Toto

This is a note on Charlotte Allen?s The Human Christ. This will not be a full fledged review, since the book itself is a review of historical research, and is too packed with details to summarize here in any reasonable amount of space.

The book is definitely a lot of fun, with a combination of scholarship and gossip. After an opening chapter on Israel about the time Jesus is alleged to have lived and a chapter on the controversies in the early church, Allen traces views of Jesus through the intellectual history of the modern age, from rationalism to Hegelianism to existentialism to romanticism to deconstructionism. The theme can be summarized as: everyone finds what they are looking for in Jesus. If you're a liberal, Jesus is a liberal. If you're an anti-establishment rebel, that's Jesus.

The book looks like it should be useful as a summary of a broad range of theories of the historical Jesus, including French, German, American and English scholars, novelists, and political figures, not to mention Hollywood producers and modern American scholars. Allen draws connections where you might not expect them - George Elliot got her start as a translator of Bultman. Allen thinks our current image of Jesus came from English Deists, who tried to extract an ordinary human from the gospels. She traces how the description of Jesus' relation to Judaism changed according to German politics.

On the other hand, Allen covers too much for one book. By the 10th Chapter, she seems to be running out of breath as she catalogues yet one more theory, and the reader keeps waiting for the punch line - how is she going to tie this all together? By the end of the book, it feels like she has just run out of space or time, and there is no satisfactory conclusion.

But her political agenda is clear: the only people searching for a historical Jesus are those who are dissatisfied with the One True Church and foolishly want to reform it or reshape it. Allen's mission is to mock them and disparage their efforts. I finally realized that it is because she is bent on discrediting the quest for the historical Jesus, that she is happy to entertain us with quips, put-downs, and features on the more outrageous theories.

About the only scholar associated with the HJ that she doesn?t lampoon or sneer at is Luke Timothy Johnson, who gave a glowing review to her book (without pointing out that she credits him in the Acknowledgements section with reading and commenting on galleys of the book.)

I wondered how someone who wrote the chapter that she did on the struggles over doctrine in the church in its first 300 years could remain a faithful Catholic. Once you realize that Catholic doctrine was the result of political compromises, not to mention arrests, banishments, or worse of the opposition, how can you still believe? There is a clue when she discusses Bultman:

p.78

To counter this, Allen quotes Jacques Elul to say that the modern age has just created new myths of progress, the worship of science, and belief in rights that are just as superstitious as any ancient faith, and leaves it at that. She is in effect using post-modern criticisms against modern scientific thinking, as if this would just reinstate the ancient superstitions, to which one can only say "huh"?? I think Metacrock tried a similar argument, but it just doesn't work. Scientists may have their own shortsighted biases, but they still understand electricity and do a better job of curing illnesses than Jesus could.

I do not have the background to check all of her assertions. I notice a few glaring polemical errors - she says or implies that liberation theology died when the Sandanistas lost the election in Nicaragua, but I am sure it had more to do with the anti-communism of John Paul II and his reassigning or silencing of any priest with a leftist orientation. Paula Friedricksen charges that "she has misinterpreted earlier material, mismanaged historical information, and missed entirely what remains intellectually and morally compelling in current research." You would not know from her dismissive treatment of Crossan that there is anything more to his theories than some wooly minded social science and academic resentment.

One wonders what the difference is between Allen and Earl Doherty. Neither one thinks that a Jesus can be constructed from historical research. What Robert Price wrote about Luke Timothy Johnson applies here:
I can see why this book has not become popular, and is not out in paperback. It is too intellectual for most fundamentalists, but too conservative politically and too mean spirited for liberals.

So what motivates Allen? Her politics look like a more intelligent version of Ann Coulter. Consider this piece written for the National Review:

After reading this sentiment, I was glad I had bought a used copy of the book.

rodahi

I read Charlotte Allen's The Human Christ last year. (I think I paid around seven dollars for a used PAPERBACK at Half/Price Books in Austin. The publisher is Lion Publishing, 1998.) I pretty much agree with your review.