Driving in CirclesJohn Simon.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, by Thomas Cahill (Doubleday, 353 pp., $24.95)

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, by Paula Fredriksen (Knopf, 320 pp., $26)

NEARLY a century after Albert Schweitzer published his enormously influential The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the question of just who Jesus of Nazareth was continues to generate books. In Schweitzer's estimation, previous interpreters had not reckoned sufficiently with Jesus' rootedness in Judaism, especially the expectation of an imminent end-time that gripped certain Jewish groups in his time. This distinction between the historical Jesus-Jesus the Jew-and Jesus the Christ has not been widely observed either inside or outside the academy. Jesus has been presented by popular authors as an existentialist, a social reformer, a universalist, a proto-Protestant, a feminist, even an Aryan opposed to everything Jewish.

For most Christian writers, meanwhile, Jesus has remained the model for the Christian life, and his death and resurrection the redemptive climax of the life to which he called others and by which they would attain salvation. But there has also been a movement in the opposite direction, more in line with Schweitzer's hopes. Many Christian scholars, feeling the claim of dispassionate historical research, have concluded that their faith does not require them to portray Jesus as having shared it in his own lifetime. These scholars may detect a challenge to religious commitment in historical criticism, but they do not find it insurmountable, and some find it religiously enriching.

Thomas Cahill's new book conspicuously does not fall into the category of historically aware Jesus scholarship. The former director of religious publishing at Doubleday and author of two previous bestselling books, Cahill has anointed himself the modern explicator of key movements in Western moral and religious development. The first book in his "Hinges of History" series, How the Irish Saved Civilization, was an informative and lively account of the unsung role of Irish monks in transmitting classical and medieval learning to successive generations. The Gifts of the Jews was a less well-informed account of "how a tribe of desert nomads changed the way everyone thinks and feels"-a genial if misguided attempt at philo- Semitism. The erosion in quality continues apace in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Cahill's new volume on the first Christians.

Though Cahill's notes acknowledge and even enthusiastically recommend the works of serious historical scholars, his presentation shows no awareness of the methodological challenges that Jesus research presents and the ways modern scholars have met them. Don't waste your time here looking for a careful

sifting of the evidence or a hardheaded identification of the ancient authors' biases and reliability. What Cahill serves up instead is a Jesus who is not only politically relevant (at least if one is a liberal of a certain antinomian stripe), but also politically correct.

According to Cahill, Jesus' message (and the message of the early Church, with which he uncritically equates it) was essentially that people should be nice and help the poor. "[T]he first Christians," he tells us, "because they 'held all things in common,' were also the world's first communists." They also constituted an ancient movement for universalism and feminism: In the apostle Paul "we have the only clarion affirmation of sexual equality in the whole of the Bible-and the first one ever to be made in any of the many literatures of our planet." For Paul (as Cahill misreads him), Christian freedom means "freedom from all human rules and conventions." Even transvestitism does not offend Cahill's apostle. If he seems to oppose it, "[h]e is actually only reminding [his correspondents] of the conventions of the time (and that anything too boldly theatrical can give unnecessary scandal to more conventional palates)." And what about Paul's dictum that man "is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man"-hardly a clarion call for sexual equality? When Cahill paraphrases that passage in First Corinthians, he just leaves this troublesome verse out.

As usual, the neglect of ancient texts goes hand in hand with huge dollops of retrojection and wishful thinking. "[S]eparation of church and state . . . free speech, universal suffrage, tolerance, and many other values we would not be without"-these too, though admittedly "achieved in the teeth of virulent Christian opposition," actually "flow from the subterranean river of authentic Christian tradition" and ultimately derive from "the distinctions Jesus made between the religious establishment and true religious spirit." Reading Cahill leaves one astounded that these amazingly contemporary early Christians never came up with Hillary Clinton's health plan, a ban on smoking, and animal rights.

Cahill's Jesus does have an eschatology, but it is a day of judgment that no one need fear: "Jesus' idea of the Time-That-Has-Come has no suggestion of catastrophe, no smell of fire and brimstone in it He does not threaten or condemn." It is not hard to see where in our contemporary culture Cahill got this image of a kinder, gentler Jesus. But it is no small accomplishment to have read the New Testament and the reputable scholarship he lists and still have missed the Jesus who promises that the Son of Man will send his angels to throw evildoers into "the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth." As for the early Christian claim "that Jesus was 'God's Only-Begotten Son' and humanity's only 'Savior'"-they didn't really mean it. "[T]o assert that Jesus was uniquely God's son and mankind's savior seems to push beyond the articulations of the first Christians." Apparently the Gospel of John, in which these doctrines are most boldly proclaimed, can be safely disregarded. "It comes as no surprise that John is often the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting; and his rigidity can call to mind contemporary churchpeople of several unfortunate varieties."

What Cahill presents is cafeteria Christianity, a consumerist religion in which the individual takes what he likes and leaves the rest. "At the threshold to the third millennium, at the golden gate to a new age of untrammeled global capitalism and its consequent winners and losers," he writes in lamenting the loss of early Christian communism, "we can only shake our heads sadly that such a society exists no more." But is that the only aspect of early Christian society that no longer exists? What about the loss of Jesus' teaching that divorce is prohibited? In an age when a staggering percentage of marriages break apart, does Cahill shake his head sadly at this too? And is Paul's endorsement of celibacy another note the modern world needs to hear, or is his imagined advocacy of gender equality the only teaching about sex that we ought to take seriously?

Cahill shares none of the curiosity about the causes of Jesus' execution that marks so many other historical investigations. "As everyone knows," he writes, "he preached a message of mercy, love, and peace and was crucified for his trouble." Why the Romans suddenly felt so threatened by these common Jewish themes Cahill never says. Indeed, Cahill seems painfully unaware of just how common these themes were in ancient Judaism. He observes that Jesus preached "Jewish justice, all right, but justice tempered by an affectionate mercy"-as if the interplay of justice and mercy were not a staple of rabbinic theology. (Cahill's image of "Jewish justice" seems to owe more to Shylock than to the Talmud.) And he casts the most extreme aspersions on the Jewish priesthood without citing a shred of evidence or considering that his sources, whatever they are, may have had biases of their own.

Cahill's errors are all the more egregious in light of the enormous amount that is now known about the actual sources of Christianity and the nature of the early Christian community. Fortunately, another new book has appeared that shows just how much is wrong with the liberal Jewish Jesus that Cahill concocts.

In her tightly reasoned, learned, and readable book, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Paula Fredriksen, a professor of Scripture at Boston University, presents a very different view of Jesus, one that makes him much more like an Orthodox than the Conservative or Reform Jew that Cahill presents. Eager to avoid this kind of sloppiness, Professor Fredriksen identifies the fatal temptation of her profession as "anachronism, the viewing of persons or events out of their historical context." The honest historian respects the differentness of the past, just as the honest Christian respects the Jewishness of Jesus. The historian of early Christianity must therefore sift through the Gospels and other New Testament texts for telltale signs of Jesus as he was before the authors gave him the now-familiar interpretations inspired by their own powerful faith.

An important example involves Jesus' observance of those numerous commandments of the Torah that Cahill disparages. In the main, the early Church viewed these norms as part of an older Jewish tradition that the Christ-event had definitively transcended. At times, the Christian texts are quite vociferous on this point, associating observance of the commandments with spiritual enslavement, faithlessness, and hypocrisy- major elements in theological anti-Semitism to this day. This theology appears already in the earliest Gospel, that of Mark. Thus it is all the more revealing that "running like an undercurrent in Mark's narrative, obscured by the immediacy of his polemical concerns, is Jesus the traditionally religious Jew." This Torah-observant Jesus can be detected in other Gospels as well.

It is thus exceedingly problematic to see Jesus as founding Christianity. It is more accurate to see Christianity as founded upon a particular theological interpretation of Jesus, which the Gospels propound in a narrative mode. But not even the evangelists and Paul intended to found a community that would endure through the ages. In their minds the Second Coming was "not infinitely distant." Paul expected it in his own lifetime, and Fredriksen-like Schweitzer-is confident that Jesus expected the Kingdom of God to arrive in his lifetime as well. (This fact alone renders any interpretation of Jesus as a social reformer problematic.) "[W]hat distinguished Jesus' prophetic message from those of others was primarily its timetable, not its content," she concludes.

So why was Jesus executed? The answer lies in the manner of his death. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment (not a Jewish one) reserved for "political insurrectionists" and intended to make a public example of them. To be sure, "Pilate [the Roman governor] knew perfectly well that Jesus was not an insurrectionist," that, in fact, "he was harmless." But perhaps, she speculates, "Jesus announced that this Passover would be the last before the Kingdom arrived," and this provoked the huge and unruly holiday crowds to proclaim him the Messiah. That in turn would have set Pilate against him and led to his ghastly-and, adds Fredriksen, totally unnecessary-impalement.

It is in these speculations that Fredriksen's reasoning becomes weak. If modern scholars, surveying a mass of written evidence, are divided as to Jesus' message-some have indeed seen him as an anti-Roman revolutionary- how likely was Pilate to have known exactly what it was? Even if he knew that Jesus posed no conscious threat to Roman authority, might not his apocalyptic language have inspired politically effective resistance, armed or otherwise?

Though it does not replace the classic treatment of E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (which it closely resembles), Fredriksen's book is shorter, more accessible, and more engagingly written. Christians, naturally, will wonder about the relationship of the historical Jesus she so carefully reconstructs to the Christ of their faith. A hardheaded historian without evident theological interests, Fredriksen does not address this. But if Sanders and Fredriksen are correct, the Church, following Paul, was more critical of rigorous Torah observance than are Conservative and Reform Judaism, whereas Jesus himself lived a traditional observant life. How the Church can integrate that insight into its life and teachings today is a question neither Cahill nor Fredriksen addresses. It is not a question that is likely to go away.