What if Jesus wasn't divine? What if he was just a good man -- possibly a perfect one (whatever that means), but definitely mortal? This is the hypothesis I remember most from the book. There are others, which doubtless future reviewers will discuss.Bible scholars have long known that the first three gospels --- Matthew, Mark and Luke --- are fundamentally different in content and presentation than the fourth. While these present a vivid picture of a very human Christ, John's book is full of imagery and theology; as for instance in the famous 3:16 verse "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Begotten Son..." or in the words of Christ himself "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life..." -- that sort of thing. It is John's gospel that has given rise to the divinity of Jesus. Cahill points to evidence suggesting that John's book was written by a Pentecostal-type preacher in an isolated church many many decades after Jesus' crucifixion. Long enough to ensure that what we've always accepted as gospel truth may in fact be merely words placed in the mouth of a legend.
Think about that. If the book has been left out, Christ would be on par with the Buddha --- an ordinary man who led a good life and was in some way enlightened. None of this Holy Trinity stuff. (I am of course being simplistic, but you get the idea.)
Of course such arguments have turned up before. But this time, the author is a Christian. Sickeningly so in places --- I almost threw the book aside when I got to page 306 and found that "Mankind's most effective check on the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Universal Declaration (of Human Rights by the UN in 1948) could have been issued only from Judeo-Christian sources..." Well, maybe I'm taking that out of context. But there are certainly chapters were you can almost hear the author yelling that it's us, the Christians (assuming the reader is one), versus the world.
Still, he makes up for it, putting aside what often seems to be Christianity's most fundamental tenet -- that it is the ONLY source of truth and goodness and urges us to do what seems right as human beings.
I've often felt that Christ was okay and that it was the Christians who were the question mark. This book says its okay to think that, possibly even correct. (I'll admit it, I'm biased whenever an author agrees with me!) Hopefully there will be more books that deal with rethinking Christianity, whose intolerance and false morality through the centuries has caused a lot more suffering than most wars.
