Robert Wright’s “One World, Under God” begins with the assertion that most New Testament scholars now regard the Gospel of Mark as significantly older than the other gosples, perhaps not much newer than the oldest writings in the New Testament, Paul’s letters. Mark stands out from the other gospels in that the sayings of Jesus recorded there are all quite harsh:
The Jesus in Mark, far from calmly forgiving his killers, seems surprised by the Crucifixion and hardly sanguine about it (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). In Mark, there is no Sermon on the Mount, and so no Beatitudes, and there is no good Samaritan; Jesus’ most salient comment on ethnic relations is to compare a woman to a dog because she isn’t from Israel.
The gentle Jesus meek and mild whom liberal Christians preach and the “great moral teacher” whom moderate secularists and ecumenical-minded non-Christians praise appears in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. If these accounts took shape as long after Mark’s as Wright says they may have done, then it is possible that they were influenced by Paul:
Of course, since Paul was writing after the time of Jesus, it’s been natural to assume he got these ideas from the teachings of Jesus. But when you realize that Jesus utters the word love only twice in the Gospel of Mark—compared with Paul’s using it more than 10 times in a single letter to the Romans—the reverse scenario suggests itself: maybe the Gospel of Mark, which was written not long after the end of Paul’s ministry, largely escaped Pauline influence, and thus left more of the real Jesus intact than Gospels written later, after Paul’s legacy had spread.
This hypothesis cuts against the grain of New Testament criticism, which at least since the Enlightenment has tended to cast Paul as the main figure in an effort to make Jesus seem less like a sweetheart and more like an apocalyptic crank than he really was. Perhaps the opposite was the case, and it was Paul who invented the idea of Christianity as a religion of boundless good will.
Wright spends most of the article using business language (for example, subject headings like “Paul as CEO,” “Barriers to Entry,” ”Getting to Non-Zero”) to lay out his idea that the reason Paul might have wanted to invent such an idea was that he was responding to the same kinds of pressures that businesspeople respond to these days, and that by expanding the appeal of the Christian “brand” to non-Jews he was acting to increase its long-term viability. He compares this strategy- “Paul’s business plan”- to efforts other religious movements have made to reach out beyond the communities they inherited, and suggests that tolerance-themed religions may have a market advantage in times of globalization. This part strikes me as absolute bushwa, but the opening sections about the relationship of the Gospel of Mark to other documents in the New Testament is very clear and handy.
Elsewhere in the issue, a note describes the work of Eric Seed, who founded a company that brings alcoholic beverages once thought extinct back to the American market. Some of these, like an Austrian walnut liqueur that I’ve been wondering about ever since I read the piece, Seed imports from out of the way places; others, such as Crème de Violette, he commissions chemists to make from old recipes.
Christopher Hitchens (I know, I know, I don’t like him either) writes a piece about Karl Marx’ strengths as an economist, conceding along the way that Marx’ theoretical framework does not include an explanation for the phenomenon of price. That would seem to represent rather a serious drawback. Hitchens might have mentioned that Marx died in 1883, and that Alfred Marshall published the first really coherent account of the law of supply and demand only in 1881, so that it is somewhat unfair to tax Marx overmuch with his failure to include a pricing mechanism in his theory. One point for which I am indebted to this piece is the citation of Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe. Hitchens writes:
In my opinion, therefore, the most powerful Marxist book of the past four decades was Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative, which showed how and why the East German state and economy were certain to implode. Communism, said Bahro—one of its former functionaries—was compelled to educate and train people up to a certain level. But beyond that level, it forbade them to think, or to inquire, or to use their initiative. Thus, while it created a vast amount of “surplus consciousness,” it could find no way of employing this energy except by squandering and dissipating and ultimately repressing it. The conflict between the forces and relations of production in the eastern part of the homeland of Karl Marx thus became a locus classicus of the sort of contradiction he had originally identified. (Incidentally, and as Václav Havel, following Heidegger, once pointed out in an address to a joint session of Congress, this makes a strong case for “consciousness” having a say in the determination of “social being.”)
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