only the messiah but God’s own son, to
be worshiped as divine? even though
he had been crucified as a criminal, and
then purportedly had risen from the
dead, yet somehow had done so with-
out making a bit of historical differ-
ence? Oh, but just wait, said the early
christians: He would; he was the whole
point of apocalyptic.
Allow me to provide some back-
ground here: The term “son of God” is
not—as Jenkins seems to make out—a
more or less direct connection be -
tween Jewish tradition and future
ideas and between the two developing
communities: The christian use of it
for Jesus actually made a sharp side-
track. Jenkins cites fewer and less var-
ious scriptural instances of the term
than there are (in fact, those ranging
from angels to kings to ordinary fol-
lowers of Jesus could be referred to as
sons of God) and leans on the loftiest
connotations. It’s almost as if he
thinks that institutional Judaism
wouldn’t have minded what in reality
would have been a bone-shaking de -
tour in theology; that only the Jewish
War and other overwhelming military
and political events separated Jewish
and christian destinies.
Of course, none of the missionaries
preaching Jesus would have added vol-
untarily to the confused impressions of
pagans, whose own religion was full of
male gods having (violent or deceitful)
physical sex with mortal women and
begetting half-divine heroes. neverthe -
less, just at this one angle, the figure of
Jesus must have seemed to Jewish
leaders—and to the communities that
trusted them—to be leading a strike
force for blasphemy. no wonder
Jewish authorities disposed of even an
apostle such as James the Just, a
paragon of Temple piety (much unlike
Paul)—by some accounts hurling him
off a Temple pinnacle for stoning after
he refused to renounce the divinity of
Jesus. To call the early followers of
Jesus “a Jewish sect” would be like call-
ing whichever Quakers (whether for-
mer catholics or not) might try to
participate in the catholic Mass on their
own terms “a catholic sect.” It doesn’t
work that way.
but in other respects, Crucible of Faithis
an extremely good book, and I recommend
it to everyone who would like a nuanced
and vivid look at shared origins.W
Hen a novel buttresses
itself with not one but
three A-list epigraphs
(Pliny, D. H. Lawrence,
Truffaut); when it opens, with references
to the mortgage bubble, ISIS, and assassi-
nation fears, on the day of Obama’s inau-
guration; and when it bears the mythically
grandiose title “The Golden House,” it
has set itself a herculean feat not to be at
best a letdown and at worst an embar-
rassment. When it borrows its template
from The Great Gatsby and then, as a sop
to discussion groups, mentions Jay Gatz
by page twelve, it has charted a course
toward the sun on wings of Kleenex.
Make that Semtex.
The term for this in tragedy is “hubris,”
which is the sort of thing that Salman
Rushdie’s narrator, a young aspiring
auteur named René (“call me René,” he
says, before trying to justify this superflu-
ous Melvillean allusion), shouldn’t spend
so much time explaining to the reader.
Rushdie’s Gatsby is a mysterious,
fabulously wealthy man named nero
Golden, which is not his real name and
which, here on Planet earth if not in
Rushdie’s imagination, nobody smart
enough to amass fabulous wealth would
ever use while trying to give his past crim-
inal associates the slip. nero’s fiddle, we
learn on page one, is a 1745 Guadagnini
violin. (Reading about Golden’s infinity-
times-a-million wealth is like being
trapped in a christie’s catalogue when it’s
not like being trapped in a Skymall one.)A Jewish intellectual such as Philo of
Alexandria (approximately 25 b.c.e. to
50 c.e.) could apply dualism in the name
of cosmopolitan assimilation; and he
probably had plenty of company, given
the great currency and prestige of Plato’s
paradigms. In Genesis, the single, all-
powerful Hebrew God was said simply
to have created the world. but, pagan
scholars of the time asked, didn’t there
need to be another deity to do this, an
inferior demiurge (“workman”) to craft
inferior material existence? (He and the
god of the immaterial would actually
battle it out, in the mythology of
Gnostic and Gnostic-related sects.)
Philo was willing to integrate this story
into Judaism, preferring the Stoic term
“Logos” or “Word” to “demiurge.”
Therefore, writings such as the first
chapter of the Gospel of John, where “in
the beginning” God does not create
directly but is instead connected to the
Word, through which everything comes
into being, require a fresh look. There is
Greek philosophical influence, for sure,
but does it come by way of the deeply
trodden path of Jewish thinkers?
This is an impressive book. Only on
one important count is Jenkins’s argu-
ment of precedence and continuity
overstated. For a long time, it has been
fashionable to speak of early christianity
as a “Jewish sect” and to play down
Greco-Roman influences. (Disclosure: In
my 2010 book Paul among the People, I
play them up.) And Jenkins falls in easily
with this line of thinking.
but modern Jews give plausible
explanations of what the absolute deal-
breakers were for Jews, from the start of
the Jesus movement. And they are exas-
perated that the christian scholarly
community (Jenkins is a distinguished
professor of history at baylor) tends not
to listen but instead to insist on one big
happy family—so happy, it’s implied,
that the older part of it shouldn’t mind
moving in with the younger. I wouldn’t
argue for interfaith sensitivity at the
expense of fact, but in this connection,
Jenkins has neither on his side.
A “Jewish sect.” Says who? Paul, of
course, thought that following Jesus
was the only logical fulfillment of
Judaism. but where is the evidence that
Paul was ever allowed to lower his
hopeful bottom onto a synagogue bench
once the congregants heard from him
that the out-of-nowhere Jesus was not
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 45
The Golden House, by Salman Rushdie
(Random House, 400 pp., $28.99)Mr. Beck is a writer living in Hudson, N.Y.Sterile
Cleverness
STEFAN BECKText