The first book anyone should read this year about early Christianity.
With dazzling panache, Cambridge don Hopkins takes on one of the most intriguing questions of ancient history: how did Christianity, an obscure new faith whose leader was dead, triumph in the Roman empire?
Hopkins’s analysis is largely familiar. The author makes much of himself for examining Christianity in the light of Judaism and contemporary paganism, but this “contextual” approach has long since become a no-brainer for every scholar of early Christianity worth his salt. Many of his claims, however, are shocking. Take Hopkins’s assertion that “the historical Jesus is a mirage.” The popular New Testament scholars who have been breaking their teeth trying to figure out what Jesus really said and did, in Hopkins’s view, are wasting their time. The Gospel writers altered Jesus’ sayings so extensively that it is impossible to figure out what he really said, what he was really like. And Hopkins challenges not only the Jesus Seminar, but many orthodox believers as well, with his bold claims that the Gospel writers (and the Church Fathers who participated in the process of canonization) didn’t want to make Jesus easily “understood.” The Gospels, he claims, did not ever intend to “settle the question as to who Jesus was,” but to encourage debate and inquiry, and to offer enough different portraits of Jesus—Jesus the rebel, Jesus the drunk, Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the healer—so that he could be whatever the believer wanted him to be. Most noteworthy, though, is the format Hopkins makes use of: far from offering us a dry scholarly monologue, the author intersperses straightforward academic prose with more daring, imaginative stuff—the fictional memoirs of two time-travelers who find themselves in Pompeii, for example, and interviews for a TV special about the Dead Sea Scrolls (fans of British TV will appreciate Hopkins’s hysterical rendering of a Jeremy Paxman–esque interviewer).
The first book anyone should read this year about early Christianity.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0010-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
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