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Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus
Thomas A. Cahill
DOUBLEDAY, 353 pages, $24.95

Thomas Cahill (a self-taught scholar and bestselling author who reads French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek) believes the Gospels not only have a history (written, improved on, and edited) but also represent history accurately. He is not kind to those who keep reinventing (or reporting on) Jesus as a cynic or a sage or a magician: "Amidst this cacophony of competing theories, the press tends to give the most attention to the loudest voices and the most sensational hypotheses."

Instead, he says, "It may come as a surprise to the common reader that there is a broad scholarly consensus about what Jesus taught." Cahill mines Matthew, Mark, Paul, and Luke (though he puzzles over John) to describe, in his usual spirited prose, what he considers the consensus on what Jesus taught and did. Cahill continues to examine (as in his popular How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews) how religion has shaped Western civilization—here by looking at "the world before and after Jesus."

Desire of the Everlasting Hills, a reference to Jacob's blessing of his sons (Gen. 49:26), begins with an event so seemingly insignificant that Alexander the Great's biographer neglects to mention it: the Hellenistic conquest of the Palestinian Jews. Hellenism, spread by military force, was a widely welcomed fashion in the fourth century B.C., except in this tiny kingdom of the Jews.

The stories of their resistance and the Roman reconquest of the Jews stoked the fires of revolutionary hope and set the stage for the birth of a liberator. Enter Jesus—or several portraits of Jesus. Taking Matthew and Mark first, Cahill finds an apocalyptic Jesus (though one that "has no suggestion of catastrophe, no smell of fire and brimstone") proclaiming that the time has finally come for God's rule. This Jesus speaks to two audiences, the powerless and the powerful: comforting the former while afflicting the latter.

With an eye for irony and trenchant metaphor (e.g., "As Cajun Country is to New Orleans and Kerry is to Dublin, the Galilean hills were the ultimate boonies"), Cahill gives a vigorous reading of these Gospels, especially of the Sermon on the Mount.

As a writer much imbued with modern sensibilities, Cahill also has a remarkable confidence in the historicity of the miracle stories. He calls the Virgin Birth "no more impossible than the exaltation of the humble." He argues that the dove and divine voice at Jesus' baptism cannot be psychologized, or there would be little basis for the disciples' leaving their livelihoods and responsibilities to follow Jesus. And he rejects the argument that the abrupt ending of the best manuscripts of Mark (which lack a post-resurrection appearance) suggests there was no resurrection. "It would make no sense for Mark, having so painstakingly assembled a story that presents Jesus as the promised Messiah and God's 'beloved Son,' to pull the rug out from his entire narrative with a final 'Fooled ya!' "

Turning to Paul's portrait of Jesus, Cahill dismisses the common claim that Paul was "the inventor of Christianity who took the unfocused, anti-intellectual messianism of the bubble-headed followers of Jesus and constructed it into an effective theological weapon." Rather, Cahill rightly claims, Paul was "the most articulate spokesman for the faith who knew how to zero in on the most essential elements of his argument and could thread his discourse with the welcome colors of his own very personal experience."

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April 3 2000, Vol. 44, No. 4