Retelling the Life of Christ With Style, Wit

Much has been lost in the mist of history, and the actual life of Jesus of Nazareth is no exception. The image of Christ suffuses Western culture, but the flesh-and-blood individual who walked the Earth for a brief time two millenniums ago has been almost entirely eclipsed. Several years ago, Thomas Cahill began an ambitious project “to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” His current book is third in this planned series of seven, and Cahill wrote first about the Irish and then about the Jews before wending his way to Jesus. Cahill is a man of obvious intelligence and deep learning whose quirky style and fluid storytelling allow him to be a mass market writer. He is a popularizer of the best sort, and well-suited to the task of writing about the greatest religious populist in Western history.

Cahill depicts a Jesus that even those who know the Bible better than the Gideons might find unfamiliar. “He was a small-town Jew, born in a bad time for Jews.” Cahill describes the Hellenistic-Roman culture that dominated the Mediterranean at that time, and he places Jesus in the context of a Judaism in flux. Rabbinic Judaism, which would soon become the only Judaism, was only one of several competing sects, and Jesus seems to have begun his ministry as a rabbi. Cahill weaves the story of Christ with analysis of the various segments of the New Testament. He gives pocket histories of Matthew and Mark and devotes entire chapters to the image of Jesus depicted by Luke and John. He also delves extensively into the personality and theology of Paul who, besides Jesus, is clearly the most pivotal figure in early Christianity. And he concludes with a poetic musing on how the world was unalterably changed by a living person, divine in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Christians but still a man, who preached for a few short years in Palestine 2,000 years ago.

For those few who have made it their business to investigate the historical Jesus, Cahill’s book offers nothing new. Yet, for most readers, Cahill’s story will be revelatory. To begin with, as the author of a previous book on the Jews, he places Jesus, the apostles and Paul squarely within the context of 1st century Judaism. Indeed, as Cahill indicates, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are the two survivors among the numerous Jewish sects present during the time of Jesus, and the early “Christians” thought of themselves as nothing more and nothing less than Jews.

Cahill demonstrates the different ways that the different writers of the New Testament put their own spin on the teachings. Luke, in particular, Cahill writes, created the image of a loving, kind, compassionate Christ and the concomitant image of the wise disciples. Luke, a Gentile writing in Greek, took liberally from the biographic tradition of the Greeks--and of Plutarch in particular--to depict Jesus’ life, and his Gospel “is the one that has had the most effect on the West.” John, on the other hand, emphasizes a Christ who focuses more on his divinity and the consequences of his martyrdom. It is an imposing, transcendent Christ that emerges from the fourth Gospel, and Cahill explains that although the shadings are different, each portrait contains what were probably valid representations of what Jesus actually said and did.

Finally, there is Paul, often maligned as the man who imposed a rigid Church and forced the living theology of Jesus into a hierarchical framework. Paul is shown by Cahill to be more complex. As a tireless proponent of the teachings of Christ, Paul was an austere man who often harshly rebuked the early communities he addressed, but some of the more doctrinaire moments were added by other, later writers.

Some will be put off by Cahill’s breezy use of colloquialism (“Paul was an either/or kind of guy”) and his equally colloquial translations of biblical texts (Mary to the angel Gabriel, who tells her that she will bear God’s son: “This doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t had sex yet”). Some will find the simplicity of his writing and the lightness of his pen a reflection of simplistic analysis. But although it is true that Cahill is covering ground that has been trampled, he does more than popularize scholarly insights. He makes judgments, puts a distinctive spin on events and adds his own voice. And he knows that no matter how much ink has been devoted to Jesus over the centuries, it is up to each generation to analyze, to remember, and to tell again.

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Zachary Karabell is a contributing writer to Book Review.