Published in Tribune, April 25, 2003: www.tribuneweb.co.uk

Review by Prof. Robert Giddings of "A History of Christianity" - A Page-by-Page Criticism of Paul Johnson's Horror Story

Robert Giddings is Professor of Communication and Culture at Bournemouth University.

Done with holy smoke and mirrors

As far as the English-speaking world is concerned, the King James I Bible is the most influential book ever published and continues to be a bestseller every year. If it's good enough for Desert Island Discs, it's good enough for me.

Yet, as Benson Bobrick's The Making of the English Bible tells us, this definitive text was not achieved without struggle and bloodshed.

"In the beginning was the word, and that word was Hebrew and Greek. In the fourth century, it was translated into Latin. Copies of it were reserved unto medieval clergy. Scriptural exclusion endured for a thousand years, until it was shattered by the translation into the vernacular - it gave every literate person access to the sacred text - fostering the spirit of inquiry. This accelerated the growth of commercial printing."

And this, in turn, encouraged the questioning of long-term secular and religious institutions, and precipitated the birth of Protestantism and the end of the divine right of Kings.

This should be read in conjunction with Michael Roll's analysis of Paul Johnson's A History of Christianity. It is a meticulous demolition of the basis of Christianity as organised superstition, leaving only superstition.

There's no historical record of the birth, life or death of a Jewish man called Jesuah. Jesus is a Greek translation of this Jewish name. Virgin births are a feature of saviour gods in other religions. There's no record of anything Jesus said, only reported teachings accredited to him. The Jews picked up the notion of resurrection from the Egyptians during their captivity. There are no historical records of any writings of Paul. Ancient historians, such as Josephus and Philo, seem never to have heard of Jesus. Josephus mentions John the Baptist, but very little is known about him and even less about his association with Jesus. There's no evidence that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome.

This stimulating pamphlet may be bought directly from Michael Roll [...].

Teaching courses on mass communication have led me to respect the admonition in Hebrews 13.9 not to be carried away with "diverse and strange doctrines". So it was with caution that I approached the new edition of Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics, one of the most influential of media sociology's sacred texts.

First published in 1972, this book continues to impress with its analysis of media behaviour in the face of "threats" to some unspecified but desirable social stability. Cohen cogently identified the way the media label as "deviant" behaviour that threatens dominant values and interests.

The author originally analysed a few examples (including mods and rockers - remember them?) and provided a methodological matrix that can still usefully be deployed in examining numerous subsequent causes of "moral panics" including youth cultures, AIDS, drugs, welfare scroungers, single mothers, and asylum seekers.

The ancient Romans probably regarded the Christians as a bunch of deviants heralding the end of civilisation as they knew it.

A History of Christianity - E-mail from Michael Roll to Robert Giddings (May 2, 2003)

"A History of Christianity" - A Page-by-Page Criticism of Paul Johnson's Horror Story - A pamphlet by Michael Roll