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Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age
A New York Times bestselling and widely admired Catholic writer explores how we can retrieve transcendent faith in modern times
Critically acclaimed and bestselling author James Carroll has explored every aspect of Christianity, faith, and Jesus Christ except this central What can we believe about—and how can we believe in—Jesus in the twenty-first century in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed?
What Carroll has discovered through decades of writing and lecturing is that he is far from alone in clinging to a received memory of Jesus that separates him from his crucial identity as a Jew, and therefore as a human. Yet if Jesus was not taken as divine, he would be of no interest to us. What can that mean now? Paradoxically, the key is his permanent Jewishness. No Christian himself, Jesus actually transcends Christianity.
Drawing on both a wide range of scholarship as well as his own acute searching as a believer, Carroll takes a fresh look at the most familiar narratives of all—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Far from another book about the “historical Jesus,” he takes the challenges of science and contemporary philosophy seriously. He retrieves the power of Jesus’ profound ordinariness, as an answer to his own last question—what is the future of Jesus Christ?—as the key to a renewal of faith.
Critically acclaimed and bestselling author James Carroll has explored every aspect of Christianity, faith, and Jesus Christ except this central What can we believe about—and how can we believe in—Jesus in the twenty-first century in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed?
What Carroll has discovered through decades of writing and lecturing is that he is far from alone in clinging to a received memory of Jesus that separates him from his crucial identity as a Jew, and therefore as a human. Yet if Jesus was not taken as divine, he would be of no interest to us. What can that mean now? Paradoxically, the key is his permanent Jewishness. No Christian himself, Jesus actually transcends Christianity.
Drawing on both a wide range of scholarship as well as his own acute searching as a believer, Carroll takes a fresh look at the most familiar narratives of all—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Far from another book about the “historical Jesus,” he takes the challenges of science and contemporary philosophy seriously. He retrieves the power of Jesus’ profound ordinariness, as an answer to his own last question—what is the future of Jesus Christ?—as the key to a renewal of faith.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published November 4, 2014
79 people are currently reading
759 people want to read
About the author
James Carroll
142 books162 followersJames Carroll was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C. He has been a civil rights worker, an antiwar activist, and a community organizer in Washington and New York. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1969 and served as Catholic chaplain at Boston University. Carroll left the priesthood to become a novelist and playwright. He lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall, and their two children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
July 19, 2016
I wanted to like this book; I loved _Constantine's Sword_. And I must say that after writing this review, I find it more valuable that I thought I would. But it's a bit of a hard slog, for some reason, which is odd because much of it is historical Jesus scholarship, which I often enjoy. Perhaps it's because he makes a big deal of stuff that to me seems pretty standard (i.e., that Jesus and the gospels were deeply/critically formed by their context of living through a brutal Roman occupation). Having read Crossan and Aslan, and having studied this in graduate school, none of that is new news for me. Perhaps I'll skip ahead to the "what does this mean" and enjoy that more. For some reason, his prose style also feels tangled and awkward to me. About every other paragraph ends with "more on this later," which feels inelegant and like amateur hour in terms of writing.
I skipped to the end. If you haven't read any historical Jesus scholarship and aren't familiar with modern textual-critical and historical methods of scholarship on the texts and their cultural context, this could be interesting. However, it's written in a very tangled style, and Crossan and Aslan are better and clearer.
What he makes of all this, in terms of the conceptual way he frames it, feels like intellectual oatmeal: there's no there there (see the final paragraph). The examples he gives of it are somewhat more satisfying: That Bonhoeffer's life is an interpretation of Christ actually in the middle of the twentieth century: "courage that is not separate from, but embedded in, the fear endemic to violence . . . The German martyr was a man through whom the actual meaning of Jesus Christ clearly shines." Bonhoeffer was a morally compromised man, who opposed anti-Semitism but refused to preside at the funeral of his sister's father-in-law, who had not been baptized. "When Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy to kill Hitler, declaring himself ready to carry out the deed in person if necessary, he regarded himself as plunged in evil -- a lesser evil than Hitler's, to be sure, but still evil. Quoting Charles Marsh, Bonhoeffer's biographer, "Bonhoeffer moved within an inescapable paradox; he gave his blessings to those who conspired to murder the Fuhrer while affirming the essential nonviolence of the gospel . . Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence, but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action" (247). This seems an important point, but it's buried deep in the book and surrounded with too many qualifications and grammatical circuities.
His main points: the surviving biblical texts must fundamentally be understood in the context of the extreme Roman violence against the Jews; Hitler killed one in three living Jews, a a ratio the Caesars may well have matched (54).
"The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple -- in its destruction by Rome -- dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel" (58).
"Instead of the usual way of seeing Jesus' agony and death on the cross as unique, a one-time instance of transcendent suffering extreme enough to redeem the fallen cosmos, the view from the year 70 -- recall the ten thousand corpses hung on crosses ringing the Temple Mount -- would necessarily have seen the crucifixion of Jesus as mundane. The consolation offered by the Passion account had to be less a matter of Jesus as the _substitute_ sufferer than of Jesus as the _fellow_ sufferer .. . . One could imagine surviving the Temple-destroying savagery only because Jesus had. Here, of course, is the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility -- nay, a promise" (59).
"the destruction of the Temple, and the attendant mass violence, were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts _just then_. (67).
Mark's apocalypse in Chapter 13 was "an almost literal description of what was happening to the people for whom Mark was written. Horrors -- not hallucinations . . . [assaults come] from warrior Jews attacking [Jesus people] as rejecters of the anti-Roman rebellion; and, always, assaults coming indiscriminately from Romans, who were crucifying five hundred Jews _every day_ (72).
"the Gospels (post-death and Resurrection, post-failure to return, post-Temple destruction, and post-dispersal from Palestine) attributed meaning to Jesus that he simply could not have embraced himself (125).
Buddhist connection?: "Salvation, Jesus says, is the recognition of [a God who is more interested in rushing out in greeting, with the fatted calf prepared for the feast, than in dispensing justice] as the only God . . . Creation is all the redemption we need. Because this recognition happens _now_, hope moves from the future to the present" (133).
random thing of interest, from a footnote: "Crossan cites medical anthropologists to distinguish between 'illness' and 'disease.' Disease is purely physical; illness includes the 'personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease.' Jesus' miracles affected change in the latter, not the former" (313).
I skipped to the end. If you haven't read any historical Jesus scholarship and aren't familiar with modern textual-critical and historical methods of scholarship on the texts and their cultural context, this could be interesting. However, it's written in a very tangled style, and Crossan and Aslan are better and clearer.
What he makes of all this, in terms of the conceptual way he frames it, feels like intellectual oatmeal: there's no there there (see the final paragraph). The examples he gives of it are somewhat more satisfying: That Bonhoeffer's life is an interpretation of Christ actually in the middle of the twentieth century: "courage that is not separate from, but embedded in, the fear endemic to violence . . . The German martyr was a man through whom the actual meaning of Jesus Christ clearly shines." Bonhoeffer was a morally compromised man, who opposed anti-Semitism but refused to preside at the funeral of his sister's father-in-law, who had not been baptized. "When Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy to kill Hitler, declaring himself ready to carry out the deed in person if necessary, he regarded himself as plunged in evil -- a lesser evil than Hitler's, to be sure, but still evil. Quoting Charles Marsh, Bonhoeffer's biographer, "Bonhoeffer moved within an inescapable paradox; he gave his blessings to those who conspired to murder the Fuhrer while affirming the essential nonviolence of the gospel . . Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence, but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action" (247). This seems an important point, but it's buried deep in the book and surrounded with too many qualifications and grammatical circuities.
His main points: the surviving biblical texts must fundamentally be understood in the context of the extreme Roman violence against the Jews; Hitler killed one in three living Jews, a a ratio the Caesars may well have matched (54).
"The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple -- in its destruction by Rome -- dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel" (58).
"Instead of the usual way of seeing Jesus' agony and death on the cross as unique, a one-time instance of transcendent suffering extreme enough to redeem the fallen cosmos, the view from the year 70 -- recall the ten thousand corpses hung on crosses ringing the Temple Mount -- would necessarily have seen the crucifixion of Jesus as mundane. The consolation offered by the Passion account had to be less a matter of Jesus as the _substitute_ sufferer than of Jesus as the _fellow_ sufferer .. . . One could imagine surviving the Temple-destroying savagery only because Jesus had. Here, of course, is the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility -- nay, a promise" (59).
"the destruction of the Temple, and the attendant mass violence, were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts _just then_. (67).
Mark's apocalypse in Chapter 13 was "an almost literal description of what was happening to the people for whom Mark was written. Horrors -- not hallucinations . . . [assaults come] from warrior Jews attacking [Jesus people] as rejecters of the anti-Roman rebellion; and, always, assaults coming indiscriminately from Romans, who were crucifying five hundred Jews _every day_ (72).
"the Gospels (post-death and Resurrection, post-failure to return, post-Temple destruction, and post-dispersal from Palestine) attributed meaning to Jesus that he simply could not have embraced himself (125).
Buddhist connection?: "Salvation, Jesus says, is the recognition of [a God who is more interested in rushing out in greeting, with the fatted calf prepared for the feast, than in dispensing justice] as the only God . . . Creation is all the redemption we need. Because this recognition happens _now_, hope moves from the future to the present" (133).
random thing of interest, from a footnote: "Crossan cites medical anthropologists to distinguish between 'illness' and 'disease.' Disease is purely physical; illness includes the 'personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease.' Jesus' miracles affected change in the latter, not the former" (313).
November 26, 2015
Reads like a dated tract from the sixties dressed in 21st century drag--like warmed-over Tillich.
December 6, 2014
A Review of James Carroll’s book,
Christ Actually: The Son of God
For the Secular Age
By Greg Cusack
December 6, 2014
James Carroll is a gentleman of my generation and, as my friend Ken Wolf has pointed out from his reading of Carroll, experienced similar rites of passage as most of us of that time and place did. One of his most memorable experiences as a young man, for instance, was volunteering at the same Catholic Worker facility where the great American Dorothy Day labored to serve the poor and outcast of that time. Ordained a Catholic priest, he left that ministry over frustrations with the Church’s growing doctrinaire conservatism following the initially hopeful years of Vatican II.
Over the years he has written numerous books, the most notable of which was likely his Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History. There is some echo of that in this present book, in that he makes frequent reference to how the Church came to distort and suppress the deep Jewishness of Jesus, his followers, and his message. He attributes this to the fateful First Jewish Revolt of 66-70, in which vengeful Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its great Temple, in the process wiping out most of that city’s influential Jewish Jesus-followers. This terrible event began the process over time of separating Jesus and his teachings from the core reality of his Jewish identity and vision, as well as introducing a hierarchical Church modeled more after the Roman imperial system than anything mirroring the collegial, servant model Jesus represented. Predictably, this also meant both the elevation of the priesthood, indeed, all of the hierarchy, above the common folk and the rapid suppression of the memory of the real prominence of women as respected equals in the lives of Jesus and Paul.
Carroll’s central thrust confronts the Church’s early fateful choice to focus on what to believe about Jesus rather than on what Jesus taught. (In one place, for instance, he argues, Jesus did not say, “Believe these things” but, rather, “Follow me.”)
Carroll argues that it is the Church’s vain attempts to hold on to “the faithful” through emphasizing the doctrines of the Church, rather than urging people to walk in the Way of Jesus, that is causing such disenchantment among Christians in our time. The faith that matters – that is, one that emphasizes the need for us to be loyal in act and deed to the teachings of Jesus (the Beatitudes, for example) – is not one that can primarily be learned or held dear in any way through passive absorption of words alone. Rather, it is in the act of doing what Jesus did – caring for the poor, being open to the different and outcast, for examples – that we truly learn and become converted. This reminds me of the phrase attributed to St. Francis: “Preach constantly and, when necessary, speak.”
To better allow the flavor of Carroll’s insights to reach you who are reading this review, I now turn to several direct quotations from his book. Just before doing so, however, I wish to state that, while I found much in this book that encouraged me in my own journey, in which similar thoughts have occurred, I, nonetheless, was a little disappointed in one aspect of the Carroll’s argument (perhaps because I still have a ways to go in my own journey?). It is this: one of the points he makes several times is that just as the memory of Jesus and his teachings never have survived throughout the centuries unless his original followers, and those who have since received his message, believed that he was truly a divine figure – the Son of Man who appears in Daniel – so also does he argue that it is essential that we come to a similar experience/conclusion. I think, but am not sure, that his answer lies in the paradox of “in doing so you will be able to see and, thus, believe.”
Well, in any case, on to some direct quotations.
“…In the beginning, Jesus was more to be imitated than worshipped. He was, in the Gospel’s supremely simple word, to be followed… This following, Bonheoffer wrote, ‘does not create constitutions and decrees, but brings human beings into relation with one another.’ In the life of the movement that takes its name from Jesus Christ, the primacy of discipleship over decree must regularly be recovered. Indeed, the generating impulse to imitate Jesus remains the Church’s permanent and multifaceted principle of indictment, self-criticism, absolution, and moral renewal. Jesus is the mark on history against which Jesus people have no choice but to measure themselves.” [p.248]
“The key to the actuality of Christ is precisely in the imitation of Jesus: the study, in Dorothy Days’ phrase, of our life conformed to his… Why? Because what was revealed in Jesus – what made others eventually see him as Son of Man, Christ, Logos, God – was that his capacity for transcendence (transfiguration, resurrection, call it what you will) was exactly a capacity that lives in every person. Not just in those we designate as saints. That is why the profound ordinariness of transcendence as beheld in him was essential – it was ordinary enough for each one of us to match, with our fears, irascibility, vanities, and doubts; also our hopes, gifts, desires, and strengths. Acting fully as who we are, the imitation of Christ is the way to actualize in ourselves what makes Jesus matter.
“We have problems believing that Jesus is God because we don’t really know what that word “God” refers to…. The intuition that Jesus is the Christ, and therefore somehow “of God,” far from being the product of naiveté or superstition, can be rooted in a profoundly sophisticated grasp o the meaning of existence. It pushes past the boundaries of what is readily known and suggests that the realm out there is real.” [pp. 265-6]
“We do not know with certain what or who God is, but it is equally true, in fact, that we do not actually know what a human is. The inability to grasp the mystery of our own meaning as humans defines the contemporary crisis of identity more sharply than anything. God is not the problem. We are the problem to ourselves. We see now, through the insights of science and the traumas of political conflict, that all of the traditional points of reference in relation to which humans have understood themselves have been upended.
“…Our ideas are not what they were. All is flux, which humans have felt forever… We can no longer take the measure of our world with anything like precision, because the measures themselves are always changing.
“To be human, therefore, is to be on the way to becoming something else.” [pp. 267-8]
“The I AM of God, of Jesus, is the “I am” of every person, and it consists in every person being aware of herself or himself. And that awareness points beyond itself. Consciousness leads to self-consciousness leads to self-transcendence…. ‘I know,’ leads to ‘I know that I know’ leads to ‘I know that I am known.’ Here is what we mean by the image of God in which we humans are created. ‘Image and ‘imitation’ are linguistic variations on I AM.” [p. 273]
“The presence of God, therefore, lies in what is ordinary. Not in supernatural marvels [nor]…in a superman with whom we have nothing in common. Not in saints. Not in a once-only age of miracles long ago. Not first in doctrine, scholarship, or theology – but in life…
“The life of Jesus must always weigh more than his death. And to repeat, the revelation is in the ordinariness of that life. His teaching – his permanent Jewishness, his preference for service over power, his ever-respectful attitude towards women and others on the social margin – is available to us because his followers passed the teaching along, which continues… Again and again he turned to God, and, as the tradition says, he turned into God – but that, too, occurred in the most ordinary of ways. Day by day. Act by act. Choice by choice. Word by word. Ultimately ‘lifted up,’ as John says, on the cross which was the Resurrection. And the cross is central to this meaning not because God willed suffering but because, in Jesus, God joined in it.
[What does this leave us with?] “A simple Jesus. An ordinary Christ. One whom the simplest person can imitate, the most ordinary person bringing Christ once more to life – day by day, word by word, bread by bread, cup by cp. In all of that we see divinity, which, paradoxically, is what makes Jesus one of us. Whatever sort of God Jesus is understood to be, it must be the God who is like humans, not different.” [p. 279]
“So we are here less to believe in Jesus than to imitate him. We imitate him above all in nurturing the conviction that the Creator of the universe cares for us a p parent loves a child, which is the conviction, finally, that rescues meaning in an otherwise pointless cosmos. Meaning is itself how God is revealed… For as long as humans exist, meaning will define the human horizon, and at every human approach, that horizon will withdraw, even while still beckoning. Follow, it says. And as we do, the word “meaning” moves from lowercase to upper.” [pp. 281-2]
Christ Actually: The Son of God
For the Secular Age
By Greg Cusack
December 6, 2014
James Carroll is a gentleman of my generation and, as my friend Ken Wolf has pointed out from his reading of Carroll, experienced similar rites of passage as most of us of that time and place did. One of his most memorable experiences as a young man, for instance, was volunteering at the same Catholic Worker facility where the great American Dorothy Day labored to serve the poor and outcast of that time. Ordained a Catholic priest, he left that ministry over frustrations with the Church’s growing doctrinaire conservatism following the initially hopeful years of Vatican II.
Over the years he has written numerous books, the most notable of which was likely his Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History. There is some echo of that in this present book, in that he makes frequent reference to how the Church came to distort and suppress the deep Jewishness of Jesus, his followers, and his message. He attributes this to the fateful First Jewish Revolt of 66-70, in which vengeful Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its great Temple, in the process wiping out most of that city’s influential Jewish Jesus-followers. This terrible event began the process over time of separating Jesus and his teachings from the core reality of his Jewish identity and vision, as well as introducing a hierarchical Church modeled more after the Roman imperial system than anything mirroring the collegial, servant model Jesus represented. Predictably, this also meant both the elevation of the priesthood, indeed, all of the hierarchy, above the common folk and the rapid suppression of the memory of the real prominence of women as respected equals in the lives of Jesus and Paul.
Carroll’s central thrust confronts the Church’s early fateful choice to focus on what to believe about Jesus rather than on what Jesus taught. (In one place, for instance, he argues, Jesus did not say, “Believe these things” but, rather, “Follow me.”)
Carroll argues that it is the Church’s vain attempts to hold on to “the faithful” through emphasizing the doctrines of the Church, rather than urging people to walk in the Way of Jesus, that is causing such disenchantment among Christians in our time. The faith that matters – that is, one that emphasizes the need for us to be loyal in act and deed to the teachings of Jesus (the Beatitudes, for example) – is not one that can primarily be learned or held dear in any way through passive absorption of words alone. Rather, it is in the act of doing what Jesus did – caring for the poor, being open to the different and outcast, for examples – that we truly learn and become converted. This reminds me of the phrase attributed to St. Francis: “Preach constantly and, when necessary, speak.”
To better allow the flavor of Carroll’s insights to reach you who are reading this review, I now turn to several direct quotations from his book. Just before doing so, however, I wish to state that, while I found much in this book that encouraged me in my own journey, in which similar thoughts have occurred, I, nonetheless, was a little disappointed in one aspect of the Carroll’s argument (perhaps because I still have a ways to go in my own journey?). It is this: one of the points he makes several times is that just as the memory of Jesus and his teachings never have survived throughout the centuries unless his original followers, and those who have since received his message, believed that he was truly a divine figure – the Son of Man who appears in Daniel – so also does he argue that it is essential that we come to a similar experience/conclusion. I think, but am not sure, that his answer lies in the paradox of “in doing so you will be able to see and, thus, believe.”
Well, in any case, on to some direct quotations.
“…In the beginning, Jesus was more to be imitated than worshipped. He was, in the Gospel’s supremely simple word, to be followed… This following, Bonheoffer wrote, ‘does not create constitutions and decrees, but brings human beings into relation with one another.’ In the life of the movement that takes its name from Jesus Christ, the primacy of discipleship over decree must regularly be recovered. Indeed, the generating impulse to imitate Jesus remains the Church’s permanent and multifaceted principle of indictment, self-criticism, absolution, and moral renewal. Jesus is the mark on history against which Jesus people have no choice but to measure themselves.” [p.248]
“The key to the actuality of Christ is precisely in the imitation of Jesus: the study, in Dorothy Days’ phrase, of our life conformed to his… Why? Because what was revealed in Jesus – what made others eventually see him as Son of Man, Christ, Logos, God – was that his capacity for transcendence (transfiguration, resurrection, call it what you will) was exactly a capacity that lives in every person. Not just in those we designate as saints. That is why the profound ordinariness of transcendence as beheld in him was essential – it was ordinary enough for each one of us to match, with our fears, irascibility, vanities, and doubts; also our hopes, gifts, desires, and strengths. Acting fully as who we are, the imitation of Christ is the way to actualize in ourselves what makes Jesus matter.
“We have problems believing that Jesus is God because we don’t really know what that word “God” refers to…. The intuition that Jesus is the Christ, and therefore somehow “of God,” far from being the product of naiveté or superstition, can be rooted in a profoundly sophisticated grasp o the meaning of existence. It pushes past the boundaries of what is readily known and suggests that the realm out there is real.” [pp. 265-6]
“We do not know with certain what or who God is, but it is equally true, in fact, that we do not actually know what a human is. The inability to grasp the mystery of our own meaning as humans defines the contemporary crisis of identity more sharply than anything. God is not the problem. We are the problem to ourselves. We see now, through the insights of science and the traumas of political conflict, that all of the traditional points of reference in relation to which humans have understood themselves have been upended.
“…Our ideas are not what they were. All is flux, which humans have felt forever… We can no longer take the measure of our world with anything like precision, because the measures themselves are always changing.
“To be human, therefore, is to be on the way to becoming something else.” [pp. 267-8]
“The I AM of God, of Jesus, is the “I am” of every person, and it consists in every person being aware of herself or himself. And that awareness points beyond itself. Consciousness leads to self-consciousness leads to self-transcendence…. ‘I know,’ leads to ‘I know that I know’ leads to ‘I know that I am known.’ Here is what we mean by the image of God in which we humans are created. ‘Image and ‘imitation’ are linguistic variations on I AM.” [p. 273]
“The presence of God, therefore, lies in what is ordinary. Not in supernatural marvels [nor]…in a superman with whom we have nothing in common. Not in saints. Not in a once-only age of miracles long ago. Not first in doctrine, scholarship, or theology – but in life…
“The life of Jesus must always weigh more than his death. And to repeat, the revelation is in the ordinariness of that life. His teaching – his permanent Jewishness, his preference for service over power, his ever-respectful attitude towards women and others on the social margin – is available to us because his followers passed the teaching along, which continues… Again and again he turned to God, and, as the tradition says, he turned into God – but that, too, occurred in the most ordinary of ways. Day by day. Act by act. Choice by choice. Word by word. Ultimately ‘lifted up,’ as John says, on the cross which was the Resurrection. And the cross is central to this meaning not because God willed suffering but because, in Jesus, God joined in it.
[What does this leave us with?] “A simple Jesus. An ordinary Christ. One whom the simplest person can imitate, the most ordinary person bringing Christ once more to life – day by day, word by word, bread by bread, cup by cp. In all of that we see divinity, which, paradoxically, is what makes Jesus one of us. Whatever sort of God Jesus is understood to be, it must be the God who is like humans, not different.” [p. 279]
“So we are here less to believe in Jesus than to imitate him. We imitate him above all in nurturing the conviction that the Creator of the universe cares for us a p parent loves a child, which is the conviction, finally, that rescues meaning in an otherwise pointless cosmos. Meaning is itself how God is revealed… For as long as humans exist, meaning will define the human horizon, and at every human approach, that horizon will withdraw, even while still beckoning. Follow, it says. And as we do, the word “meaning” moves from lowercase to upper.” [pp. 281-2]
August 17, 2015
Carroll, who wrestled so artfully with Christianity's, and particularly, the Roman Church's denigration of Jews throughout history, applies a similar treatment to what he calls a modern understanding of Jesus Christ. Carroll argues that the experience of the "Jesus people" changed radically in just the hundred years or so since the death of Jesus. The explicit rejection of the Jewishness of Jesus, says Carroll, not only created the terrible history of Western Christian relations with Jewish people that culminated in the Holocaust, but also distorted the lens through which followers of Christ came to view Him.
Carroll take the Holocaust and the atomic bomb detonation at Hiroshima to be turning points in modern human history, which challenge us to re-examine existence, including faith, for a modern people. What he arrives at is a need for a simple faith, but not a blind one. Rejecting slavish devotion to literal textual interpretations, he revisits the life of Jesus as man, and as Jew, in his time and place. He argues that the cataclysmic Roman violence against Jews in the first century shaped the population of Jewish Jesus followers, leading them to explicitly distance themselves from other Jews as a means of survival. Increasingly, the hierarchical Western church devised a complex dogma, based upon Hellenic philosophy, that became a self-perpetuating religious machine, that deviated significantly from the simple goodness and dignity of the carpenter from Nazareth.
What Carroll concludes is that modern Christians need to find their way to an unknowable God through imitation of Jesus; his humility, compassion, and service to others. The book is well reasoned and well documented. As is always the case with Carroll, hard-line Catholics will call him a blasphemous heretic, while others, theist and atheist alike, will find much to consider.
Carroll take the Holocaust and the atomic bomb detonation at Hiroshima to be turning points in modern human history, which challenge us to re-examine existence, including faith, for a modern people. What he arrives at is a need for a simple faith, but not a blind one. Rejecting slavish devotion to literal textual interpretations, he revisits the life of Jesus as man, and as Jew, in his time and place. He argues that the cataclysmic Roman violence against Jews in the first century shaped the population of Jewish Jesus followers, leading them to explicitly distance themselves from other Jews as a means of survival. Increasingly, the hierarchical Western church devised a complex dogma, based upon Hellenic philosophy, that became a self-perpetuating religious machine, that deviated significantly from the simple goodness and dignity of the carpenter from Nazareth.
What Carroll concludes is that modern Christians need to find their way to an unknowable God through imitation of Jesus; his humility, compassion, and service to others. The book is well reasoned and well documented. As is always the case with Carroll, hard-line Catholics will call him a blasphemous heretic, while others, theist and atheist alike, will find much to consider.
July 7, 2015
A stirring and challenging attempt to find the meaning, history, and relevance of Jesus Christ in a secular age. Carroll seeks to recover a sense of the Jewishness of Jesus by investigating how the records of his life became distorted by the early Christians who wrote about him. Were this the book's only contribution it'd still be worth reading, although it is merely reaffirming the conclusions of other scholars of the last few decades who have returned Jesus to his Jewish roots. But there's more involved in Carroll's task.
He argues that Jesus could only be Jesus IN RELATION to others. Therefore, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and other witnesses including women who have been subsequently downplayed in the tradition are indispensable to Jesus's development as well as the picture we have of Jesus in the Christian scriptures. Carroll's own understanding of Jesus then is dependant upon other disciples--Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and the unexpected Albert Schweitzer--who sought Jesus by following his actions.
Plenty of provocative moments throughout, but a reader need not agree with all Carroll offers in order to appreciate the effort or to selectively borrow from the author's answers to any number of questions--or to borrow the questions so eloquently posed themselves.
He argues that Jesus could only be Jesus IN RELATION to others. Therefore, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and other witnesses including women who have been subsequently downplayed in the tradition are indispensable to Jesus's development as well as the picture we have of Jesus in the Christian scriptures. Carroll's own understanding of Jesus then is dependant upon other disciples--Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and the unexpected Albert Schweitzer--who sought Jesus by following his actions.
Plenty of provocative moments throughout, but a reader need not agree with all Carroll offers in order to appreciate the effort or to selectively borrow from the author's answers to any number of questions--or to borrow the questions so eloquently posed themselves.
December 29, 2014
(probably not that interesting if you don't answer to a vague self-description as christian)
as a reading experience i'd probably give this a 3.5-4. i think carroll gives human beings too much credit, if anything. there is a bit of repetition and some of the more speculative passages (necessarily speculative, but still speculative) are unsatisfying simply because there's nothing anyone can be sure of. but i really dug the overall message (act like jesus, the guy, not the god), and it doesn't really matter what you think about divinity or life everlasting, you will have solved something permanent and important about making the world around you better. and pace martin buber ("all real living is meeting"), that world is made pretty much exclusively of your connections with other human beings. this was a nice and welcome antidote to some spiritual weariness i'd been feeling. sparked my imagination and made me think about history in a new way. also nice to read a book about christology that gives a plausible rebuttal to some of the unpleasant misogyny that creeps into the NT. anyway, i will see you outside in the world. good job james carroll.
as a reading experience i'd probably give this a 3.5-4. i think carroll gives human beings too much credit, if anything. there is a bit of repetition and some of the more speculative passages (necessarily speculative, but still speculative) are unsatisfying simply because there's nothing anyone can be sure of. but i really dug the overall message (act like jesus, the guy, not the god), and it doesn't really matter what you think about divinity or life everlasting, you will have solved something permanent and important about making the world around you better. and pace martin buber ("all real living is meeting"), that world is made pretty much exclusively of your connections with other human beings. this was a nice and welcome antidote to some spiritual weariness i'd been feeling. sparked my imagination and made me think about history in a new way. also nice to read a book about christology that gives a plausible rebuttal to some of the unpleasant misogyny that creeps into the NT. anyway, i will see you outside in the world. good job james carroll.
June 6, 2018
I was motivated to read this book after reading Carroll's novel The Cloister, which tells the story of Peter Abelard, and in the process highlights the scourage of Christian anti-Semitism in the 15th century. Christ Actually begins with the Holocaust and the struggles of imprisoned Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeeffer who grappled with the meaning and relevance of Christ in a post-Nazi, post-Holocaust world and asked: "who is Christ actually for us today?" While acknoledging the great contributions the Church has made to the world over the centuries, Carroll grapples with the horrific acts of violence inspired by religion in the 20th century: the Holocaust, Hiroshima, 9/11 and more.
The overarching purpose of the book is to revisit the life and story of Jesus to highlight that he operated in and was interpreted within an entirely Jewish context, and that only as the Church moved into the Graeco-Roman world and then was blessed by the emperor it took on a starkly anti-Jewish tone. Carroll draws heavily on the work of the Jesus Seminar and other attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus and provides a scholarly and provocative look at Jesus.
Carroll writes as a devout but critical Roman Catholic and so his quest is both scholarly and personal. While doing an excellent job of reviewing recent scholarship highlighting the Jewish context of the gospels and the writings of Paul, Carroll does not take up the question of the Christian response to the modern nation of Israel and whether (as some say) that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same. All in all, this was a thought-provoking book, which causes one to re-examine his/her assumptions about the Bible and the relevance of Jesus for today
The overarching purpose of the book is to revisit the life and story of Jesus to highlight that he operated in and was interpreted within an entirely Jewish context, and that only as the Church moved into the Graeco-Roman world and then was blessed by the emperor it took on a starkly anti-Jewish tone. Carroll draws heavily on the work of the Jesus Seminar and other attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus and provides a scholarly and provocative look at Jesus.
Carroll writes as a devout but critical Roman Catholic and so his quest is both scholarly and personal. While doing an excellent job of reviewing recent scholarship highlighting the Jewish context of the gospels and the writings of Paul, Carroll does not take up the question of the Christian response to the modern nation of Israel and whether (as some say) that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same. All in all, this was a thought-provoking book, which causes one to re-examine his/her assumptions about the Bible and the relevance of Jesus for today
January 18, 2015
How do we believe in God in the post-religious twenty-first century? How do we follow Christ after the Holocaust and the Death of God? According to Carroll's beautifully written analysis, both Judaism and Christianity emerged out of just such faith-shattering events as the world witnessed in the twentieth century. As we continue to come to terms with the twentieth century Holocaust, that spiritual black hole that inevitably bends and distorts our panglossian attempts to construct a conception of the world in which everything works for our own good, Carroll reminds us that Judaism, as we know it today, was born out of a series of "Holocausts" of a sort; brutal episodes in which the powers-that-be attempted to crush the cult of Yahweh and its subversive tendencies. The Torah materialized fully during and just after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE. The prophetic Book of Daniel was written in the wake of the Maccabean Revolt against the Greco-Persian Seleucid Empire. The Jesus movement was the newest iteration of a long tradition of prophetic activism against oppressors of the Jewish people. It was only after a great deal of cultural and theological reworking of the movement begun by the likes of Jesus, Peter, and Paul that Christianity emerged as a religion distinct and separate from Judaism.
Jesus was a Jew. Christians know this, of course, but rarely stop to consider the implications of this fact. Jesus lived and died as a Jew. He was not some otherworldly divinity with luminous white garments and a halo floating over his head. He was a Palestinian Jew who lived, taught, and met his death in a world scarred by war and genocide. His life and teachings find their proper context in a world defined by the suffering the Jews experienced under the oppression of a pagan empire and its clients. The understanding of Jesus as Christ, the Son of God, or the Son of Man by the earliest Christians, among them the Gospel writers, can only be understood in the context of the catastrophic Roman suppression of the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE. Like other prophetic movements of the Jewish tradition, the Jesus movement was inaugurated by war.
Carroll is very sophisticated in demonstrating how Jesus, even Jesus as Christ, can be understood in a thoroughly Jewish context. Most interpreters of Christianity make a sharp distinction between, in Marcus Borg's terms, the "Pre-Easter" Jesus of the Jewish tradition, and the "Post-Easter" Christ of the Greek New Testament. Carroll shows that there was plenty of room within the Jewish tradition for someone to be spoken of as both human and divine.
I particularly enjoyed Carroll's analysis of the plight of women in the early Christian community. Jesus's teaching and Paul's early, authenticated writings seem to be radically sexually egalitarian. Mary of Magdala was one of the most important of Jesus's disciples, only to have her importance diminished within the Christian tradition by the erroneous association of this aristocratic patroness of the Jesus movement with the repentant prostitute who washes Jesus's feet while he dines with the Pharisees. By the end of the first century CE, the writings attributed to Paul have transitioned dramatically from the egalitarianism of a Paul who trusts his letter to the Romans to a woman named Phoebe, considers a woman named Julia to be an "apostle" like himself, and places the blame for the fall of man solely on Adam, and not on Eve; to a very conservative and patriarchal conception of church life in which woman are not to speak in church or assume any leadership position. Fascinatingly, Carroll associates this post-temple destruction patriarchalism with a sort of national shame that must have wounded the pride of the Jewish community following their brutalization at the hands of the legions of Vespasian and Titus.
Starkly put, one of the great unspoken consequences of war for a civilian population is rape, and the Roman legions, as much as any marauding army of ancient or modern times, were notorious for practicing wanton sexual violence against the women of the peoples they conquered. When the women of a defeated people are raped, this is not only an act of violence and denigration toward the women themselves, it is directed as the ultimate insult toward the men of the defeated nation. It demonstrates that the men cannot fulfill their primordial role as protectors of their women. According to Carroll, it is quite likely that the Roman reconquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by an atrocious bout of rape by the Roman legionaries. This shame at having one's women defiled in this way was internalized by the post-temple churchmen of the Jesus movement, and Carroll speculates that this is what gave rise to the mandated subjection of women in some of the most notorious writings of the New Testament. The despair of seeing one's women victimized in this way was internalized by the defeated men, and this shame led to a presentation of women as a source of shame, rather than the partners in discipleship which they seem to have been in the earliest decades.
A fascinating book, both in its exploration of the historical context of Christianity and in its putting forward of a vision of renewal of faith in Christ as something to be lived out rather than something to be believed, in our age which seems ready to discard belief altogether.
Jesus was a Jew. Christians know this, of course, but rarely stop to consider the implications of this fact. Jesus lived and died as a Jew. He was not some otherworldly divinity with luminous white garments and a halo floating over his head. He was a Palestinian Jew who lived, taught, and met his death in a world scarred by war and genocide. His life and teachings find their proper context in a world defined by the suffering the Jews experienced under the oppression of a pagan empire and its clients. The understanding of Jesus as Christ, the Son of God, or the Son of Man by the earliest Christians, among them the Gospel writers, can only be understood in the context of the catastrophic Roman suppression of the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE. Like other prophetic movements of the Jewish tradition, the Jesus movement was inaugurated by war.
Carroll is very sophisticated in demonstrating how Jesus, even Jesus as Christ, can be understood in a thoroughly Jewish context. Most interpreters of Christianity make a sharp distinction between, in Marcus Borg's terms, the "Pre-Easter" Jesus of the Jewish tradition, and the "Post-Easter" Christ of the Greek New Testament. Carroll shows that there was plenty of room within the Jewish tradition for someone to be spoken of as both human and divine.
I particularly enjoyed Carroll's analysis of the plight of women in the early Christian community. Jesus's teaching and Paul's early, authenticated writings seem to be radically sexually egalitarian. Mary of Magdala was one of the most important of Jesus's disciples, only to have her importance diminished within the Christian tradition by the erroneous association of this aristocratic patroness of the Jesus movement with the repentant prostitute who washes Jesus's feet while he dines with the Pharisees. By the end of the first century CE, the writings attributed to Paul have transitioned dramatically from the egalitarianism of a Paul who trusts his letter to the Romans to a woman named Phoebe, considers a woman named Julia to be an "apostle" like himself, and places the blame for the fall of man solely on Adam, and not on Eve; to a very conservative and patriarchal conception of church life in which woman are not to speak in church or assume any leadership position. Fascinatingly, Carroll associates this post-temple destruction patriarchalism with a sort of national shame that must have wounded the pride of the Jewish community following their brutalization at the hands of the legions of Vespasian and Titus.
Starkly put, one of the great unspoken consequences of war for a civilian population is rape, and the Roman legions, as much as any marauding army of ancient or modern times, were notorious for practicing wanton sexual violence against the women of the peoples they conquered. When the women of a defeated people are raped, this is not only an act of violence and denigration toward the women themselves, it is directed as the ultimate insult toward the men of the defeated nation. It demonstrates that the men cannot fulfill their primordial role as protectors of their women. According to Carroll, it is quite likely that the Roman reconquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by an atrocious bout of rape by the Roman legionaries. This shame at having one's women defiled in this way was internalized by the post-temple churchmen of the Jesus movement, and Carroll speculates that this is what gave rise to the mandated subjection of women in some of the most notorious writings of the New Testament. The despair of seeing one's women victimized in this way was internalized by the defeated men, and this shame led to a presentation of women as a source of shame, rather than the partners in discipleship which they seem to have been in the earliest decades.
A fascinating book, both in its exploration of the historical context of Christianity and in its putting forward of a vision of renewal of faith in Christ as something to be lived out rather than something to be believed, in our age which seems ready to discard belief altogether.
June 20, 2021
Uneven. That was my feeling the whole time I was reading this. I would be just on the point of deciding it wasn’t worth finishing, when it would get better. In the end I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
March 5, 2015
I suppose as an agnostic (hedging my bets I suppose), it is somewhat more difficult to take on a more scholarly text dealing with Jesus and Christianity. The main disadvantage is vocabulary, terminology and religious historical context. But I stayed with Carroll's argument for the Jesus and God he sees or understands. I have to say I am convinced by his argument and view of Jesus as a servant of the poor and oppressed, the champion of non violence and the focus of community awareness and cooperation. Our modern tendencies toward selfishness and narcissism sadly deviate from these principles allowing the distortions of history to validate such male-dominated individual and collective behaviors that have aided antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, devolving into wars of destruction with "Holocaust" and "Hiroshima" end results.
What I learned from this reading:
Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew. He was a man though followed as a divine being.
Antisemitism among Christians was induced through historical inventions and distortions.
The Romans were brutal and responsible the first Jewish Holocaust, circa 70 AD.
The Nazi's responsible for the 2nd, circa 1940 AD.
A male-dominated Church was not consistent with Jesus' teachings or interactions with his followers.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian, died defending Jews during WWII.
Dorothy Day, a nun who was founding editor of the Catholic Worker and an anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons protestor, was a living example of what it means to embody the essence of Christ, the imitation of Christ or Christ actually.
What I learned from this reading:
Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew. He was a man though followed as a divine being.
Antisemitism among Christians was induced through historical inventions and distortions.
The Romans were brutal and responsible the first Jewish Holocaust, circa 70 AD.
The Nazi's responsible for the 2nd, circa 1940 AD.
A male-dominated Church was not consistent with Jesus' teachings or interactions with his followers.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian, died defending Jews during WWII.
Dorothy Day, a nun who was founding editor of the Catholic Worker and an anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons protestor, was a living example of what it means to embody the essence of Christ, the imitation of Christ or Christ actually.
January 7, 2015
This is the best book when it comes to looking at Jesus Christ through the Historical Jesus lens. This book talked about all the things that my history side was in conflict with the spiritual and belief side. This book is not for a layman reader. I have a degree in secondary education History and enough religion classes from evangelical churches and Bible college under my belt that it was a pretty easy read. With all the written, this is an opinionated book and I did not agree with everything but it is extremely well researched.
October 6, 2015
"Jesus reveals humanity and much as he reveals divinity". This is a thorough study of who Christ is going all the way back to Jesus before the written gospels when Jesus was viewed as Lord and it brings us to the present view of Jesus as God. Excellent book by a former priest who followed his heart to know Christ more. Highly recommend.
The image of God is a variation of I am. The church embraces the mystery of Jesus never claiming to know him in His fullness. This is a terrific study.
The image of God is a variation of I am. The church embraces the mystery of Jesus never claiming to know him in His fullness. This is a terrific study.
October 13, 2015
excellent. title does it justice: consider who jesus christ is by re-connecting with who he truly WAS.
January 13, 2015
One of the most interesting, accessible, insightful books I've read.So much I didn't know about the history of the early church and the Jewish faith. Highly recommended.
June 27, 2015
Interesting ideas, but couldn't finish due to repetitiveness and writing style.
October 25, 2018
Carroll has written a challenging history about the chasm between Christians and Jews, tragically punctuated by the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews in the heart of Christian Europe. How did this come about? Much of the book is about how this split began to develop immediately after Christ's death. Christ, as well as Paul and the evangelists (possibly excepting John) were born Jews and died Jews, and it's his contention that in many respects Christ was not only a Jew, but actually a conservative Jew, thoroughly familiar with the Hebrew scriptures.
Carroll thinks that the first truly traumatic event for Jews (it could even be called the first Holocaust) occurred with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. The Romans killed untold thousands of Jews and crucified victims by the hundreds around the city of Jerusalem. The history of Christianity has tended to neglect this event which effectively scattered remaining Jews around the Mediterranean.
The accounts given of the "Jesus Jews" by the gospel writers began to separate this sect from the Temple or synagogue Jews, so that what is found in the gospels is a disparagement of the non-Jesus faction (because they failed to recognize Christ as the long-awaited Messiah), to the extent that by the time John's late gospel was written, the "Jews" begin to stand in for the villains who killed Christ. Christ was not killed by the Jews, but by the Romans. The Jesus Jews began to refer to themselves as Christians, some of them motivated by the hope that the Romans would go easier on them if they weren't Jews.
Carroll's premise, then, is that an awareness of these facts should have changed the way Christ is thought of by believers and nonbelievers alike but no such transformation ever took place. Correctly seen, Jesus would exist in a thoroughly Jewish context, and would come into self-recognition as a member of a people, and his power and goodness exist only in relation to others. He was not the uniquely solitary "god-man" that early Christians turned him into.
What about the resurrection, then? Didn't that demonstrate that Christ was truly a divine figure, a bedrock fact that followers believe? Carroll writes a lot about the difference in thinking between modern humans and those of twenty centuries ago. Mark, writing four decades after Christ's death, knew well that his followers were disappointed by his crucifixion and the failure of the "Kingdom" to appear. What he did, as Paul did before him, and the other gospel writers after him, was to change what the death of Jesus meant. Moderns , as fact-obsessed people, find it nearly impossible to grasp the metaphorical thinking of these early followers which was taken as a given.
Carroll writes that the resurrection, with its notion of bodily resuscitation, certainly never took place literally. But what Christ represented, was a "God at home with human complexity, a God undefeated by death, a God whose love for creation was unbounded." The life and death of Jesus is not the "mechanism" of redemption, but that redemption, the worth of all creation, is a the "signal" of the "permanent ground of being."
Carroll is a Catholic Christian, but he finds far too much of what developed over the centuries were doctrinal formulas that drifted farther and farther away from Christ's message. He is, in a sense, the "son of God", but it's a metaphorical "god" which is potentially found in each human being's existence and experiences. I thought the book was a convincing re-interpretation of Christianity, especially in its relation with Judaism, and as far as I'm concerned, Christianity is always in need of new insights and interpretation.
Carroll thinks that the first truly traumatic event for Jews (it could even be called the first Holocaust) occurred with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. The Romans killed untold thousands of Jews and crucified victims by the hundreds around the city of Jerusalem. The history of Christianity has tended to neglect this event which effectively scattered remaining Jews around the Mediterranean.
The accounts given of the "Jesus Jews" by the gospel writers began to separate this sect from the Temple or synagogue Jews, so that what is found in the gospels is a disparagement of the non-Jesus faction (because they failed to recognize Christ as the long-awaited Messiah), to the extent that by the time John's late gospel was written, the "Jews" begin to stand in for the villains who killed Christ. Christ was not killed by the Jews, but by the Romans. The Jesus Jews began to refer to themselves as Christians, some of them motivated by the hope that the Romans would go easier on them if they weren't Jews.
Carroll's premise, then, is that an awareness of these facts should have changed the way Christ is thought of by believers and nonbelievers alike but no such transformation ever took place. Correctly seen, Jesus would exist in a thoroughly Jewish context, and would come into self-recognition as a member of a people, and his power and goodness exist only in relation to others. He was not the uniquely solitary "god-man" that early Christians turned him into.
What about the resurrection, then? Didn't that demonstrate that Christ was truly a divine figure, a bedrock fact that followers believe? Carroll writes a lot about the difference in thinking between modern humans and those of twenty centuries ago. Mark, writing four decades after Christ's death, knew well that his followers were disappointed by his crucifixion and the failure of the "Kingdom" to appear. What he did, as Paul did before him, and the other gospel writers after him, was to change what the death of Jesus meant. Moderns , as fact-obsessed people, find it nearly impossible to grasp the metaphorical thinking of these early followers which was taken as a given.
Carroll writes that the resurrection, with its notion of bodily resuscitation, certainly never took place literally. But what Christ represented, was a "God at home with human complexity, a God undefeated by death, a God whose love for creation was unbounded." The life and death of Jesus is not the "mechanism" of redemption, but that redemption, the worth of all creation, is a the "signal" of the "permanent ground of being."
Carroll is a Catholic Christian, but he finds far too much of what developed over the centuries were doctrinal formulas that drifted farther and farther away from Christ's message. He is, in a sense, the "son of God", but it's a metaphorical "god" which is potentially found in each human being's existence and experiences. I thought the book was a convincing re-interpretation of Christianity, especially in its relation with Judaism, and as far as I'm concerned, Christianity is always in need of new insights and interpretation.
October 3, 2017
This is a long and complex book with a historical account of Jesus. His writing style was difficult to grasp at times. The author ends many paragraphs with "more on this later," which leaves the reader confused. Some will enjoy this book but many readers will be frustrated.
The main ideas in this book:
1. The surviving biblical texts are in the context of extreme Roman violence against the Jews;
2. The Temple is main background for Jesus and many "who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel"
3. the destruction of the Temple "were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts"
4. Thousands including Jesus were hung on crosses on the Temple
5. "the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility -- nay, a promise"
6. "the Gospels attributed meaning to Jesus that he simply could not have embraced himself"
The main ideas in this book:
1. The surviving biblical texts are in the context of extreme Roman violence against the Jews;
2. The Temple is main background for Jesus and many "who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel"
3. the destruction of the Temple "were precisely what created the urgent need among the Jesus people for these texts"
4. Thousands including Jesus were hung on crosses on the Temple
5. "the power of the proclaimed Resurrection, the hope that evolved into conviction that survival, even of the worst fate imaginable, was a possibility -- nay, a promise"
6. "the Gospels attributed meaning to Jesus that he simply could not have embraced himself"
March 15, 2021
Disclaimer: I only completed the Introduction and Chapter 1 and stopped. I could not go any further and in my opinion, this books so far is totally “down” pushing and negative as opposed to “uplifting” and positive. Also, in my opinion the author, as a former Catholic priest, is a follower of “Liberation Theology” and “Gnosticism” and is now spending his life writing books supporting his decision to leave the Catholic Church and dispute Catholic doctrine and teachings. I could not waste any more time on this dribble and if an individual is looking for something contemporary to read about the Catholic Church I would suggest: George Weigel; Peter Kreeft; Cardinal Timothy Dolan; Bishop Robert Barron; or the publication contain the “Nihil obstat” and/or “Imprimatur”. Finally, I am not implying that individuals should not be informed about their “religion” but be aware of what you are reading.
May 22, 2024
I sometimes write more copious notes about books that I don't agree, with than with books that I totally agree with. I enjoyed reading this book although I totally disagree with the conclusions of the author.
I am a Christian who believes that the Bible is the totally inspired word of God and totally true. The author quotes the Bible extensively but does not believe that it is true. It does, he says, contain some facts but so much of it is myth. A quote from his conclusion sums up his belief about Jesus: " When we proclaim with the tradition, that Jesus is 'Christ", that Jesus is 'risen' that Jesus Christ is 'God' we know that we are not asserting scientific facts."
I find it very sad that someone who has taken so much time studying the Scriptures and quotes and misquotes them extensively could reject the Jesus of the Bible for simply someone that we should admire and seek to emulate.
I am a Christian who believes that the Bible is the totally inspired word of God and totally true. The author quotes the Bible extensively but does not believe that it is true. It does, he says, contain some facts but so much of it is myth. A quote from his conclusion sums up his belief about Jesus: " When we proclaim with the tradition, that Jesus is 'Christ", that Jesus is 'risen' that Jesus Christ is 'God' we know that we are not asserting scientific facts."
I find it very sad that someone who has taken so much time studying the Scriptures and quotes and misquotes them extensively could reject the Jesus of the Bible for simply someone that we should admire and seek to emulate.
March 29, 2025
Reading Christ Actually felt like listening to someone who has wrestled deeply with faith, history, and the ache of contradiction—and still chooses to love through the questions. James Carroll writes with both intellect and tenderness, inviting the reader into a deeply personal exploration of who Jesus was, and who he might be for a world that no longer blindly believes but still yearns for meaning.
What touched me most was Carroll’s honesty. As a former priest and lifelong seeker, he doesn’t try to reclaim Christianity through doctrine or dogma, but through memory, humility, and justice. He reminds us that Christ’s message—radical love, mercy, and resistance to empire—is not locked in the past, but waiting to be lived, especially now. This isn’t a book that tells you what to believe—it’s a companion for anyone brave enough to ask, “What does it mean to follow love in a wounded world?” It left me quieter, more thoughtful, and oddly, more hopeful.
What touched me most was Carroll’s honesty. As a former priest and lifelong seeker, he doesn’t try to reclaim Christianity through doctrine or dogma, but through memory, humility, and justice. He reminds us that Christ’s message—radical love, mercy, and resistance to empire—is not locked in the past, but waiting to be lived, especially now. This isn’t a book that tells you what to believe—it’s a companion for anyone brave enough to ask, “What does it mean to follow love in a wounded world?” It left me quieter, more thoughtful, and oddly, more hopeful.
February 24, 2023
A heartfelt and intelligent attempt to create a picture of the historical Jesus that a modern worshiper can accept and also one that preserves his Jewishness, thus presumably putting a brake on the church's long history of persecuting and despising Jews. Sometimes Carroll leaps to rather large conclusions from rather meager evidence, and sometimes he glosses over data that might disturb his thesis, but he certainly comes up with an attractive portrait of Jesus, and for the most part it is persuasive. My one reservation about his argument was his claim that Jesus was worshiped as divine from the very start of the Christian movement. I don't think the first three gospels present Jesus as divine; in those gospels "son of God" seems to mean something quite different from what it comes to mean in later church theology and signifies, rather, that God has conferred upon Jesus some of his own authority, glory, and power-- has "exalted" him, as some of the New Testament documents put it. The gospel of John, written somewhat later than the other three, does indeed present him as divine, and I wonder that Carroll didn't make more of the link between this "high christology" and John's virulent animus against "the Jews."
June 13, 2019
This excellent book placed far more emphasis than most authors on the effect of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and other violence against the Jews on the authors of the Gospels and other books of the Christian New Testament.
Very straightforward about how little the author believes we can separate the "real" Jesus, or Christ, from the literary figures by those names -- he may surprise some readers by the level of faith he expresses as the book reaches its conclusion.
I find his ideas very compatible with my own in Unified Field Theology.
Very straightforward about how little the author believes we can separate the "real" Jesus, or Christ, from the literary figures by those names -- he may surprise some readers by the level of faith he expresses as the book reaches its conclusion.
I find his ideas very compatible with my own in Unified Field Theology.
May 25, 2018
The beginning premises we’re solid. The initial history and facts were on point. And then for some reason without citing any reasoning he relates some points to just fairytales. Where his theory still had holes or rather unexplainable specifics The author quite unlike him pushes it aside as figments and stretches of the interpreters imagination. Otherwise well written history but the agenda of the author Fails on several points due to lack of support
August 23, 2017
Several worthwhile insights and thoughtful questions of discussion, but in trying to tow the line between both divinity of Jesus and skepticism, it occasionally feels like the author is trying to have it both ways, but this is a common personal tension and certainly opens up consideration for those who may feel the same doubts and are struggling with how to frame their conversation
December 29, 2018
Wonderful book. The consideration of who is Jesus today goes beyond a consideration of the historical Jesus and asks us to think about who is Christ actually. Along the way Carroll invites us to discover our humanity through the imitation of Jesus in our daily lives.
June 28, 2021
Excellent! Best for serious biblical students and spiritual persons who have given up on institutional Christianity.
August 7, 2023
Microscopic. Myopic. Miserly.
Pretentious. Presumptuous. Pompous.
Pretentious. Presumptuous. Pompous.
May 13, 2015
***I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway***
I really only take one issue with this book and that is with the very beginning. The author introduces himself as a Catholic (former priest) and that sets up expectations in the reader about what biases may be present in the book. This, however, is very misleading. It would be much more informative and reasonable for the author to introduce himself as a believer in a symbolic and interpreted Jesus as he makes it clear later in the book that he sees miracles, the resurrection and other tenets of "mainstream" Christian faith as things that did not actually happen.
Beyond the introduction, I really enjoyed this book. It is very well researched with ample citations. The first half of the book sets up a historical basis for viewing Jesus's life in context to the society and time He lived in. That was very informative and written in an easy and flowing style for laymen like me. The second half delves more into the philosophy that arises from viewing Jesus that way and what it means for our modern society. The author, in multiple places, makes the excellent point that we must evaluate how we look at morality, the human condition, and religion differently in light of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He talks at length about the disconnect between modern Christians and their atheist/agnostic counterparts and how that disconnect is, in part, due to a disconnect between modern Christians and the life of Jesus Christ.
I do not expect that most readers of this book will agree entirely with the author's belief system, but that does not detract from the excellent points that are made about faith and living a life in imitation of Christ. As he points out, the one thing that is not in debate about the life of Jesus Christ is that He has inspired billions upon billions of people to feel a connection with God...whether that is defined traditionally or simply as the awe-inspiring power of the cosmos.
I really only take one issue with this book and that is with the very beginning. The author introduces himself as a Catholic (former priest) and that sets up expectations in the reader about what biases may be present in the book. This, however, is very misleading. It would be much more informative and reasonable for the author to introduce himself as a believer in a symbolic and interpreted Jesus as he makes it clear later in the book that he sees miracles, the resurrection and other tenets of "mainstream" Christian faith as things that did not actually happen.
Beyond the introduction, I really enjoyed this book. It is very well researched with ample citations. The first half of the book sets up a historical basis for viewing Jesus's life in context to the society and time He lived in. That was very informative and written in an easy and flowing style for laymen like me. The second half delves more into the philosophy that arises from viewing Jesus that way and what it means for our modern society. The author, in multiple places, makes the excellent point that we must evaluate how we look at morality, the human condition, and religion differently in light of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He talks at length about the disconnect between modern Christians and their atheist/agnostic counterparts and how that disconnect is, in part, due to a disconnect between modern Christians and the life of Jesus Christ.
I do not expect that most readers of this book will agree entirely with the author's belief system, but that does not detract from the excellent points that are made about faith and living a life in imitation of Christ. As he points out, the one thing that is not in debate about the life of Jesus Christ is that He has inspired billions upon billions of people to feel a connection with God...whether that is defined traditionally or simply as the awe-inspiring power of the cosmos.
March 29, 2016
A thought-provoking alternate take on the prevailing conception of the Christian Jesus. By necessity, this is a highly speculative work, and Carroll sometimes blurs the line between personal conjecture and reasonable assumptions based on historical scholarship. Nonetheless, it is an important and challenging read for anyone who is religious or interested in religion as a social/historical force.
Carroll is a former Catholic priest, and I think one of the reasons his arguments are effective is because he approaches them as a modern thinker eager to access the essential truth of the tradition, rather than as a troublemaker trying to tear it down. As a Catholic myself, I'm not sure I'm ready to be as liberal as Carroll in my reading of Christ's divinity, but it is healthy and holy to examine one's faith with a critical eye.
Above all, Christ Actually serves as a powerful reminder that the Bible, no matter how divinely inspired, was written, revised, and passed along by people living in a time of apocalyptic upheaval. To read it without this knowledge at hand is pointless.
Carroll is a former Catholic priest, and I think one of the reasons his arguments are effective is because he approaches them as a modern thinker eager to access the essential truth of the tradition, rather than as a troublemaker trying to tear it down. As a Catholic myself, I'm not sure I'm ready to be as liberal as Carroll in my reading of Christ's divinity, but it is healthy and holy to examine one's faith with a critical eye.
Above all, Christ Actually serves as a powerful reminder that the Bible, no matter how divinely inspired, was written, revised, and passed along by people living in a time of apocalyptic upheaval. To read it without this knowledge at hand is pointless.
June 2, 2015
James Carroll's affirmation of religious identity provides insight and understanding to the historical Jesus genre. Jesus and Paul were Jews. The Roman War against the Jewish people was the backdrop for the New Testament Gospels. Paul wrote before the complete annihilation of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple. All of these statements are recognized in other historical Jesus literature, but Carroll drives these points home in a way that gives new meaning to the historical figures of Jesus and Paul and the myth-making surrounding their lives.
It would have been better, however, if Carroll had ended before he wrote the last two chapters of the book. He moves from critical insight to kerygmatic statements that seem misplaced. Although he is an excellent theologian, his kerygmatic statements seem to wonder looking for a way to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion.
Again, this is an important contributor to the historical Jesus field.
It would have been better, however, if Carroll had ended before he wrote the last two chapters of the book. He moves from critical insight to kerygmatic statements that seem misplaced. Although he is an excellent theologian, his kerygmatic statements seem to wonder looking for a way to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion.
Again, this is an important contributor to the historical Jesus field.
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