NO ONE CAN BRING THEMSELF TO BELIEVE hE WAS TRULY HUMAN:

Kierkegaard relates a chilling parable in "The Sickness Unto Death." An emperor summons a poor day laborer. The man never dreamed that the emperor even knew of his existence. The emperor tells him that he wants to have him as his son-in-law, a bizarre announcement that must strike the man as something he would never dare tell the world, for fear of being mocked; it seems as if the emperor wanted only to make a fool of his subject. Now, Kierkegaard says, suppose that this event was never made a public fact; no evidence exists that the emperor ever summoned the laborer, so that his only recourse would be blind faith. How many would have the courage to believe? Christ's kingdom is like that, Kierkegaard says.

The French writer Emmanuel Carrère doesn't mention Kierkegaard in his latest book, "The Kingdom" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), but the Danish philosopher--the Danish Christian lunatic, one might say--hovers over the book as God's face is said to have hovered over the waters during the creation of the world. The Kierkegaard whose work is scarred by the great "offense" of Christianity, by its shocking challenge to reason and empirical evidence; who claimed that modern philosophy amounts to the premise "I think therefore I am," while Christianity equals the premise "I believe therefore I am"; who writes that the best proof that God exists is the circular proof one was offered as a child ("It is absolutely true, because my father told me so")--that brilliant, mutilated Christian is the unnamed patron of "The Kingdom." An amazingly various book, it narrates the author's crises of religious faith in the nineteen-nineties; combines conventional history and speculative reconstruction to describe the rise of early Christianity; deftly animates the first-century lives and journeys of Paul, Luke, and John; and attempts to explain how an unlikely cult, formed around the death and resurrection of an ascetic lyrical revolutionary, grew into the established Church we know today. "Can one believe that such things are still believed?" Nietzsche asked, scornfully. "And yet they are still believed," Carrère replies. [...]

Jesus was an event within Judaism; it was not especially scandalous that a young Jewish radical went about proclaiming himself the Messiah, ambiguously calling himself "the son of Man," and quarrelling with the rabbis about aspects of the law. But it was another thing entirely to claim--as Paul did--that Jesus came to earth to wash away an original sin contracted by humans in Eden; that this Jesus was crucified by the Romans, was buried, and rose from the dead; and that he would soon come again, in a rescue mission that would usher in a new eternal kingdom. In place of the intimate, familial struggle of the Jews and their God, Paul invokes a strict theology of sin and salvation. Kierkegaard, at his most Protestant-masochistic, says that Christianity's singularity lies in its understanding of sin; if that's true, it was Paul's singularity rather than Jesus'. The new theology transfers Judaism's healthy involvement in this life onto a palpitating anticipation of the next; the present becomes eternity's duller portal.

Paul was born Saul, in Tarsus (now in Turkey), perhaps a few years after the birth of Jesus, whom he never met. He was a devout student of Judaism, and was sent to Jerusalem for schooling with one of the most eminent rabbis of the age. Filled with piety, Saul became an eager persecutor of the early Christians, who were known at this time as "those who follow the Way." As Luke relates in Acts, Saul was on his way to Damascus, to arrest those blasphemers he could find and bring them back to stand trial in Jerusalem, when a light blinded him, and he fell to the ground. Jesus' voice asked him, "Why are you persecuting me?," and then told him to go into the city and await his orders. Paul's conversion was momentous. During the next twenty years, this incandescent missionary visited Christian churches and communities from Corinth to Antioch; and when he could not reach them he wrote to them, setting down the epistles that form (with the Gospels) the core of the New Testament. These letters are, as Carrère explains, the oldest Christian texts (they predate the Gospels by twenty or thirty years), and perhaps the most modern Biblical texts, "the only ones whose author is clearly identified and speaks in his own name."

I can feel my eyes glazing over--alas, I am back in school again--but suddenly the reader wakes up, because Monsieur Carrère, at the blackboard with his maps and dates, is shaking things up. Paul's letters, he says, are like those which Lenin wrote "to various factions of the Second International from Paris, Geneva, and Zurich before 1917." More interesting still, Monsieur Carrère has got hold of a detail in the Letter to the Galatians, in which Paul warns the congregants not to believe rival teachings by impostors: "Even if I came to preach something other than what I have preached, you shouldn't believe me." 

And suddenly the classroom is awake, because Monsieur Carrère is making early Christianity sound like . . . science fiction. In a sparkling, unexpected digression--there are many such in this book--he mentions Dick's fascination with the Stalinist show trials, in which the victims were forced to deny what they had believed their whole lives, and to denounce their earlier selves as unrecognizable monsters. And then he wheels back to Paul. This terror--of the split self, the self who has turned from one pole to its opposite--was largely unknown in the ancient world, Carrère maintains, until Paul's conversion. But because violent, sudden conversion had happened to Paul, "he must have dreaded, more or less consciously, that it could happen to him again." This, Carrère thinks, is the hidden fear behind Paul's admonition to the Galatians:

The person he once was had become a monster to him, and he had become a monster to the person he once was. If the two could have met, the person he once was would have cursed him. He would have prayed to God to let him die, the way the heroes of vampire movies make their friends swear they'll drive a stake through their hearts if they're ever bitten. But that's what they say before it happens. Once contaminated, their only thought is to bite others in turn, in particular those who come at them with a stake to make good the promise they made to the person who no longer exists. I think that Paul's nights must have been haunted by a nightmare of this kind.

Rampant speculation, outrageous psychologizing, insouciantly unscholarly behavior--but diabolically plausible. Carrère is not afraid of Paul's reconverting from Christianity to Judaism (what might be considered the orthodox anxiety) so much as fearful of conversion generally. We are hardly surprised when he adds what we have all been thinking: that he is really talking about himself. He quotes a friend, who tells him, "When you were a Christian, what you feared the most was becoming the skeptic that you're only too happy to be now. But who says you won't change again?" Once a convert, always convertible.

What makes "The Kingdom" so engrossing is this element of personal struggle, our sense that the agnostic author is looking over his shoulder at the armies of faith, as they pursue him to the wall of rationality. That struggle plays out here over the two scandals--the two great "offenses," to use Kierkegaard's favorite word--at the heart of the Christian message. The first is epistemological, and has to do with the claim that Jesus is God made flesh, and that he died and rose again from the dead. The notion of a fully human god, who shares human weaknesses and frailties without any diminution of divinity, is so outrageous that Christians anxiously police Christ's full humanity. Yes, he got angry, and he could be intolerant, enigmatic, even faltering in strength; he died, humanly, on the Cross. But don't for a moment suggest that he slept with Mary Magdalene, or that he spent his teen-age years--well, doing what other teen-age boys are known to do a great deal of. [...]

But, to the extent that Jesus' humanity is outrageous, then so is his divinity. For if Jesus is the Son of God, then God changed--you could say that God converted. The distant, unnameable, vengeful Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible becomes the approachable "Father" who washes away all our sins. As both Jack Miles and Harold Bloom have suggested, the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible cannot also be the father of Jesus Christ; either Christ represents an almost incomprehensible break with that world or Yahweh committed suicide on the Cross. And this Man-God, this impossible incarnation of Yahweh, died and was resurrected! Paul puts this amazing fact at the center of his teaching, and insists that if Christ was not raised from the dead "then empty, too, your faith. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all."

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