Did John Lennon Think He Was Jesus?

John's Messiah Complex

via the Lennon X account.

Catch-up service:
Why It’s Hard To Stop AIs Lying
The Hipster-Military-Industrial Complex
The Ruffian Speaks
The Audacity of Ambition
Tolstoy on Disagreement

• This is the last Saturday before UK PUBLICATION day for John & Paul, on Thursday 25th March. So if you’re in Britain, you only have a few days left to pre-order. US publication is April 8th - so guess what that you means you have more time to pre-order. US pre-sales are looking good now - thanks to those of you who have pitched in - but still much room for improvement! The dream is to hit the bestseller lists in week one.

• A second extract will run in the Sunday Times magazine tomorrow (here’s the first).

• You can hear me talking about the book on the excellent Beatles Books podcast.

• Dylan Jones (former GQ editor and music biographer) has given J&P an incredibly nice review in the Evening Standard. “A masterpiece, a classic…as soon as I’ve finished writing this, I’m going to start reading it again.” The review is not online but there’s a pic here if you don’t mind squinting.

• Finally - on launch day I’m taking part in a John & Paul event at Kiln Theatre in Kilburn with Tom Holland (The Rest Is History). It’s sold out but we have a couple of complimentary tickets to give away to paid subscribers. Details after the jump.
  

  On with the show. This piece borrows a little material from the book but is largely new and exclusive to The Ruffian (despite having written a whole book on J&P it turns out I still have more to say about them).

Did John Lennon Think He Was Jesus?

In 1966, the journalist Maureen Cleave interviewed each of the Beatles in turn for a series of perceptive newspaper profiles in the London Evening Standard. She had known them since the early days of their fame and become quite close to John. During his interview John talked freely about what was on his mind.

He’d been thinking about religion, specifically Christianity. He’d read a bestseller called The Passover Plot, published the year before, a kind of nonfiction Dan Brown, by a Biblical scholar called Hugh Schonfield. The book argued that Jesus meticulously orchestrated the events of his final days, including his arrest and crucifixion, in order to fulfil messianic destiny. According to Schonfield, Jesus planned to fake his death and resurrection but got killed by a Roman soldier who put a spear in him. The apostles, who are portrayed as rather clueless, then spread the message of the resurrection. Yes, it does sound like a Monty Python plot.

Lennon mused to Cleave about the decline of the religion he was raised in. “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink…We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary.” When the interview was published in the Standard, in March 1966, these remarks weren’t even noticed. In July, an American teen magazine called Datebook ran extracts from the Cleave profiles at the invitation of the Beatles’ publicist. The Beatles were embarking on a tour of the U.S. that month.

Datebook was running a “speaking out” issue on political topics. Its editor mailed the magazine to conservative radio DJs in the South, with the aim of sparking outrage, to generate publicity for the magazine. He didn’t think Lennon’s remarks were controversial, however. In Paul McCartney’s interview with Cleave, he’d dismissed America as “lousy” with racism. Datebook put Paul on the cover. But when a couple of DJs in Alabama read the magazine, they snagged on Lennon’s words.

It wasn’t that they found the remarks blasphemous so much as arrogant and hubristic. Certain elements had been looking for an excuse to attack these British pop stars who had hypnotised and indoctrinated American teenagers. The Beatles had refused to play for segregated audiences in the South. It was time they got their comeuppance. Who did they think they were - Jesus come to earth? The DJs proposed a ritual burning of Beatles records. The stunt was reported on by national media, and series of copycat protests took off. There were death threats, and concerns that a sniper might infiltrate one of the Beatles’ concerts.

Landing in America, Lennon was distraught and terrified. In press conferences, he defended his remarks. He said he didn’t think he was Jesus, and he wasn’t against Christianity; he had just been making an observation. “I’m not saying we’re better or greater or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person.” At first, he sounded contrite, but as he spoke further, and as the others backed him up, he became increasingly confident, even defiant.

After this tour, the Beatles decided they didn’t want to tour again. From then on, they would focus on making music in the recording studio. But they were not retreating from public view. John now took seriously than ever his and the band’s role as a kind of global shaman, spreading vibes of peace and love to billions of people. The next year, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper, received rapturously around the world as the harbinger of a new global consciousness.

That summer, they took part in a global TV special, for which John wrote All You Need Is Love (Paul had proposed Your Mother Should Know). They met the Maharishi and publicised their attraction to Eastern spirituality, to which John, as well as George, was particularly drawn. In the second half of 1968, John took up with Yoko Ono, and together they embarked on a campaign against war.

Inside the crucible of the 1966 American controversy, an intuition that John had about himself and the Beatles - that they could be a force for social, political and spiritual change - began to crystallise and solidify. And inside that intuition germinated an even wilder idea - that he was the messiah. I don’t think those Alabama DJs were right about the Beatles, but I think they might have been on to something, if only accidentally, about John.

Jesus played a significant role in the Beatles story from its beginning. In 1957/1958, during the first phase of their creative partnership, John and Paul kept notebooks with ideas for songs in them along with stories and other fragments of mutual creativity. In one of these notebooks is an idea for a musical about a preacher called Pilchard, who hails from a Liverpool “slum”. Pilchard turns out to be Jesus. The messiah had chosen to make his return to earth by way of John and Paul’s hometown.

The musical wasn’t an idea that they forgot about or took lightly. In 1964, John told an interviewer that he and Paul wanted to do a musical about Liverpool. In 1965, John and Paul mention the idea in another interview, citing the Jesus storyline. In that interview they also talked about wanting to incorporate their Liverpool childhoods into song more generally, making a reference to a composition that later became In My Life, on the Rubber Soul album.

One of the other songs on Rubber Soul, The Word, is a more significant song than it might seem. It is about spiritual transformation; spreading the word of love. Beatles podcaster Chris Shaw makes a persuasive case that The Word is pivotal to the group’s evolution. It marks the moment that “love” became, for the Beatles, not just about romance, but “a mantra, a message, and a mission.” The lyrics to The Word, written by John, are infused with scriptural cadence:

In the beginning, I misunderstood
But now I’ve got it, the word is good

In fact, as Shaw points out, the whole song is a hip version of the Gospel According To - you guessed it - John. This is how the Gospel of John opens:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John was not a practicing Christian but he was deeply fascinated by Christianity. Aunt Mimi sent John to Sunday School and later on he talked about how glad he was to have gone. In Cleave’s profile of John she mentions that among the many knick-knacks and curios John had in his home were “a huge altar crucifix” and “an enormous Bible he bought in Chester”. You can imagine John, at Mimi’s house as a kid, or in his Surrey Mansion, picking up the Bible and turning to the pages with his name at the top.

Lennon used “In the beginning” (also in the Book of Genesis) again the following year, for Tomorrow Never Knows. There’s another echo of the Gospel of John in the indelible opening line of I Am The Walrus, from 1967: “I am he as you are he as you me and we are all together.” In John 14:20, Jesus says: "On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you." All You Need Is Love - a sequel to The Word - has a repetitive quality which echoes Biblical psalms or liturgical responses.

Freedom through truth is a theme of the gospels: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32). In Lennon’s song, truth is found, not in Jesus, but in love, and the singer is here to show you the way:

Say the word, and you’ll be free
Say the word, and be like me
Say the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love

The Bible teaches that to follow Jesus, you must live as He lived. Lennon adapts this idea, and points to himself: “Say the word and you’ll be free, say the word and be like me.” In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world”. Lennon sings, “I’m here to show everybody the light”.¹

Later on, John’s identification with Jesus became more explicit. In 1968, when John was going through something of a crisis - leaving Cynthia, binge drinking, taking a lot of LSD, dabbling in heroin, and generally acting erratically - he called an emergency meeting of the Beatles at Apple. After the group and their closest aides were gathered around a conference table, he said, "I have something very important to tell you all. I am Jesus Christ. I'm back again.” He even proposed a press release. The other Beatles listened sympathetically before suggesting lunch.²

Shortly after this, John and Yoko embarked on an improvised program of avant garde activism which in 1969 became their global peace campaign. John grew his hair long and sprouted a beard. In April 1969, on returning from honeymoon with Yoko - which included a bed-in in Amsterdam - he wrote a song about what it was like to be him at that time. The Ballad of John and Yoko describes how hard it is to deliver a message of peace when the world wants to bring you down. “Christ you know it ain’t easy….the way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me.”³

When people write about John’s Jesus references, they often dismiss them as drug-induced delusions or jokes. But there is a consistent pattern here that stretches across the years. Yes, the Ballad is playful, as is The Word. But to conclude that therefore John didn’t really mean the words he sang would be a mistake: he was often at his most sincere in jokes, and jokes, as I wrote here recently, can be ways to get at truths that might not otherwise be aired.

I doubt that John carried around a consistent conviction that he was the messiah. But ever since he was a kid, he had felt special. As an adult he was always looking for ways to cope with his often painful experience of childhood - to understand his psychic suffering. I would guess that John’s idea he was Jesus, or a Jesus-like figure, flickered in out of his consciousness, a daydream he sometimes took seriously during times of stress. After all, John was prepped to believe. He had lived a life in which his most outlandish dreams proved real. If a boy from Liverpool could become more famous and successful than anyone on the planet, what other crazy things might be true?

---

This post is free to read so please share and spread the word!

After the jump: how to win tickets to see me and Tom Holland talk John & Paul. Plus a Rattle Bag of excellent things I’ve been reading/watching/listening to. Please consider a paid subscription to The Ruffian. Paid subscriptions are what makes this newsletter possible, and indeed facilitate all my writing, including and especially John & Paul.