Christianity stolen from the Jews ?

Professor Barrie Wilson’s book How Jesus Became Christian (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2008) treats a subject that really deserves to be better understood: how in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean a new religion emerged that was to spread around the world. No doubt the professor knows his subject well, and the early part of the book seems promising enough: we get the impression that he is no ‘respecter of persons’ - which is important when such a sensitive historical study is being undertaken.

But the further I got into the book, the more irritated I became, because the professor (a) is trying too hard to ‘write down’, incorporating occasional slang words and phrases and gimmicks into his text that just don’t seem (to me, at any rate) to make the text more ‘readable’ but, if anything, render it less ‘authoritative’; (b) he is not at all impartial, and the further you get into the book, the more blatant his uncritical partiality becomes; (c) his logic is distorted by this partiality; and (d) he feels that every point he makes must be repeated again and again, elaborated, summarised, expressed in new terms (or the same old ones): presumably he assumes the reader has a short memory, or is likely to skip pages. The main text of the book could so easily have been shortened by 25%, with some 200 pages instead of 265.

Many experts realise that the jargon of their own professions or ‘schools’ is not welcomed by the general reader. But disappointingly few of them see that the remedy lies in good, clear writing that expresses well-disciplined, well-marshalled thoughts. Sprinkling the text with occasional modern slang is not a good way to become either more intelligible or more respected. Wilson is probably (or ‘likely’, to use one of his favourite terms) a very well-informed academic, no doubt well travelled in the Bible lands and of wide reading: but he is not a very good writer, and does not seem even to understand every word he uses (‘decimate’ and ‘aftermath’, for instance): he uses phrases like ‘a very major problem’, and ‘a fussy point emerges’.

One gorgeous mix of three metaphors, “[Paul’s religion] held out the welcome mat with no strings attached”, I have already discussed in an earlier blog (‘Something for SCREAM to disentangle’: 1th February 2009).

But the bias of the book is a much more serious flaw than its unsatisfactory style. Christianity, which we all know has been frequently inconsistent and often cruel, is fair game. But what seems to motivate Wilson’s central chapters is a very bitter resentment of the raw deal that he reckons the Jews have always had. Now much of what he says about this is true: but he tries to demolish all the early Christian writers, from the New Testament to the early fathers, accusing them of (among other things) bias, stealing ideas from other religions including Judaism, and falsifying history, without a word of criticism or analysis of the text or history of the Jewish scriptures themselves. The Jewish scriptures, traditions and laws (the Torah) are all faultless and right, it seems – they don’t even need to be justified: while the scriptures of the early Christians were all wrong. The Jews have always, to this very day, played fair, we are left to assume, while the Christians have always played (and by implication, still do play) foul. No doubt we all, including Christians, should admit that anti-semitism still flourishes in some contexts, and is morally indefensible. But we all have as much right to disagree with aspects of Judaism as to criticise what we may see as weaknesses or faults in Christianity.

The author gets so hot under the collar in later chapters that he begins to adopt the tone of Eric von Daniken and popular conspiracy theorists, misrepresenting, exaggerating, using ‘loaded’ words, quoting selectively to reinforce his own theses, attributing wrong motives to some folk and being quite uncritical about others, and allowing his prejudices to warp his logic. This book (that is to say, a book on this topic) is really needed, but how much more valuable it would be if it were more impartial ! This is the trouble with religion: it seems to be hard to write about it without belittling those with whom you don’t agree. This sort of book should really be written by a benign, tolerant agnostic who is not afraid of unpopular facts; a sound and sympathetic scholar with no axes to grind but a sincere desire to get as close to the whole historical truth as possible.

The book may not be perfect, but I still learnt a lot from it (including some things that were not part of the author’s intention). It would be good to know more about the matters it discusses - but preferably from a less opinionated, more independent scholar.

Christianity stolen from the Jews ?