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Book Review God bothering

GORDON PARSONS doubts that the person of Jesus should be separated from the legacy of Christianity 

I Judge No One 
By David Lloyd Dusenbury
Hurst, £25

READERS of this book will be drawn to it principally by its subtitle, A Political Life of Jesus. Could anyone doubt, given the role that Christianity has played in world power-politics throughout the last two millennia, that the founder of the religion was essentially a political figure?

David Lloyd Dusenbury, philosopher and historian, would agree but claims that “we tend to confuse the person of Jesus with the legacy of Christianity.”

Rejecting what he terms the “modern theory of Jesus” first promulgated by the17th century Enlightenment philosopher, Reimarus, for whom Jesus was “a Zealot-style aspirant to sovereignty in a last-days kingdom of Israel,” Dusenbury, like Spinoza, Neitzsche and Kant, considers Jesus to have been an ethical revolutionary.

The author’s breadth and depth of scholarly research is impressive. As Jesus’s sayings, gestures and scenes only come to us from the gospels, Dusenbury’s tortuous wrestling with, or “clarifying the meaning” of the questions these pose take up much of the book.

He handles the lack of “real dissonance” between the gospels by seeking “deep structure … not a harmonised chronology.”

There is some validity in this approach as Jesus communicated largely in parables that even his disciples found confusing.

Dusenbury admits: “In contemporary terms … there is only one sort of politics represented in any of his sayings — and that is … Realpolitik.” 

Where he engages with various later commentators, he finds it difficult to accept that all portrayals seen through the lens of time are fundamentally subjective. 

For instance, in the chapter dealing with Jesus and the Presentiment of Death, he acknowledges the possibility of accounts being “pious fictions … concocted by Christ believers,” but complains that “the imperative to demythologise the gospels … is too often taken as a licence to banalize the sacred page.”

Dusenbury devotes much attention to what is a key question for him, namely: who was legally responsible for the Crucifixion, the Judeans or the Romans?

After extensive examination of the Judean and Roman legal systems, his conclusion is that Jesus was put to death for a Roman political crime.

“Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself up against Caesar.”

Jesus’s answer to Caesar’s question “Are you the king of the Jews,” “You say so,” has to modern ears the resonance of “You might think that but I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Dusenbury is particularly condemnatory of the “shocking” Christian myth of Pilate’s hand-washing innocence, which leads, he believes, to the subsequent centuries of anti-semitism.

He argues fiercely that the Judeans of Jesus’s period, are not “Hebrews of first-century Antioch nor Judeans of fourth century Rome, much less Juden of 16th-century Saxony or Jews of twenty-first century London.”

Dusenbury labours hard on his interpretive construct of Jesus but the fact is, surely, that whatever the man Jesus may have been, done or said, the influence of his legacy — Christianity — has, like most religions, allied itself with the powerful of the world in domination of the weak.

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