Product Description

This volume in the new "Revolutions" series presents Jesus Christ as a figure akin to revolutionaries like Robespierre, Marx, and Che Guevara. In this new presentation of the Gospels, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful and provocative argument for Jesus Christ as a social, political and moral radical, a friend of anti-imperialists, outcasts and marginals, a champion of the poor, the sick and immigrants, and as an opponent of the rich, religious hierarchs, and hypocrites everywhere - in other words, as a figure akin to revolutionaries like Robespierre, Marx, and Che Guevara.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32914 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Terry Eagleton is professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other books include Ideology: An introduction, The Function of Criticism, Criticism and Ideology and Figures of Dissent.

Customer Reviews

Provocative, if brief, account of a revolutionary Jesus
This volume combines Eagleton's short introductory essay on the extent to which Jesus can be seen as a revolutionary with the text of the four Gospels, annotated with some rather hastily-assembled endnotes from Giles Fraser, BBC Radio 4 `Thought for the Day' presenter. Though Eagleton is not terribly original, he nonetheless pulls the scholarly material together well, and as a result his `Yes and No' conclusion looks balanced and scholarly rather than an exercise in fence-sitting. Pithy and pungent - for example describing Jesus as hobnobbing with some `vicious and squalid' characters - Eagleton manages a couple of glorious sideswipes along the way, accusing Richard Dawkins of `19th century rationalism' and dismissing the da Vinci Code as suburban in its aspirations for its desire to marry off Jesus to Mary Magdalene. Her real revolutionary status in a male-dominated society was, he observes, as first witness to Jesus' resurrection in the Gospels.

Eagleton's reflection on Jesus' death is, considering his Marxist perspective, both remarkable and open-hearted. He sees Jesus as identifying in his death with the `scum of the earth', engaging in solidarity with evil in order to transform it. There is no `smooth teleology' at work in his death - he really is abandoned by God, for `only if his death were a cul-de-sac could it become a horizon'. For Eagleton, the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal. Human renewal is not achievable through politics alone (again, somewhat surprising for a Marxist), but rather has also to come through a different kind of revolution - a revolution `as deep as the flesh itself' (Introduction, xxvii).