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Those "most essential elements" expanded the picture beyond the remnant of Israel. Paul painted on a broad canvas that encompassed all humanity and the whole creation: for as in Adam all die, so in Christ are all made alive; God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself; therefore we are no longer slaves, but sons, moved by God's Spirit to call him Abba. Unfortunately, Cahill stumbles when he rejects Luther's summary of Paul's gospel as sola fide, taking instead as gospel the old calumny that "by faith alone" means isolating faith from its sister theological virtues of hope and love.

Paul's fellow traveler Luke is "preeminently the evangelist of God's mercy to sinners," the Gospel writer who dramatizes in parables (the Prodigal Son) and stories (the prostitute at Simon's feast) Paul's insistence that "God's love for us is shown in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." In writing for Gentiles, Luke omits the raw emotional edge of Jesus' Jewish psychology and the black-and-white contrasts of Jewish discourse, but he does not stint on the acceptance and liberation Jesus offered to the unwelcome and the outcast.

If Jesus' primary word in Mark is "The time is fulfilled" and in Matthew is "Blessed are the poor in spirit," then in Luke it is "The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." Indeed, wealth was for Luke one of the major spiritual obstacles, "the preeminent blindfold to spiritual sight," and in emphasizing this part of Jesus' teaching, he is more radical than his fellow evangelists.

As Cahill moves into the story of the early church, we glimpse more clearly how this book fits into his series. He recounts the story of Philemon and Onesimus and writes that "Paul's insistence to Philemon that there are no slaves, only brothers" will flower into the antislavery activities of Patrick, the seventeenth-century Anabaptists, the nineteenth-century abolitionists, and the twentieth-century civil- and human-rights movements.

Likewise, Paul's advice to widows to remain free of marital entanglements blossoms into the monastic sisterhoods ruled by the powerful likes of Catherine of Siena and Hildegard, and finally into fuller freedom for women this century. Along with caring for the poor and sharing of wealth, these humanizing effects on civilization mark the difference between the world before and the world after Jesus.

Though willing to feel the ethical demands of the synoptic tradition, Cahill shrinks from the hard theological matters of John. He thinks John gives us a Jesus who is "the gravitas-encrusted Christ of the ancient creeds, of tasteless religious art, of German passion plays and Hollywood movies. He is the immobile icon loved by ecclesiasts and theologians."

Cahill spins out a not uncommon line about a Johannine theology influenced by a culture of "Asiatic pomp and rhetorical exaggeration," giving us a Jesus whose titles compete with those of Alexander and the Caesars. Furthermore, the Johannine "insistence on there being but one way of thinking" makes John "the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting." Cahill is careful to blame those who followed John for turning his "high Christology, poetic and liturgical hyperbole, into rigid dogma." But Cahill still does not like John.

Cahill, like so many in our time, is fascinated with Jesus. And unlike many, he has confidence in the unified portrait that emerges from the Gospels. Yet he drags his feet on John's high Christology, as well as on Paul's doctrine of substitution (while ignoring Paul's earlier and equally high Christology in Colossians 1 and Philippians 2). The synoptics' ethical demands, he insists, are the essence of the change Jesus brings, but John's theological demands are an encrustation. But why should those theological demands bind us any less? Are they not all part of the same whole?

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April 3 2000, Vol. 44, No. 4