Book Review - Eric Stockton The RISE and FALL of JESUS by STEUART CAMPBELL ISBN 0-9521512-1-9: pp200+ p/b: Explicit Books, Edinburgh, 1996.

This is an intellectually honest book. That is to say, the author makes plain that he is attempting to assess and interpret fact, especially historical fact, on the assumption of the non-divinity of Jesus. It is truly an 'Explicit Book'. Whether Mr Campbell sees this non-divinity as a working hypothesis, or whether he holds to it as an immovable dogma, is surely his business. What is honest about the book is that the author comes clean about its intellectual basis. This honesty is in marked contrast to many books written by believers - books in which the authors seek to use fact to supprt a doctrinal position that they hold anyway. If such authors admit that that is their game then they are perhaps scholars to be respected; if they do not admit what their game is then they are propagandists to be exposed and despised.

The Jesus story (hereinafter referred to as The Story) has been told in many ways. When we consider the total failure of a world-transforming Second Coming to have come about after thousands of years (let alone during the lifetimes of the contemporaries of Jesus as was claimed at the time) we see that any version of The Story that hinges upon the alleged divinity of Jesus is highly suspect. Campbell's book therefore is, at least to that extent, plausible. Perversely, the result may well be that the book gets a hostile reception and indeed something of a 'conspiracy of silence' on the part of minds not even open enough to be frankly hostile. The book is in my opinion, and not in mine alone, a work of genuine scholarship; we have long needed a scholarly sceptical attempt to re-write The Story - and this is one such.

You do not have to take your highly non-expert reviewer's word for the quality of the Campbell Version; the book is graced by an appreciative Foreword by Professor James Thrower of the University of Aberdeen and, in view of the adverse reception that the book may well have, it is well to indicate the weight of Thrower's opinion. He is Professor of the History of Religion but he is a little different from most professors in a very important respect - as I have ascertained by reference to several high-level personal contacts I have in his ancient and distinguished university.

Most professors are the successful applicants for vacant professorships and - just like any other people chosen to fill other sorts of vacancies - some of those appointed are excellent while some, while good, are merely good enough. James Thrower occupies what is technically termed a 'personal chair'. This means that he was awarded a special professorship simply on grounds of academic merit; the university 'went out of its way' to recognise his perceived academic merit.

We live in a somewhat wicked world and that is why I mention all this - not as a comment about the professor but to pre-empt any malicious attempts to suggest that this is a bad book whose author has persuaded some kindly old fellow to write flatteringly about it.

The Campbell version of The Story will strike some people as weirdly unacceptable when, in your reviewer's opinion, it is not. To to try to locate that version in the spectrum of weird unacceptabilty, it might be useful briefly to outline two other versions of The Story that are on offer.

One is from a German Protestant theologian - Holger Kerston - in a book called JESUS LIVED IN INDIA. (I bought this - and this is not April 1st stuff - from a bookshop at the the Connemara Hotel, Madras, some years ago. Really, they do have a hotel of that name in that city and a pretty plush outfit it is too).

The main thesis advanced by Kerston is that the early, largely undocumented, years of the life of Jesus were spent in India - to which distant place he and his parents walked from Palestine (perhaps in the noble cause of tax-avoidance? ES). In India, our hero consorted with monks who taught him great truths and, at the age of twenty-something, Jesus and his mum and dad walked back home and he, Jesus, spilt the acquired doctrinal beans to all and sundry.

But that is not all. The authorities were not amused and attempted to crucify him but failed; his friends took him down from the cross, let him rest for a day or two in a conveniently vacant tomb whereafter the three of them, by now accompanied by Mary Magdelene, walked back to India. Jesus and his Mary lived happily to a great age and his remains are now in a tomb in Srnaga (capital of Kashmir. Kerston gives us a photograph of this supposed grave - as though the Kashmiri populace hasn't enough on its plate already!).

I have to say that I am gobsmacked by the thought of walking from Palestine to India and back .... and back again - especially when the final of the three walks was supposedly made by a man convalescing from recently aborted crucifixion.

Another version of The Story is much more extraordinary - even if we are familiar with it. This version tells of some deplorable goings on involving a fruit tree, a naked lady and a talking snake. The upshot has been that, to this day, we all stand in need of a process called Salvation.

This is available to us because Jesus, the requiste Saviour, was a wholly and authentically human person who was wholly and authentically divine (and who was presumably both fallible and infallible) who died-but-did-not-die in great pain long after the snake episode but long before you and I were born.

The bad news is that nobody understands this story; the good news is that nobody needs to understand it - it is enough for you to say, with sufficient sincerity of course, that you believe it. Do that - and in you're in with a chance. The even better news is that, by thinking of it as symbolically true, rather than as literally true, you can enjoy a suit-yourself salvation. Modernism means that off-the-peg religion is no longer all the religion there is.

It has to be admitted that The Story according to Campbell pales by comparison with these magnificent and wondrous constructions. Unfortunately this rambling review cannot properly include an account of the Campbell Version - and for a very particular reason.

Professor Thrower says in his Foreword that the book is a good read with many of the features of detective yarn. The Professor is not the sort of chap who goes to see THE MOUSETRAP and then tells everybody the plot so spoiling the fun - so he does not give anything away in that foreword. Your reviewer is almost as reticent.

What can be said is that the book is well, but not attractively, written. By 'well-written' is meant that there is hardly a weary cliche, hardly a slack sentence, hardly a tiresome anbiguity, hardly a purple passage, from first to last. Not attractive! The style is dry and often appears to be too authoritarian. Writer X is said to be 'wrong' while writer Y is said to 'right' as though such assessments are factual rather than, as they must be in many cases, matters of informed opinion.

Of course, in a book that is so full of references to other writers, it would nearly double the number of pages to say, endlessly, that 'Prof X is probably mistaken in this' or that 'Dr Y is difficult to disagree with on that'. That said, it is still hard to swallow the statement (on the back cover) that 'this may be the last book on Jesus'; it is hard not be somewhat taken aback by (page 186) a contrary but certainty-laden statement about books on Jesus - 'There will always be a steady trickle of such books and some will continue to search for Jesus (despite the fact that I have found him - out)'.

Mr Campbell is immensely diligent and has enormous integrity and we, his friends, value him on those accounts BUT I have to say that (as my happy eighth decade unfolds and the allowable and edifying role of candid friend becomes increasingly congenial to me) that he does seem sometimes to overcook his perceived certainties. Mr Campbell acknowledges freely his fundamentalist Christian background - and indeed claims rightly that it makes him the better informed on matters religious than are most life-long sceptics. But the candid friend has to wonder whether Steuart has been thorough enough in discarding ultra-certainty in general while he, quite reasonably, was discarding the particular ultra-certainties of his upbringing.

Since I don't give the plot away, this is not really a review at all; it is a discursive essay written by a general reader for other general readers. But it would be wrong to give no clue about the Campbell Version of The Story. Since we are talking about Jesus, perhaps a home-made parable will help and, since The Story is about prophesy-fulfilment, the parable should be about that subject too.

I, ES, hereby make two predictions:

One is that in or about 2150 there will be a major earthquake, in Italy, killing many people. Let us suppose that, come that time, there is such an earthquake. What would people make of the prophesy made by old ES all those years ago? They could say one of two things: either he got it right by chance or he got it right by genuine precognition

. The other prophesy is that at some future date, unspecified, a rounded redhead will appear in the public arena claiming to be, and accepted widely as being, the the second coming of the present Duchess of York - Fergie Reincarnate, FR. Let us again suppose that, come some future time, such a lady does emerge into the limelight - ostensibly as FR..

Clearly people will be able to say that old ES got it right by fluke or by precognition - take your pick. But, in this case, there is a third possible scenario; the lady may have heard of the prophesy and decided to act it out - perhaps on her own, perhaps put up to it by others - perhaps genuinely coming to believe herself to be FR, perhaps deceiving some others but not herself.

It is obvious that the earthquake can be the subject of factual verification or falsification; you can't conceal an earthquake when it is happening all around you and you can't be persuaded that it is happening when it is not. The possibility of the woman truly being FR is not like that; it is not a simple matter of verifiable fact; it is a matter of credited, or discounted, belief.

The Campbell Version is that the Jesus story we have all heard of is somewhat similar to the FR story I have just invented. Jesus, claims Campbell, saw himself as acting out an ancient prophesy. The 'RISE' of the book's title is the steady successful progress Jesus made to this end (and Campbell does not see Jesus as a con man, or as a madman, but as an honestly plausibly deluded man). The 'FALL' of the title is what happens when the scheme goes wrong at, quite literally, the crucial moment.

The professor is right; this book is a good read. Buy it or ask for it at your local library. E.S.