beloved and ubiquitous “One Solitary Life”:

… He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself…

… today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.

Far fewer, however, may be likely to recognize your characterization of the person and work of Jesus Christ as having far deeper roots in early Protestant liberalism than in the Scriptures.

The liberal churches of the mid-19th century, having tired of defending their lost belief in the divinity of Christ, began experiment with ways to make “the real Jesus” be an idealized version of “someone just like us” rather than the incarnated 2nd person of the Trinity. Their early products included a Jesus who was the embodiment of civic morality, one who maintained burnished rows of steel along the Union lines, and one who was willing to take a lesson or two from Mr. Marx. Over time, however, some theologically conservative Christians wanted to get in on the fun as well; grievous hilarity could ensue when opposing Jesuses occasionally met at midfield, as the teetotalling and the home-brewing, or the hippies’ hope and the dispenser of lawn order.

Missing, of course, in all of this, including your own inspiring piece, is any substantially correct reference to Jesus’ role in redemptive history.

You state: He led without a mandate. But you are contradicted by the most widespread Protestant confessions:

It pleased God, in his eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus his only begotten Son, according to a covenant made between them both, to be the Mediator between God and man; the Prophet, Priest, and King, the Head and Saviour of his Church, the Heir of all things and Judge of the world; unto whom he did from all eternity give a people to be his seed, and to be by him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified. (WCF, Savoy, BLC “Of Christ the Mediator”, I)

You state: He taught without a script.Not only manifestly untrue, but ironically so: every word out of the Lord Jesus’ mouth was rooted in the Scriptures which, according to his own testimony, speak of him.

You state: His common sense parables filled people with promise and compassion. This is certainly the liberal interpretation of the parables–as akin to Aesop and Ben Franklin–but it does not square with the reality that they caused division and anger, and, again from Jesus’ own testimony, were not “common” at all but rather divine revelations intended to confute: “for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’”

You state: He never condemned what others believed–just sin, evil and corruption. You have perhaps unknowingly demonstrated one of the hallmarks of Protestant liberalism: its externalization of sin into structures rather than persons. Certain remarks concerning snakes, broods of vipers, blind guides, an adulterous and wicked generation, and “you, being evil” come to mind for rebuttal.

You state: everywhere He went, it turned into a rally, attracting large crowds, and giving them … inspiration. Not necessarily so; by the end of the “rally” that had begun with the feeding of the 5,000, many deserted Jesus due to his “hard sayings”, until there were only 12 left–”and one of you is a devil!”

You state: The liberal court found Him guilty of false offences and sentenced him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men. Spending a little more time in the gospels or under sound exegetical preaching is advisable. The court was egregiously conservative. The death sentence had nothing to do with changed hearts and minds–as highly rated as those entities are in both narcissitic evangelicalism and liberalism–but rather because Jesus had, in the court’s eyes, uttered blasphemy both throughout his public ministry and at its close, by claiming to be God.

That implications of that last fact, curiously, is notably absent from your piece, Mr. Cain. We seem to have read about remarkably different Jesuses. I’m afraid I will need to leave you with the one you found who is just like you in so many ways, and remain rather with the one who does not need us to be his defenders.

To say, as you did, that “American conservatives would have staunchly defended Jesus’ right to say anything he wanted” on that darkest of nights is not only contraindicated by the consistent misrepresentations and misapplications of Jesus’ own words by many, even on such a solidly conservative site as this, but also bears measuring against the actual words and behavior by Peter on that same night.