Controversial biblical scholar Crossan restates his thesis that the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus tell us more about the polemics of the early Christians than about what really happened. For Crossan (Biblical Studies/DePaul Univ.; Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, etc.) Jesus was the leader of a liberation movement that contrasted itself with Rome by seeking to empower rather than dominate people. He argues that the accounts of Jesus' trial, death, and especially resurrection are fiction, a patchwork of themes drawn from the prophets and written down as history. Moreover, he sees the role attributed to the Jews in Jesus' condemnation as reflecting a much later historical situation, when the vast majority of Jews had rejected the Christians' claims that Jesus was their messiah. This book is essentially a polemical reply to Raymond Brown's acclaimed Death of the Messiah and a popularization of Crossan's earlier study The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative. Crossan takes fierce issue with Brown, who holds that the various agendas at work in the passion narratives do not mean that they lack a strong historical basis. Crossan's pages are marred by his frequent sardonic references to Brown, and although he argues his case well, it stands or falls according to whether the reader accepts his highly reductionist position that the supernatural, or even the unusual, could not have happened. Inevitably, Crossan's reasoning comes across as circular, and even arrogant, when he pronounces on events that are presupposed to be unique by an appeal to his own reading of what is ``more likely'' to have happened. Thus he holds that a nobody like Jesus could never have had a trial before Roman governor Pilate and that his crucified body was probably eaten by dogs from a shallow grave. Brilliant writing in the service of a disappointingly dogmatic positivism.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-061479-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
