The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bleak Expectations

Part spiritual memoir, part intellectual self-portrait, part textual exegesis, part fictional dramatisation, The Kingdom is of a genre not often encountered in Anglo-Saxon letters. It is a French invention. Fame in France - in politics, in journalism, in the arts - brings with it the opportunity, possibly the obligation, to bare one's beliefs and motivations - or lack of the same. Perhaps this is a sort of rationalist Cartesian cultural legacy. Bernard Henri-Levy writes in the same vein, for example, in his The Genius of Judaism.

But whereas Henri-Levy writes about his lost and found Judaism, Emmanuel Carrere writes about his lost and found and lost again Catholicism. And whereas Henri-Levy celebrates Judaism, Carrere questions the credibility of Christianity as essentially an extension of Greek mythology. His basic question: How is it that a religion so soaked in Greek myth and magic emerged from Jewish monotheism and has come to dominate so much of the world? Carrerre is quite right to point the finger at Paul of Tarsus and his gospel-writing bag-man, Luke. For it is this dynamic duo, neither of whom ever met Jesus, who promoted his cause so effectively, and so weirdly.

Unlike the writers of other parts of the New Testament, Luke and Paul are real people. That is, we know for sure that their identities are not some symbolic or composite name. Mark, Matthew and John, for example, are unknowns aside from their gospel monikers. Paul is certainly the author of a number of letters (but not all ascribed to him). He speaks frequently in the first person: I saw, I believe, I command. And so does Luke in those parts of his writing, namely the Acts of the Apostles, in which he has first hand experience.

Carrere recognises that it is Paul's interpretation of Jesus's teaching and its significance that is the basis for Christianity. Paul, rather than Jesus, is the Christian Moses. And it is he who seeks to displace Moses, and with him Judaism, as the chosen people who proclaim the existence of the one God. Christianity rises or falls - intellectually, culturally, politically - depending on one's faith, therefore, not so much in Jesus but in Paul. And Paul has more than his fair share of credibility issues in Carrere's estimation.

Carrere's technique of interpolating, of imagining, scenes and dialogue that supplement the gospels is one that is an ancient pious practice. Without it, Jesus and his followers become formulaic and inhuman, even in the four versions that have been deemed orthodox. Carrere's inventions are at least as plausible as the various Christmas story embellishments, for example. And for the most part they are done sympathetically, as consistent with the 'official' texts.

Paul's fundamental message, in Carrere's view, was that the world had undergone an evolutionary change through the life, but especially the death, of Jesus. The being of the world, what is known in Greek philosophy as its ontology, had been altered for the better. This message is incomprehensible and meaningless to Jews, who had never been schooled in the categories of Greek thought.

To say that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, was one thing. Such a claim might be wrong but it was plausible and could be debated. It was certainly not heretical. To say that this Messiah saved by changing the basis of existence, however, was nonsensical, except to Greeks. This implied not simply a replacement-Moses but a replacement-Genesis. And this is indeed heresy: if God had found what he had done "good," what need could there possibly be for a second try?

So Paul abandons his fellow-Jews and proselytises among the Gentiles. His preaching isn't about Jesus, whom he only knows second-hand; it is about Christ, whose sacrifice of himself somehow, Paul claims, creates a new cosmic order. It is this new arrangement of the world, its ontological character, not the person Jesus which is what Paul announces. Jesus's purported resurrection from the dead is merely the miraculous evidence for this new order.

There is no subsequent gospel story that confirms this new order among the stay-at-home Jews. Nor is there a clear relationship in these stories between the God of Israel and Jesus. Yet Paul is confident that Jesus should be worshipped as divine as part of this new arrangement. He is also confident that this new order, which he calls the kingdom, will become visible imminently. Little wonder then that Paul desisted from spreading his message too close to Jerusalem.

Told in such a clinical way, it is clear that the spread of Pauline Christianity could only have taken place in a cultural and intellectual environment like that of the Roman Empire. Rome was the source and enforcer of law. But Greek was the language and philosophical font of a largely Hellenised population. And Paul's doctrines fit far more easily into the Greek Pantheon than into the Jewish Temple. Confident of the imminent end of the world, Paul attracted what today would be classified as a cult following of those who were eagerly anticipating an apocalyptic resolution of the world's miseries.

Carrere bases much of his interpretation of sacred texts on what is generally called the New Criticism, that serious exegetical study of the bible, which is a reading from rather than a reading into the text. This method began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and continues as the dominant mode of biblical analysis today. One of its first proponents was the Frenchman Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus and History of the Origins of Christianity caused widespread scandal by treating biblical texts as historical documents. At Renan's hands, the pious myths of Christianity, particularly those of the kingdom, do not fare very well. Things have not improved at all since then for the credibility of the texts or the attempts over centuries to square Jewish monotheism with the Pauline divinity of Jesus. Carrere's summary of the results of the New Criticism, and his own speculations, are a good introduction to the discipline.

Alfred Loisy, the French theologian, excommunicated at the beginning of the 20th century because he dared to take the findings of the New Criticism seriously, created the enduring bon mot about Jesus, Paul, and the first Christians. "They expected the kingdom," he said, "But what arrived was the church." Not a bad summary of the summary.

Postscript: for more on Paul, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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