Review: King Jesus

King Jesus King Jesus by Robert Graves
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have tried reading this book a couple of times before, but this time I persevered. Let me offer fair warning that, although I am usually careful not to void spoilers, I will not take such precautions in this review and what follows will be chock full of them.

The first part of the book is entertaining enough but made tedious by the technicalities concerning various Jewish sects and regions around the inception of the Roman Empire. There is ample talk of Pharisees, Sadducees, Philistines, Zealots, Edomites, Samaritans, and countless other denominations without any context. The reader is supposed to know about them or look them up elsewhere. Another hindrance to the flow of the story is Graves' characteristic deep dives into mythological themes and his attempt to form complicated - and at times dubious - connections between the various religions and their origins, always culminating in the concepts of the Triple Goddess, the Sacred King and his Tanist, and the Sacred Grove. These themes are familiar to readers of Robert Graves' mythologies but probably to no one else.

To the reader who successfully navigates around these shoals of Robert Graviness, the story that emerges is that Jesus is not the son of God but of Mary, matrilineal heiress of David, and Antipater, son of Kind Herod and rightful heir to the throne of Israel. This position, though vastly improbable, resolves the apparent contradiction in the New Testament that claims that Jesus is a descendant of David from Joseph, but also Joseph is not his real father, and at the same time eliminates an unnecessary miracle. The story of Jesus' birth, together with a parallel and equally unlikely narrative of king Herod trying to restore a pre-Jehovah religion based on the Egyptian God Set (long story), occupies half of the book.

I found the part that follows, Jesus as a child and young man, quite boring as it is filled with lengthy discussions about Mosaic law and various other religious and mythological topics. I am guilty of skipping a few pages here and there. Then at some point, the miracles start, which surprised me because I had assumed that the author was going to avoid miracles. But Robert had other plans. He accepts some miracles as valid, mainly healings and exorcisms, whereas others, like the water into wine, he considers merely symbolic acts that were later misinterpreted as miracles by the ignorant Greek Christians. It turns out that the author does not object to miracles as much as he objects to mythological inconsistency.

The last part of the book follows the New Testament narrative quite closely, but with a typical Graves twist, although the acts and words spoken are re-enacted exactly, the intentions of the people behind them were completely different. The big innovation is that Jesus realizes that the time of Salvation has not come and completely changes his plan from establishing the New Kingdom to becoming the Scapegoat that is supposed to absorb all the sins of the people of Israel. This interpretation serves to explain the "angry" Jesus incidents such as the cleansing of the Temple and the cursing of the fig tree. There is also an amusing invention of alternative motives concerning the behavior of governor Pontius Pilate and the Tetrarch (for Judea no longer has a king) Herod Antipas. In the end, the book is an alternative interpretation of Christianity that makes it consistent with its Hebraic and mythological roots, and as such, it is kind of a religious book, though the author did not care to develop it into dogma.

View all my reviews

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Image
The Travels of Ibn Battutah by Ibn Battuta My rating: 4 of 5 stars Reading the travels of Ibn Battutah was a long journey. I got a nice edition with gilded edge paper and an elegant ribbon book marker. The books is diminutive in size, but thanks to its very thin pages and tiny print, which makes it hard to read in less than perfect lighting, it packs almost 450 pages. Thankfully, it is an abridged edition. I have no idea how big the full version is. It is a hobby of mine to read ancient history by ancient writers. I am not interested in accuracy - after all history mutates every couple generations - but I am curious to experience that distant world through the eyes of people who lived in it. I have mostly read Greek, Roman, and assorted European authors, so when I found out about this book, I was very much looking forward to the novel experience of reading a Muslim author of the 14th century who traveled in lands where the European seldom or never ve...
Read more

Review: Probability with Martingales

Image
Probability with Martingales by David Williams My rating: 5 of 5 stars There is a large gap between classical and modern (measure theoretic) probability theory in that the later seems so much harder. However, without measure theory probability theory lacks a solid theoritical basis and leads to unsurmantouble problems in tryingto define stochastic processes. I found this to be the best instructional book for those who want to transition from classical to the measure theoretic probability. I am not sure it is the best introductory book for measure theory and Lebesgue integration although the author offers a complete exposition in the first chapters. It is however an excellent exposition of how to apply these results in probability theory. By reading the book and doing the exercises the reader can gain intuition and start formulating probabilistic problems in this framework. View all my reviews
Read more

Review: I, Lucifer

Image
I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan My rating: 3 of 5 stars This a story told by the Devil who occupies the mortal body of a writer called Declan Gunn, an obvious anagram of the authors name. As is to be expected, Lucifer is quite a character, so the book is quite entertaining, though not consistently. The narrative often wonders, by Satan makes it clear from the beginning that that's his style and the reader better get on board with it. Interestingly, the book sticks very closely to the traditions of Christian dogma and tries to work within the framework. Lucifer's rebellion, the garden, the fall, Christ, the resurrection, are all there together with an omnipotent and omniscient God. The book briefly and superficially explores the paradoxical implications of omniscience and free will. There is ample criticism of our race and the choices we made, and how they make Satan happy. Some passages I found particularly entertaining, like the one where Satan te...
Read more