Timothy Freke and Peter
Gandy, The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom.
Harmony Books (Crown Publishing/Random House), 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Immanuel
Kant was so disgusted with the religious violence of the eighteenth
century that he wrote his classic Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, in which he offered an olive branch for future
peaceful coexistence among faiths. His palliative was Enlightenment
Piety, the rational religion of pure morality. If rival religions would
concentrate on the moral core they hold in common instead of majoring in
the minor doctrines that separate them, there would be no more jihads or
crusades or pogroms. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy are following in
Kant’s footsteps, writing in the wake of the religious violence of our
own day, symbolized most dramatically by the attacks on the World Trade
Towers on September 11, 2001. They offer their own prescription for
religious peace, and theirs is the rejection of literal dogmas in favor,
not of ethical monotheism, but rather of the Gnostic mysticism they
discern as the underlying essence of all faiths. If we could all agree
to journey inward, we would meet in the same still point, safe in the
eye of the theological storm. It is a noble effort.
The book calls forth
another historical parallel, that of the rebellion against hidebound,
ironclad Lutheran Orthodoxy in the eighteenth century. Two very
different movements made common cause against the orthodox juggernaut:
Pietism and Rationalist biblical criticism. Both had good reason to try
to throw off the chafing yoke of Lutheran orthodoxy. So for a while they
embraced a strategic alliance, like the Communists and the Kuomintang
united against the Japanese invaders. As soon as the common foe was
defeated, however, the two allies sprang apart and began mutual sniping,
and thus Fundamentalist pietism and the Higher Criticism are bitter foes
today. Likewise, Freke and Gandy represent an attempted union of
biblical (and history-of-religions) criticism and mystical piety (which,
painting with an exceedingly broad brush, they call “Gnostic”). Whether
the twins will begin again to fight in the womb remains to be seen.
The book encourages a
root-and-branch repudiation of Literalism in all religions, claiming
that all fundamentalisms are fossilized shells and husks from which the
living essence has either withered or escaped long ago. They divide the
book into two sections, “The Baby” and “The Bathwater,” suggesting what
the reader ought to reject and retain. In this the authors follow
Marcion’s precedent in composing a set of “Antitheses,” a
ground-clearing exercise drawing a dramatic contrast between Literal and
Mystical forms of faith. I will deal only with the first, critical half,
the demolition job, since the second is more in the nature of a
motivational or devotional exposition, not the stock in trade of this
journal.
The criticism of the
doctrines and scriptures of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam
is unrelenting and unsparing. Much of it smacks (as I have already
hinted) of rationalistic, almost “village atheist” religion bashing. The
moral blemishes of the ancient writings are paraded as unworthy of these
scriptures’ inherited and idolatrous position as the ostensible Word of
God. Though the authors, in the second half, will back up and calm down
a bit, allowing that a nostalgic, aesthetic, and metaphorical use of
scripture and ritual may be salutary, in the first half they are
merciless. “Paul was right about the Tanakh being crap” (p. 52). Of
course it is his previous achievements and his remembered smug pride in
them that Paul disdained as crap, not the sacred texts of his tradition.
But whatever Paul meant, it is throwing the baby out with the bathwater
so to dismiss the whole Old Testament.
The authors try to show how
no scripture is what it is cracked up to be, especially by Literalist
idolaters. To that end, they survey Old Testament Minimalism to
demonstrate the utterly non-historical character of Israelite narrative,
not that that is a fault, but it sure yanks the prayer rug out from
under Literalists. Some of the claims made in passing invite debate,
such as the claim that “the Tanakh… was written, compiled and
extensively edited, to serve as the mythological justification for the
Hasmonean desire to rule all of Palestine.” (p. 40). But why would a
Levitical dynasty go to the trouble to create a Messianic paradigm that
gave them so much trouble—by making the royal line Davidic? Well, that’s
just one question to be pursued elsewhere.
One observation/contention
that has added relevance, more than the authors themselves seem to
realize, is that the saga of Joshua was of very recent vintage, stemming
from Hasmonean times (p. 64). If that is true, then the burden borne by
traditional Christ Myth theorists (Freke and Gandy’s own forbears) like
J.M. Robertson and Benjamin W. Smith is lightened: they argued for the
survival from archaic times of a hypothetical “Jesus/Joshua cult” that
resurfaced in the first century as the Jesus myth. But if Joshua was a
recent invention, then little separates him from a similarly mythical
Christian Jesus.
The criticism of Islam and
Muhammad (a “mobster”) also harks back to the Rationalist and Christian
polemic against Muhammad as a faker and false prophet. That is a bit of
an oversimplification, as most historians of religion would admit these
days. On the other hand, it is refreshing not to read a Politically
Correct whitewash job like Karen Armstrong’s either. And while Freke and
Gandy are trying to demolish the credibility of the Koran, it is
surprising they do not utilize the recent radical criticism of Gunter
Luling, Michael Cook and Patricia Crone and others. These scholars have
shredded the conventional model of Islamic origins quite as severely as
the Minimalists have shattered the Old Testament “history.” One
intriguing hint Freke and Gandy do provide, though, is this: “The Qur’an
makes some impressive claims about itself. It states categorically,
‘This is the book wherein is no doubt.’ Yet even this statement itself
is open to doubt. It can’t be a revelation from God to Muhammad, because
in Muhammad’s lifetime there was no ‘book” (p. 86). Bingo! All such
references are grossly anachronistic, giving the lie to the notion that
the Koran was a compilation of fragmentary transcripts and oral
traditions. They rather demonstrate and presuppose that the Koran was
written within a fictive frame of reference, as if the authors of the
Bible were to refer to “the Bible.”
Freke and Gandy’s
characterizations of Fundamentalists of all faiths seem at first to be
severe to the point of caricature, but, virtually in all cases, a
moment’s thought shows the caricatures are self-portraits painted by the
Fundamentalists themselves. The criticisms are damning yet largely
accurate, it seems to me. One regrettable point, however, is this book’s
sharing of the liberal tendency to lump worldly Methodist George W. Bush
in with prancing shamans and brutal theocrats like Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson. Similarly, the authors’ idea that, had the President simply
announced that America forgives its jihadist enemies and invited them to
come to the table for dialogue, we would have entered upon the path to
millennial peace, is perilously naïve. It is precisely such gestures
that our enemies, with all the feverish fanaticism Freke and Gandy
ascribe to them, view as signs of decadence and cowardice, prompting
them only to further acts of violence against what they perceive as a
spent and pathetic paper tiger. One wonders that the ivory tower these
authors inhabit managed to survive the frontal assault upon it by the
hijacked airliners of 9/11.