When Jesus is speaking to the condemned in Matthew 25:43, saying things like, “I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in,” there wasn’t a caveat at the end of the verse that said, “But that’s okay, because I know you had a recording session booked that night.” Thus, when Paul McCartney opened his front door to see a man claiming to be the Messiah himself, he thought he’d better invite him in for a cup of tea. (And a few questions.)
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The strange encounter took place in the late winter of 1967, when The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As McCartney recalled in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, he used to answer anyone who rang at his front gate. “If they were boring, I would say, ‘Sorry, no,’ and they generally went away. This guy said, ‘I’m Jesus Christ.’ I said, ‘Oop,’ slightly shocked. I said, ‘Well, you’d better come in then.’”
McCartney continued, “I thought, ‘Well, it probably isn’t. But if he is, I’m not going to be the one to turn him away. So, I gave him a cup of tea, and we just chatted.” The musician told his visitor that he had a recording session booked that night, adding, “If you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner, you can come.” That was an offer even Jesus couldn’t refuse.
Paul McCartney Facilitated a Full Circle “Jesus” Moment for the Beatles
The recording session at Regent Sound Studios in February 1967 wasn’t the first run-in The Beatles had with Jesus Christ—at least, in a public setting, anyway. The band had already been the subject of great controversy the previous year after John Lennon infamously said that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” To be fair, the sentiment was valid, albeit hyperbolic. The Beatles were the biggest band in the world at the time. Still, conservative Christian critics of the American South took offense, sparking a wave of public burnings of Beatles records.
Things were far tamer in the studio, where the band was in the process of recording “Fixing a Hole”. Speaking to Barry Miles, Paul McCartney recalled ushering the so-called Messiah into the studio at Tottenham Court Road. The musician said that, as he requested, Jesus did “sit very quietly, and I never saw him after that. I introduced him to the guys. They said, ‘Who’s this?’ I said, ‘He’s Jesus Christ.’ We had a bit of a giggle over that.”
Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
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