Free Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill

unrealistic. Any Christian who imagines himself morally superior to those who turned away has only to glance at the subsequent history of Christian persecution of Jews to realize that Christians have been far more successful at rejecting Jesus than any Jew has ever been.
    Despite this catastrophic bimillennial failure, the image of Jesus haunts our civilization in exceedingly persistent ways. Everyone knows who he is; everyone knows what he looked like; everyone knows what he expects of us. This consistency, this transultimate
reliability
is found in the four original gospel portraits and has persisted through the ages. As the ancientliturgy of Easter says of him: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega—his are the seasons and the ages.” Or, far less triumphally, as a Jewish woman confided to me recently: “I love Jesus. Don’t get me wrong: I have no interest
whatsoever
in Christianity. But I love Jesus; I feel he belongs to me.”
    At the turn of the new millennium, it may be time for everyone to reassess Jesus. I hope that the process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation will soon have progressed far enough that Jews may reexamine their automatic (and completely understandable) fear of all things Christian and acknowledge Jesus as one of their own, not as the Messiah, but as a brother who called God
Abba.
For Christians, it may be time to acknowledge that we have misunderstood Jesus in virtually every way that matters. AsRaymond Brown was fond of remarking, if Jesus were to return to earth, the first thing we would do is crucify him again.
    But whether we are Jew or Christian, believer or atheist, the figure of Jesus—as final Jewish prophet, as innocent and redeeming victim, as ideal human being—is threaded through our society and folded into our imagination in such a way that it cannot be excised. He is the mysterious ingredient that laces everything we taste, the standard by which all moral actions are finally judged. As one poet, W. H. Auden, echoing centuries of others, says affectionately and without regard to dogma or creed:
        
He is the Way.
        
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
        
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
        
He is the Truth.
        
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
        
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
        
He is the Life.
        
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
        
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
    1 The second half of the Book of Zechariah, written soon after the conquests of Alexander, abounds in Messianic references that thrilled the first Christians: the entry of a humble Messiah, astride an ass, into Jerusalem (as Jesus would enter just before his Passion); the image of sheep deserting the shepherd, interpreted as a prophecy of the disciples abandoning Jesus; the “thirty pieces of silver, the sum at which the Precious One was priced,” which would turn out to be the amount Judas would be paid for identifying Jesus to the soldiers who arrested him.

Notes
and
Sources
    I MEAN TO GIVE HERE not an exhaustive bibliography of everything I consulted (which, given the enormous accumulation of biblical and New Testament studies over the past half century, would dangerously increase the size of this book) but a sense of what I found most valuable. As I did in Volume Two of this series, I again recommend the six volumes
of The Anchor Bible Dictionary
(New York, 1992), now helpfully available on CD-ROM, as the best of all initial research tools. For those who prefer a more compact instrument, both
The Oxford Companion to the Bible
(New York, 1993) and
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), the latter containing particularly well focused overviews, are also highly recommended. Other excellent sources of information for the non-specialist are the back issues of
Bible Review
and
Biblical Archaeology