Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is invoked in Common Sense as a scriptural authority and reference point in Thomas Paine’s arguments about kingship, religious conscience, and political action. He is not presented as a participant in the contemporary events; rather, Paine draws on claims associated with his teachings to question both monarchical power and a religious testimony against involvement in political change.

Scriptural Authority and Kingship

Paine argues that scripture does not legitimate monarchy. He points to the biblical rejection of kingship attributed to Gideon and the prophet Samuel, and contends that the saying about rendering to Caesar does not endorse monarchy: in his account, the Jews at that time had no king and lived under Roman rule. Within this argument, Jesus Christ’s authority belongs to a broader scriptural case against treating earthly kings as divinely sanctioned rulers.

The text also recounts the Israelites’ request for a king and Samuel’s warning that royal rule would impose obligations and burdens on the people. Paine presents this narrative as evidence that monarchy was a mistaken political choice, rather than a form of government approved by divine authority. Jesus Christ is part of the scriptural frame for this political theology, though Paine’s specific examples of opposition to kingship come from the accounts of Gideon and Samuel.

Religious Diversity and Civic Life

Paine connects religious freedom with a providentially permitted diversity of belief. He argues that differing religious opinions create a wider field for Christian kindness and compares the denominations in the colonies to members of one family who differ in their Christian names. Jesus Christ is named in the phrase describing the light manifested in the conscience of those who profess him; this gives the argument for religious tolerance an explicitly Christian setting without making uniform belief a condition of political unity.

In Paine’s proposed Continental Charter, freedom of religion is among the protections to be secured, alongside personal freedom and property. He further maintains that government’s duty toward religion is to protect people who conscientiously profess it, not to control religious belief. In this account, Christian language supports a distinction between faith and governmental jurisdiction.

The Quaker Testimony and Political Action

Paine’s most direct engagement with Jesus Christ comes in his examination of a Quaker political testimony. The testimony asserts that setting up or removing kings and governments belongs to God, and that believers should refrain from political schemes and pray for the king. Paine challenges its authors to apply that principle consistently: if political change is God’s prerogative, they should wait for events rather than publish a political appeal urging people to oppose independence.

He also argues that the testimony’s appeal to the light of Christ in the conscience sits uneasily with its intervention in political affairs. In his reading, its authors cannot both disclaim human agency in political change and seek to influence the public against separation from Great Britain. The dispute is not simply over Christian belief, but over whether religious conviction requires political quietism and whether a professed principle can be reconciled with the conduct undertaken in its name.

The Dispersal of the Jews and Human Agency

Paine invokes the dispersal of the Jews, which he says Jesus Christ foretold, to argue that even a divinely foretold change in political and national circumstances can be carried out through ordinary human means, including armed action. The example supports his challenge to the claim that human beings must not participate in political change because such change belongs to God. He argues that refusing to act on one side while attempting to influence events on the other is inconsistent with the testimony’s own principle.

Jesus Christ therefore serves two related functions in the book: his name locates arguments about conscience and Christian conduct within a religious frame, while the attributed prophecy of the Jews’ dispersal becomes part of Paine’s case that divine providence and human action are not mutually exclusive. The text does not present him as endorsing a specific contemporary political program; it uses scriptural interpretation to contest the boundaries that religious opponents place on political action.