c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Few authors ever sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their works, and fewer still are able to achieve such popularity while having critics praise their writing as poetic, captivating and compelling.

Thomas Cahill has sold a million-plus books to the masses while earning the adulation of literary elites, but even more surprising, he has done this writing about ancient history _ a subject that in other hands can be as dry and dusty as cracked, crumbling parchment or sun-bleached desert sands.

In 1995, Cahill introduced readers to bookish Celtic monks in”How the Irish Saved Civilization,”which has nearly 900,000 copies in print. In 1998, he explored the roots of monotheism and Western culture in”The Gift of the Jews,”which is approaching sales of half a million copies.”Desire of the Everlasting Hills”(Doubleday) is the third installment in Cahill’s planned seven-part series,”The Hinges of History,”which he first dreamed up 30 years ago but couldn’t sell to a publisher. Here he examines one of the world’s most frequently told but possibly least understood stories, the story of Jesus, whom Cahill calls”the central figure of Western civilization.” Single-handedly reinventing the craft of intellectual history, Cahill struggles”to make the stick figures of the distant past into flesh-and-blood people, with real feelings,”unveiling”the lived experiences of the people who thought the ideas.”His writing is often surprisingly accessible. The enthusiasm of a cripple healed by Jesus’ touch is compared to the irrepressible glee of Italian movie star Roberto Benigni, and Jesus’ Galilean homeland is described as”the ultimate Boonies.” Likewise, Cahill’s Jesus is both unpretentiously down to earth and breathtakingly otherworldly. Instead of a pleasant plaster of Paris divinity, Jesus is a religious radical who comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable and confounds all expectations.”I tried to divest myself of whatever it was that I thought I knew about this figure,”says the author by phone from his New York office.”I tried to start all over again, actually trying to find the figure of Jesus, not seeing him through the eyes of 20 centuries of cultural encrustation.” To understand the world into which Jesus came, Cahill studied ancient Roman, Jewish and Greek writers. (The Greeks, by the way, are the subject of his next volume.)

Insight into Jesus’ life and ministry came from the New Testament Gospels, portions of which he translated from their original Greek.”You can’t get any closer to Jesus than the Gospels,”he says,”for they bring us to within a generation or two of the time of Jesus himself.”He also studied dozens of biblical scholars, from the traditional to the trendy.

A former director of religious publishing for Doubleday, Cahill puts greater stock in the detailed, disciplined work of scholars like Raymond Brown, whom he published, than the more sensationalist work of the Jesus Seminar or the controversial Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong.”I find it very difficult to take some of these people seriously,”says Cahill, who attributes their popularity to an often uncritical press.”Andy Warhol was right: If you say something really outrageous, you will get attention.” Cahill, who describes himself as a faithful but flawed Catholic (“I shrink slightly from calling myself a Christian, but I would say I’m somebody who would like to be a Christian”), finds in Jesus a compassionate living embodiment of the ancient Jewish justice tradition, but without all the histrionics of the Old Testament prophets.”Instead of lashing out with threats, he holds up an idea,”writes Cahill.”Jesus is not so much issuing `commandments’ as offering invitations.” Although each Gospel writer sees Jesus in unique ways, Cahill finds astounding unanimity in their portrayals. As for Paul, whom some scholars call”the inventor of Christianity,”Cahill sees him as the new faith’s articulator,”someone who could give a more precise formulation”to the early Christians’ experiences.

As for the resurrection, the pinnacle of Jesus’ many recorded miracles, Cahill doesn’t try to browbeat skeptics into accepting its historicity. Still, he says to dismiss the resurrection as a hollow hoax would require one”to imagine that the most sublime moral sentiments ever expressed had somehow been drafted in the service of a cheap fraud.” Christianity has continually evolved in the centuries since Jesus, taking on the cultural forms of the succeeding ages and repeatedly confounding its official guardians, much as it did first-century Jews. Still, Cahill argues that a substantial core of Jesus’ original message has survived, inspiring generation after generation of believers to follow in his footsteps.”I would be very happy if readers _ whether they were believers or unbelievers, Christians or Jews, no matter who they are _ really feel they understand who Jesus was and what he was trying to do,”says Cahill.”This is my real and only hope for this book.”

DEA END RABEY