Customer Reviews

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Random House Large Print)

5 star:		(59)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I think that my fellow reviewers have been much harsher on Cahill than they need be. What Cahill does--which is popular history in the best sense of the word--is very admirable, and the fact that he brings so much gusto and personal opinion to this account of Jesus is par for the course. I mean, which would you prefer--yet another dryly academic treatise on Jesus that summarized all the facts in 800 pages and showed little or no emotion (so that you don't even know if the author is religious or not), or something much more colorful, but that does away with the tight and uncomfortable trappings of scholarly tomes? If you prefer the former, I can only recommend that you learn German, since you can then devote the rest of your life wading through such awfully boring (please pardon my choice of word) stuff as, say, the maddeningly trivial dating of a certain event related in the Bible. But if you choose the latter, then I can say that I don't quite know too many books like Cahill's: concise, engrossing, interesting, and, yes, always fun. If the book does nothing else but engages the reader's interest, then I think it has achieved a noble purpose. Whether you agree with Cahill's opinions or not is of course something else entirely. But then, do you always have to agree with an author's opinion to enjoy his or her book or to benefit from reading it?

Desire of the Everlasting Hills, like Mr. Cahill's earlier two books, offers more information and insight than can be absorbed through a single reading. While I don't agree with everything the author (or Paul, for that matter) has to say, all of it deserves careful thought and reflection. As in The Gift of the Jews, Mr. Cahill sets the stage for the focus of the book by reviewing events that lead up to the main events. This isn't some "Chariot of the Gods". The author provides not unfounded speculation, but scholarly explanations that are consistent with what is known about how people lived and acted 2000 years ago. Some readers may feel that -- by providing academic, popular, alternative descriptions of issues central to our religious and secular worlds -- Mr. Cahill is playing with fire. I for one welcome the light and heat these books provide. If this book helps readers understand people from other cultures, religions and times, then it can also bring us closer to understanding each other in our own time. And that might be Mr. Cahill's greatest gift of all.

So much intellectual discourse has been written in these reviews about this book. Allow me to give you a layman's review! Thomas Cahill's book is a smart, collegiate look at the times that surrounded Jesus, and it doesn't disappoint.

He examines the different Gospels and their approach to the story of the Jesus, and how each author tailor made the stories to suit a different audience (hence, the sometimes contradictions within the Gospels themselves), which I found delightfully enlightening.

His section on Paul was riveting, painting a picture of how a simple man could be so transformed by an event to change his life entirely. He also works to dispel some myths about Paul, particularly his sexist bias in his letters. He also bravely takes on some church doctrines that are apparently "Bible based", more power to him!

I did find the first chapter difficult to get through at times. I felt that Cahill was using terms and historical names that I wasn't too famililar with, and therefore, left the reader in the dark by failing to explain these people/events/terms. The muddy water soon clears, so just steer a course through the words and trust that your comprehension will come back!

Overall, Cahill's book summed up and affirmed much about what is known about Jesus and his times, and provides an inspiring look at Biblical events in the contexts of world history, leading to a deeper understanding of the Son that has transformed much of our own world.

In my opinion Cahill got it right. By 'it' I mean the voice and tone with which to discuss Jesus. Many of the critics of this book blame it for not being sufficiently 'academic.' Well, I applaud Cahill for choosing to write a book that can speak to the comman man or woman.

I have never felt that the Hinges of History series were meant to be scholarly works arguing controversial positions. They are meant to be engaging and entertaining books that speak to all of western civilization. I feel that they are meant to BEGIN to wake us up to the depth of history that has shaped who we are, and to put in context the ideas, such as Christianity, that have such a profound impact on us today. After all, nearly 2000 years after the start of Christianity, how many Christians can say they really understand the origins of their faith or the world in which Jesus preached?

Desire of the Everlasting Hills does an excellent job of painting a picture of Jesus and his worlds and the origins of the early church. To those critics who say that Cahill doesn't say enough about the early church: You are either blind or very unimaginative. Do you want a history of organized religion? There wasn't one. Cahill's presentation of theology is the history of early Christianity, which was decentralized and personal. Once THE Church comes onto the scene then the impact of Jesus as a person fades. In the end, Cahill's book is about Jesus and his individual impact on the world, not the impact of the institutions founded in his name.

Cahill's relaxed use of footnotes and citation are a blessing to the common reader. Faith is a very personal idea, and to clutter it with the trappings of an uptight and suspicious academia is to kill it outright. Go back to your ivory towers. Cahill's goal is not to explain the word of God, but to give the reader a sense of the times, a feeling of the mood in this outpost of the Roman world at the time of Jesus. This goal he achieves with unmitigated success.

I have seen reviews that say not to read this book if you are a Christian, and not to read it if you aren't a Christian. These people I feel, sadly, missed the point. Most are offended with Cahill's treatment of Jesus or his presentation of theology. Whether you believe Jesus was the Son of God or not, Cahill has to explain him and what he and the people around him believed in order to press upon the reader that Jesus was a man unlike the world saw before or since. It was ultimately this uniqueness that changed the way the world viewed morality, religion, and mankinds place on Earth. Central to this uniqueness was Jesus' faith. I never felt that Cahill's discussion of theology was an attempt to convert the reader, merely to explain Jesus' attempts at conversion.

How do you emphasize a man's uniqueness while trying to place his life into a historical context? I do not know, but Cahill does it well. Those who cannot see that either cannot let themselves go enough to accept Jesus' uniqueness or the fact that he really did walk among us in a very brutal and gritty time. To anyone with the slightest bit of imagination and open mindedness, this book will speak volumes and open your eyes to a better understanding of yesterday and today.

Cahill deals with a mighty task in a light and amusing fashion that rivets the reader and enthralls him. His detractors either can not let go of their biases long enough to hear Cahill speak, or are not able to come to grips with Cahill's non-academic goal: to spread understanding, rather than theory. Read Cahill's book for what it is and let it move you.

Thomas Cahill's "Desire of the Everlasting Hills" is an engaging but somewhat disappointing work. In short, Cahill's discussion of the "world before" Jesus is more carefully considered than that of the "world after," with the author's treatment of the person of Jesus himself being an equivocation. Was Jesus merely human or was he both human and divine? I wouldn't have minded a clear argument for either position, but Cahill's narrative seems to hedge between the two. "Desire" sees Jesus as a radical visionary, to be sure, but does not have the courage to either affirm or deny the element of transcendence in the Gospel accounts. Ultimately, though hints of possible transcendence abound, the person of Jesus is reduced to what nearly everyone can affirm (that Jesus was a "great moral teacher"), and when I finished the middle chapters of the book I found myself asking "is that all?" It is true that during Cahill's later discussion of the "world after" Jesus, Paul is described as someone who unquestionably viewed Jesus as divine, but here Cahill fails to make a definitive connection between Paul's theology and the historical figure of Jesus. And the further the book proceeds into the "world after," the more selective Cahill's scholarly sources become, a selection seeming to support a mostly negative bias regarding the institutional Church. This is especially apparent in his discussion of John's Gospel, which is impugned as being anti-Semitic, and is posited to be the primary inspiration for later anti-Semitism in the history of Christianity.

Still, there is much to admire in this work. As I have said, I found the book to be engaging. Even when I disagreed or became frustrated with him, I never doubted the author's sincerity; Cahill seems to have a genuine desire to understand the impact Jesus has had on history. The discussion of the "world before" Jesus was excellent; I especially appreciated the way the description of Alexander the Great set the reader up for the inevitable contrast with the description of Jesus later in the book. And though I did not agree with many of the author's conclusions concerning the synoptic Gospels or the Pauline epistles, I was surprised to find such a thought-provoking and positive treatment of these topics. I recommend this book to those who are familiar with the New Testament from scholarly and/or devotional reading, and who are at least somewhat familiar with the history of Christianity; others might find it to be confusing or even misleading.

Well I am sure that if you only accept orthodox theology, this book will either scare you or enrage you. This book succeeds brilliantly in detailing the history and customs of the "times of Jesus". Definitely informative and entertaining.The kind of book that opens up new levels of investigation for a "spiritual detective". Great book....highly recommended.

Thomas Cahill is a remarkable historian and this is a most remarkable book. Cahill has set himself the task of examining the pivotal periods in the history of western civilization; he wants to look at those periods, figure out what happened, and determine how that period led us to where we are now. Another effort of his is Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, an examination of the Greek contribution to Western Civilization.

In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Cahill looks at the Mediterranean basin in the years before and after the birth of Jesus. One things that is clear is this: without the Jews, we would probably not value justice and mercy as we do today. Though the Greeks were concerned with arete and the Romans with virtu, these concepts did not include mercy toward your enemies or justice for all, no matter their social station. Instead, those two defining values of the west come to us from the Jews through the Christians. Cahill, by the way, sees Christianity as a off-shot of Judaism.

The final chapters, extremely moving chapters by the way, deal with the life of Jesus. Almost nothing about institutionalized Christianity of today came from Jesus's teaching, Cahill tells us. The patriarchy, the emphasis on sin, the denial of the flesh--all these things came later and after. What Christ taught was love and forgiveness. Everything else you think you know about Christianity is added on later by people who did not know Jesus.

This book is a history lesson written by someone who is initmately familiar with the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The book adds depth to the study of the life of Jesus Christ. We have the Gospels and the writings of the Apostle Paul to describe the life of Jesus. We have the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament heroic figues. Thomas Cahill gives us a learned retrospective of two millenia comparing the different mindsets of the writers of the New Testament books. Deeper understandings of the commonalities of the Christian and Jewish religions emerge. The person of Jesus Christ is better understood given an understanding of the Roman and Hellenistic thought that colored the writings we now call the New Testament. The Jewishness of Jesus is deeply felt. This book is a serious and scholarly work, yet it is unpretentious. The writer is passionate at times in explaining that Jesus came to minister to the poor, disinfranchised, the lame, and the powerless. The leadership of the organized Churches could bear reading this work. All of us could, believer and agnostic alike.

This book is the 3rd in a series of "Hinges of History" by the author Thomas Cahill. For a book about Jesus, the writing style is somewhat cavalier; not unfunny, mind you, but in the context of the discussions, out of place. If the style is somewhat disconcerting, the contents are downright disturbing. This is not a scholarly book. Indeed, it is full of errors and oversights, and on occasion, bad taste. For example...

"Since scholars can no longer consult it [the Aramaic version of Matthew], they have given to this putative source the name "Q"... (p. 75)." Nonsense. The Q document is not the lost version of Matthew. Q is a hypothetical construct designed to address the communalitiues in Matthew and Luke that cannot be found in Mark.

"Its origins [the Gospel of Matthew] ...may well lie with such an eyewitness (p. 75)." That's right. Mark and Matthew both wrote their Gospels. And I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. It is fairly well established that the Gospels were written many years after Jesus' death, and the number of errors in them clearly show that they are not eyewitness accounts.

"Gehenna...pyres were kept burning for this purpose [burning children]. (p. 80)." In fact, Gehenna was a garbage dump and the burning fires were used to dispose of the waste, which included dead people.

"She [Mary] was..no more than fourteen or so... (p. 95)." The fact is no one has any idea how old she was, except that she was a "young woman" and that most Jewish woman in the 1st century BC married at the age of 12.

"...kataluma which means a room occupied by human being. (p. 99)." Yes, but it also can mean a "cave" and there is a wealth of theory and literature supporting the idea that Jesus was born in a cave.

Though this book is not without its merits, you have to wonder what its purpose is. While it is well written, there are much better written books, and while it purports to provide some facts, it hardly ranks even as a weak scholarly text. It provides nothing new, and its rewriting of the old is so full of mistakes that it doesn't warrant reading.

I enormously enjoyed Cahill's earlier book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," and was looking forward to this one. But I was disappointed. This volume with the susbtitle "Before and After Jesus" (which I take to be modeled on F.M. Cornford's "Before and After Socrates"), appears to be about the effect of Jesus or Christianity on Western civilization. It proved instead to be a synopsis of the New Testament from a vaguely liberal (but carefully orthodox) post Vatican II point of view. Only part of the last chapter deals with the historical effects of Christianity, and most of that is taken directly from Donald Kagan's "On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace." So if you are really interested in the effects of Christianity you would do better to buy Kagan's book than Cahill's.

Synopses of the New Testament have a long and not very reputable history. The first effort was that of Marcion in Rome in 135 A.D. (See John Knox's "Marcion and the New Testament.") Marcion undertook to eliminate the tensions and contradictions between the pro-Gentile and pro-faith oriented views of Paul and the pro-Jewish and pro-works oriented views of Peter by simply eliminating the Petrine, works-oriented texts from his proposed Christian "canon".

That did eliminate the tensions and contradictions, but it was untrue to the actual history of the church in a way that horrified the more conservative Roman church establishment. They declared Marcion a heretic and promptly published their alternative canon which included both such works-oriented texts as Matthew and the letter of James and such faith-oriented texts such as Mark and the authentic Pauline epistles. They also included the John and Revelation and (probably) edited and compiled Acts into its present form. Finally, they included the entirety of Hebrew scripture and declared that entire collection to be canonical. By so doing they (probably inadvertently) preserved a range of free choice for Christian belief. Despite the efforts of the later writers of the creeds, there would always remain a range of choice withing the Christian tradition which would make closure on any one consistent set of beliefs impossible. Yet Cahill is still trying to create a self-consistent synopsis. He does this by sticking closely to a conservative group of scholars (such as those behind the Anchor Bible Commentaries) and to Catholic scholars acceptable to the church. (He mentions the maverick Crossan but only to dismiss him.) Naive readers are given no inkling that they are being fed a straight dose of contemporary Catholic orthodoxy. For example, Cahill asserts in passing that both Paul and Peter were martyred in Rome, and that Peter was buried on Vatican Hill. One thing most church historians agree on is that there is not a shred of evidence that Peter ever left Jerusalem immediately before or during the Roman-Jewish war of 66-70 A.D. The most probably fate of Peter was that he died in the slaughter after Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem. The claim that he traveled to Rome is a myth created by the Catholic church as part of its effort to claim supremacy over other chruches, especially the one in Constantinople. The earliest claim that Peter died in Rome that I know of is made by Eusebius in the 4th Century A.D. Cahill even undertakes to deny that Paul asserted the doctrine of salvation by faith alone in a way that would contradict the doctrine of salvation by works. He does this by appealing to the love poem in Chapter 15 of First Corinthians, where Paul say love is greater than faith or hope. But none of these three are "works" in Paul's sense of the term. They are inner attitudes from which external works in accordance with the Law may or may not follow. So the reference is simply off the point of his argument. Luther's, Calvin's, and St. Augustine's readings of Paul stand vindicated. Finally, Cahill even reverts to church rellics to bolster his interpretation of the historical Jesus. He believes the Shroud of Turin and third and fourth Century icons enable him to determine what Jesus looked like. Of course the cloth of the shroud has been determined by Carbon 14 dating to have been made in the medieval era. Cahill's reasons for rejecting that finding are not convincing to anyone not already committed to the shroud on religious grounds. As for the third and fourth century icons, they seem plainly to be Hellenistic idealizations, like any Greek representation of a god. Cahill knows this, but tries to read the actual appearance of Jesus from them anyway. Cahill simply ignores the tradition of what he calls secular, academic" biblical scholarship, such as that of the "Jesus Seminar" in the Society of Biblical Literature. Anyone who takes account of it will find they have to be much more agnostic about the life, teachings, and appearance of the historical Jesus than Cahill supposes. Of course we have known since Schweitzer's "The Quest of the Historical Jesus" that the loss of the historical Jesus is actually a religious advantage, for it frees one's religion to be based on faith not ambiguous "fact." Since the book is so well written, I give it three stars. But the smooth prose coceals rather than reveals the ambiguities and conflicts in the historical record. So it stands condemned as a work which conceals the real challenges of faith from complacent and the comfortable. The book is an anodyne for the spirit, not a challenge for spiritual growth.