A brave attempt to discover more than ancient texts can reliably reveal. (11 b&w photos)
A Jewish scholar challenges the received wisdom of contemporary scripture studies by contending that fragments of a Dead Sea scroll contain evidence of a suffering messiah prior to Jesus.
Knohl (Bible/Hebrew Univ.) proposes a thesis at odds with mainstream Scripture scholarship. According to what for decades has been the prevailing view, the notion of a suffering messiah was utterly foreign to first-century Judaism, so messianic claims made by Jesus in the gospels must therefore have been ascribed to him after his death by followers who picked up their ideas from non-Jewish sources. On the basis of certain Dead Sea Scroll fragments, however, Knohl argues that the notion of a suffering, redemptive messiah was indeed current in the Qumran community of Judaism prior to the time of Jesus. The fragments come from the badly torn “Thanksgivings Scroll,” which includes two hymns central to the author’s argument. The first, the “Self-Glorification Hymn,” speaks of an exalted figure who places himself on a footing with angels, but who has also known great suffering; the author argues that this figure was himself a member of the Qumran community. The second hymn, though, describes a time in which redemption and salvation are accomplished realities, and the author maintains that this blessed time had been achieved, in the community’s opinion, through the sufferings of the exalted figure in the first hymn. This mysterious redemptive sufferer, we are told, is thus the true author of “catastrophic messianism”—a Jewish conception of which Jesus was likely aware. The author’s thesis is daring; its soundness is for specialists to determine. Unfortunately, most of his study is devoted to identifying the shadowy sufferer referred to in the Scrolls, and the strain of this exertion presses his argument toward implausibility.
A brave attempt to discover more than ancient texts can reliably reveal. (11 b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-520-21592-3
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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