UPDATED
I've been sent an e-mail by Eric Zuesse, who is trying to sell a book titled Christ's Ventriloquist: How St. Paul Engineered the Hoax that Shaped Our World. I decided I'd be willing to pass the word along, even though I have significant reservations about the book.
First, what's good:
1) He's right that Galatians is an important document in early Christian history. If only we had more documents like it.
2) He's right that Paul's Christianity was probably different from that of Jesus, James, and Peter. This is true even though we don't have any of their writings. The question would be easier to answer definitively if we had a counterpart to Galatians written by Peter or James, but we don't--the letters attributed to them in the New Testament are probably inauthentic.
However:
1) Though I haven't seen the whole book, it appears to exaggerate the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint. The Synoptic/Johnnine and Romans/James gaps in particular are wide.
2) Any book that calls Paul the founder of Christianity ends up ignoring the fact that Christianity has constantly evolved over its history. The changes introduced by Constantine, Augustine, medieval Popes, and the Protestant reformers compete with Paul's work in terms of importance. Again, ideological unity is exaggerated.
3) The aggressive disregard for scholarship in interpreting ancient documents is inexcusable. Knowledge of the language and historical context of a document can make valuable contributions to serious analysis. No historian does history though rigid application of courtroom procedures to their documents, those procedures were designed for a different task.
That's my take anyway. For what it's worth, I do think I would support the work if I were a SecWeb editor considering it for non-commercial publication, simply in the name of getting new viewpoints out. Check it out, though; you may reach a different conclusion. Note that I make know judgement as to what I'd do if I was a publisher, since publishers' decisions must be driven mainly by economic considerations.
UPDATE: Here's how the author responded to this post in private e-mail:
"Though I haven't seen the whole book, it appears to exaggerate the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint."Let me emphasize that my comments above were based on my reading of the condensed proposal. In particular, I said he was exaggerating the ideological unity of the New Testament based on this passage:
That's an outrageous comment: I didn't say anywhere "the ideological unity of the New Testament." Nor did I say that the NT "represents a single person's viewpoint." I said, to the contrary, that any truthful history of the origins of Christianity must explain the contradictions within the NT. You're criticizing my book and you haven't even read my book. I am attaching it so that you can find out how ridiculous your comment is; I'm hoping that, on your website, you'll apologise for having criticized a work you hadn't even read and which you gravely misrepresented.
Your other two criticisms are equally based on ignorance. Look at your three comments; read the work that you've criticized in those three comments; and then compare the work versus what you said about it; and ask yourself "Should Chris Hallquist apologise to Eric Zuesse for those three comments?"
Please apologise on your website for having criticized this work which you hadn't even read. If you have any personal integrity, you'll do that.
What is known today as Christianity started with Paul, and was then developed by his followers, who wrote the canonical Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The religion of the New Testament has nothing to do with the religion of the historical Jesus: The NT was written and assembled to fulfill Paul's Roman agenda, not Jesus' Jewish one... Paul turned Jesus into his corpse dummy, and thus became the voice of "Christ."Zuesse cannot deny having said this. In my view it attributes too much of the New Testament to one strain of early Christianiy. Just because he disagrees with me doesn't mean I lack integrity for thinking so. Therefore, I see no reason to apologize. Nor will I read the whole book, because I have limited time in my life and I especially don't have time to waste on such insufferable egomaniacs as Zuesse.
13 comments:
Chris acknowledges that he reviewed my book based on a one-paragraph summary of it that appears on the MediaPredict website. He goes on to say that that summary "exaggerate[s] the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint." But neither the summary nor the book assert or imply that the NT was written by a single person. The summary's assertion that "The NT was written and assembled to fulfill Paul's Roman agenda, not Jesus' Jewish one" doesn't imply that the NT was written by a single person, and nothing that I said does. Chris grossly distorted not only the book but the summary, and he now says that he won't even read the book that he has so incompetently reviewed. I therefore stand by my assertion that short of his apologizing, he here exhibits himself to be lacking in integrity.
I'm taking only as much time on this as is needed to correct your misstatements of fact.
1) It wasn't based on the one-paragraph summary; it was based on the PDF.
2) I never said your view was that the New Testament was written by a single person.
I didn't misstate fact: your comments did suggest that my book somehow argues that the NT was written by a single person. Your exact words were "it appears to exaggerate the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint." Nowhere in the one-paragraph summary, nor in the PDF, nor anywhere, did I give any basis for that inference or implication. (I said only that the NT reflects Paul's agenda, instead of Jesus's such as the NT claims.) Nor did I give any basis for the other two criticisms you leveled against the work.
There's a difference between saying a book represents someone's viewpoint and that it was written by the person.
Is your view that a person's agenda can dominate without the person's viewpoint dominating? Or that lots of people's agendas, including non-Pauline ones, were involved in the New Testament, just that Jesus' agenda was not? What's your point?
My book explains it in detail, and I don't know any better way of summarizing it than what I said in the paragraph which sparked your outrageous comments. I said there:
"Based upon the first-ever legal/forensic exegesis of Paul’s letter to the Galatians and an associated legal/forensic analysis of the four canonical Gospels, this work finds that Christianity started in or around the year 49 CE in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey) as a direct consequence of a personal conflict which had arisen, over 17 years, between Paul and the leader of this (at that time) Jewish sect, which Jesus had begun. The sect’s leader was not Peter, as the Christian myth asserts, but was instead Jesus’s brother James. Peter was and remained a follower of James, and he died (as did the rest of the sect) as a member of this Jewish sect, not as a Christian — not as a member of the group which Paul started on this occasion. Jesus’s sect soon itself expired. What is today known as Christianity started with Paul, and was then developed by his followers, who wrote the canonical Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The religion of the New Testament has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus: The NT was written and assembled to fulfill Paul’s Roman agenda, not Jesus’s Jewish one. This is shown to explain the entire myth.
Paul turned Jesus’s corpse into his dummy, and thus became the voice of 'Christ.'"
From this, you said "it appears to exaggerate the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint."
And now you're trying to split hairs over "viewpoint" versus "agenda." It won't work.
For example, Paul wanted the crucifixion to be blamed on "the Jews" instead of on the Roman Emperor, and my book explains why he did. Is this Paul's "viewpoint" or is it Paul's "agenda"? Whatever it is, Paul's followers who wrote the canonical Gospels created fictitious accounts of Jesus's trial and execution in order to serve Paul's agenda.
If anyone else is reading this, please tell me if you can make better sense of Zuesse's position than I can.
You sound like an asshole for reviewing a book based on insufficient data and then refusing to be gracious when your error is pointed out. But have it your own way.
es-
I made my comments based on all the information I was given, which was not inconsiderable--an 11 page PDF which, as far as I could tell, clearly laid out the author's thesis, and even included sample chapters.
And the trouble is, I can't tell where my error was. Contrary to what Zuesse claims, I never said that his thesis was Paul wrote the entire NT. Rather, I characterized his thesis as saying it represented Paul's viewpoint. He may think I "suggested" it, but I didn't mean it, and most definitely did not say it, so to say I said it it to make a simple, contrary-to-fact assertion.
Since he explicitly says that the NT was written to support Paul's "agenda," but did not use the word "viewpoint," a word I did use, I wondered whether he was drawing a distinction between the two. That only got him to accuse me of splitting hairs. At this point, I decided I could no longer make sense of what he was trying to say, which is why I asked if anyone could better sense of his position than I.
Es, read the PDF for yourself, and if you can find a way in which Zuesse's position differs from my initial description of it, I would, in all sincerity, love to hear it.
Oh, and a little light on the "egomaniac" comment. The first six words of his e-mail to me were "The next big bestseller of atheism..." Then, rather than clearly explain what he thought I was getting wrong, he told me what I'd do "if I had any integrity." I am perfectly able to respond cordially to counter-criticism (see me review of Hemant's book and the comments thread), it's just that Zuesse strikes me as incapable of comprehending that anyone might think differently than him.
But again, if you can make better sense of his position than I, please tell me.
I find it difficult to understand Chris's obtuseness here. His criticism #1 (of three, all of which were false) about my work was that "it appears to exaggerate the ideological unity of the New Testament, which does not represent a single person's viewpoint. The Synoptic/Johnnine and Romans/James gaps in particular are wide." But there is nothing whatsoever in anything that he had read, including the 11-page PDF, which could rationally justify that statement as being even relevant. Then I e-mailed to him the entire manuscript, hoping that this would make clear to him how ridiculous his criticism of the work had been. He refused to read it; he evidently had enough time to say these things about it which are wildly false, but not to read the work itself. I'd say that that's a person who lacks integrity; I can see no other basis to explain his behavior here.
Es, is he making sense to you?
What is the point of any serious discussion on the worst plagiarised book of fiction ever written: "The Holey Babble". Nobody will ever know who wrote it or will ever find the authored MSS. Christianity is based on two lies: that there is a god and Jesus was the son of that god. It is all copied from Babylonian and Egyptian Myths
Paul pushed his view onto the still forming cult that became christianity.
Hardly news.
Hardly news indeed. Though again, this book also goes wrong in imagining every book of the New Testament to have been dominated by Paul's "agenda."
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