The NYT ran a review of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by D. MacCullough in the Sunday Book Review. A favorable review, which I won't gainsay as I've not read the book. The review and the reviewer's views are not quite coherent, however. Consider this bit from the early portion of the review:
Christianity’s foundational belief is that Jesus was the Son of God, who died and rose again as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of a fallen world. It seems banal even to note this. But guess who did not know it on that epic morning of Resurrection long ago? Those closest to Jesus, the disciples, who, when told of the empty tomb by the women who followed Jesus, were perplexed: what could this mean? Jesus had not adequately prepared them for the central dramatic action of the new salvation history that was to take shape in the wake of his Passion. Read carefully, the Gospels tell the story of the disciples’ working out what a resurrected Messiah might mean, and the conclusions they drew formed the core of the belief system that became Christianity.
Why the initial uncertainty? Because it is vastly more likely that Jesus’ contemporaries expected his imminent return to earth and the inauguration of the kingdom of God — a time, in first-century Jewish thought, that would be marked, among other things, by a final triumph of Israel over its foes and a general resurrection of the dead.
(Emphasis added). Now compare that to this bit from the end:
To suggest that such supernatural stories are allegorical can be considered a radical position in even the most liberal precincts of the Christian world. But the Bible was not FedExed from heaven, nor did the Lord God of Hosts send a PDF or a link to Scripture. Properly understood — and MacCulloch’s book is a landmark contribution to that understanding — Christianity cannot be seen as a force beyond history, for it was conceived and is practiced according to historical bounds and within human limitations.
The inference which this suggests rather strongly, but does not explicitly draw, is that the allegorical interpretation of Bible passages is not at all what was intended in their composition. If not allegorical, then absurd. And so off from reason.
The example of Christianity and abolition, though, is ultimately a cheering one.
Cheering because it took only about two thousand years for Christianity to repudiate slavery?
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