John Lennon vs. Jesus, 50 Years Later

'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.'

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, Slate reminds us that while somehow John Lennon's "Jesus" comment has become part of pop culture lexicon, it wasn't even the worst thing they said in the interview:

Like an overplayed single that loses its punch, the “more popular than Jesus” line is a lot less shocking in 2016. But a return to the original series turns up several quotes that now read as seriously pungent. “Show business belongs to the Jews,” Cleaves quotes “The Beatles” collectively as saying, in a version of her reporting that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in July of 1966. “It’s part of the Jewish religion.”

Lennon also tells Cleave that he is considering sending his son Julian to a French lycée in London, but muses “I feel sorry for him, though. I couldn’t stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren’t they?” Ringo Starr, meanwhile, refers to the band as being so close they’re like “Siamese quads eating out of the same bowl.” He jokes of his wife, Maureen, that “I own her, of course.” She was 16 when they met—he was six years older—and “her parents signed her over to me when I married her.” Paul McCartney decries racism in America, “a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty nigger.” That line made it to the cover of Datebook, too, above Lennon’s Jesus quip.

Also funny: the KKK thinking Jesus would pick them over The Beatles.