Book Review: Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus by Thomas Cahill

After his successes with How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill continues what has become a series called The Hinges of History. The series is meant to chronicle people and events that influenced Western Civilization for the better. In this book, he looks at the impact of Jesus.

After a brief and colorful review of the Greek and Roman world that led up to the time of Jesus, Cahill gets into Jesus's story. A lot of people in Jewish society were expecting an apocalyptic revolution that would put Israel back on the map. After a time of hardship and suffering, the Kingdom of God (that is, the Kingdom of Israel) would be restored. Jesus's preaching does not follow this track according to Cahill. Jesus taught a time of reconciliation that would bring about peace in our time through loving God and our neighbors. Cahill's description and analysis is very earthy and very modern. Jesus's teaching on marriage, that it should be indissoluble, Cahill interprets as a triumph for feminism and a great social advance--no more "guys only" free divorce or blaming the woman for adultery. Cahill says that the Gospels give very little evidence what Mary, Jesus's mother, was like, and then proceeds to characterize her as a brilliant and manipulative schemer who wants the downfall of the rich and the rise of the poor (because that's what the Magnificat is all about, right?) orchestrated by her Son. 

The first chapters have so many moments where Cahill is so off-the-mark that I found it very hard to read. His text isn't confusing or excessively erudite, just a modern scholar reading in his own biases and calling it a "fresh and new understanding." If only there was something fresh or new or accurate! He briefly discusses metanoia, a famous Greek word used in the Gospels that identifies the change Jesus makes in His followers. It's a compound of meta and nous, which Cahill claims is a change (the meta) of mind (the nous). People are being persuaded to new ideas and understandings. But the word nous refers to much more than a person's thinking part. It is the core of a person's being, so the change is more fundamental than just being persuaded by an argument or behavior. The Gospels even have a word for the "change of mind" that Cahill references, metameletheis, which is used to describe Judas Iscariot's attitude after he betrayed Jesus. If Cahill is really a Greek scholar or a Bible scholar (which he definitely presents himself as), how can he not know this? He has plenty of other little and big errors. I gave up reading the book after a hundred pages because I felt like I was wasting my time. At least The Davinci Code, for all its ridiculous misrepresentations, admits it is fiction and has some interesting puzzles in it.

Not recommended.