The Gospels

The Gospels are described as writings for the instruction of Christians already made, rather than as biographies whose purpose is to produce converts. In Screwtape’s account, their role clarifies a larger contrast: historical reconstruction can turn Jesus into a distant subject of study, while Christian belief begins from the Resurrection and Redemption understood in relation to an already recognized moral law.

Purpose and Audience

Screwtape argues that the earliest converts were not brought into Christianity by studying Jesus’ life as a biography. Their conversion, he says, followed from a single historical fact, the Resurrection, and a single theological doctrine, the Redemption, acting upon a sense of sin that they already possessed. That sense of wrongdoing was not, in his account, created by a novel code attributed to a religious innovator; it concerned the old and widely taught moral law, familiar from childhood teaching.

He places the Gospels later in this sequence. They were written to edify Christians who had already been converted, not to make Christians through biographical information alone. The distinction makes their function formative rather than merely introductory: they address an existing community of belief instead of supplying a complete life of Jesus as the basis for first conversion.

The Gospels and Historical Reconstruction

The letters set this claim against attempts to construct a “Historical Jesus” by selecting and reshaping the available material. Screwtape describes such reconstructions as dependent on suppression, exaggeration, and speculation, and says that they tend to present Jesus as a modern “great man” whose importance lies in a distinctive theory. This framing can reduce him first to a teacher and then to a figure assessed at a distance by historians or political partisans.

The contrast helps explain why Screwtape considers historical biography an inadequate substitute for religious life. In the account he offers, a remote reconstruction cannot take the place of the presence encountered through prayer and sacrament. He therefore treats the Gospels’ stated purpose of edifying existing Christians as part of a broader opposition between faith and an approach that makes Jesus only an object of historical judgment.

Narrative Context and Limits

This account of the Gospels appears within letters written by Screwtape to Wormwood, and its theological claims are voiced by a demon whose judgments should not automatically be accepted as impartial truth. The framing gives the discussion an ironic force: Screwtape explains how religious belief takes hold while trying to advise his nephew on ways to undermine it. His description of the Gospels’ purpose is therefore both an argument within the letters and part of the novel’s sustained dramatic reversal of diabolical analysis.

The letters also do not offer a full biography of Jesus or an extended account of the Gospels’ contents. Their emphasis is narrower: the relation between historical fact, theological doctrine, moral awareness, and the formation of Christian readers. The Gospels matter here less as a narrated life than as writings addressed to believers whose faith, in Screwtape’s formulation, has already begun.