Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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a b Strandness, Erik (17 September 2020). "Tom Holland: "I began to realise that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian." ". Patheos . Retrieved 12 April 2023. Live, fast, die young and leave an emaciated corpse, seems to have been the tragic recipe for medieval religious celebrity. Some things stay the same Holland hosts (with Dominic Sandbrook) the no.1 podcast The Rest is History. He has written and presented a number of TV documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from religion to dinosaurs. He served two years as the Chair of the Society of Authors; as Chair of the PLR Advisory Committee and was on the committee of the Classical Association. However perhaps I am missing the point: Holland is not an anthropologist after all, he is a historian and by overstating his case he provokes more debate, and challenges us as readers to think for ourselves. Ultimately I much prefer to read a book with a strong argument that I don't fully agree with, than one with no argument at all. Conclusion

The history is pretty even-handed overall, though in certain points it amplifies unimportant concerns or passes over seminal events in silence, and at worst in a few places is specious. It is notably so when dealing with the New Testament canon, the life and motivations of St Paul, and Paul's epistles. When analyzing Paul's view of the sexes, he tries to make a canon within a canon by dismissing texts that don't agree with his thesis, like 1 Tim 2-3 and 1 Corinthians 10, as pseudepigrapha.

Other stories

The other omission I noted was that nothing was said on the scientific revolution, the discussion of science/natural philosophy (for again we are in the realm of non-neutral terminology) featuring instead in the discussions of high medieval intellectual life and Victorian natural history - despite the presence of Peter Harrison's The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science

But what Holland fails to do is to distinguish the sort of contexts (and texts) in which such claims were made and the way in which they were made. Intelligent Romans, many of whom were not of Caesar’s party, not only did not believe he was a god, but did not believe in the actuality of the pantheon it was (politically) suggested he had been elevated to. Earlier, Heracles and Romulus were part of the mythology of two great states but were written of in remote antiquity, anonymously, and quite unlike the genre of realistic historical prose that the Gospels and New Testament letters present. In addition, what the Greeks understood by immortality was the escape of the soul from the imprisonment of the corrupt body. The idea of the resurrection of a body was remote, even impossible, in Greek thinking. Moreover Paul’s first letter to Corinth (not doubted by any serious scholars to be anything but genuine) was written in affirmation of the resurrection only twenty years after the event. It was sent to a mixed Jewish and gentile community at a time when many were alive who could remember those astonishing ‘forty days’ of appearances. Such readers would deny their reality if they felt Paul was lying. Holland does not explore any of these important distinctions between cultures in this instance. Christian roots now lost to view

Odd omissions

Holland is clearly an excellent writer but he does have a few stylistic quirks that can grate. The one that needled me was his love of a good paradox - I counted 27 of them throughout the book, excluding the two in the index - about one per chapter. These men are nationalist bigots, which suggests another sense in which Christianity can be subversive. Holland remarks that the early Christians’ refusal to identify themselves with a homeland was a cause of scandal. They were branded as rootless vagrants who delighted in being alien, and thus made a boast out of what should have been a source of shame. Christianity started life as an eastern, not western phenomenon, but rapidly left its birthplace behind. What held it together was faith, not territory. One was no longer to grovel before the idols of state, tribe, nation and household. And as for household, almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is deeply hostile. Kinship and blood ties no longer matter, and Jesus’s treatment of his mother is by no means always that of a good Jewish boy.