Question: Beatles "Bigger Than Jesus" FAQ - The quote
What was the source of the original "Bigger Than Jesus" quote?
Answer: On March 4, 1966, John's friend Maureen Cleave, a reporter for the London Evening
Standard who'd first met the Beatle in 1963, met Lennon at his Tudor mansion in
Weybridge for an article on his daily life, part of a four-part series where she
interviewed each Beatle separately. The rather slight result revealed a bored,
isolated, and somewhat jaded Lennon living at home with wife Cynthia and restlessly
searching for new artistic directions; perhaps as part of that restlessness, it also
found him questioning many established ideas he'd grown up with. The quote about
Jesus, in full, comes in the context of a paragraph that reads as follows:
Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it's closed round whatever he believes at the time. "Christianity will go," he said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first-rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." He is reading extensively about religion.
