The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

Emmanuel Carrère finds Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker intellectually stimulating but ultimately unpersuasive. Maccoby argues that Christianity is little more than history rewritten by its victors. In his telling, Paul is not merely mistaken but fraudulent. He is not even authentically Jewish. He hijacks Judaism, invents a new religion, and legitimizes it by claiming direct revelations from the risen Jesus, thereby elevating himself above the apostles who actually knew Christ.

Carrère cannot resist responding with dry irony. “Then, finally, after two thousand years of darkness, Professor Maccoby appeared.”

The joke exposes what Carrère sees as the weakness of Maccoby’s thesis. In attempting to strip Christianity of its myths, Maccoby constructs a myth of his own. Carrère writes, “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.”

This does not mean Carrère dismisses Maccoby outright. He readily acknowledges that portions of the New Testament contributed to centuries of Christian antisemitism. But he rejects Maccoby’s insistence that Jewish authorities bore no responsibility for Jesus’ persecution. The historical record, however fragmentary and contested, still points to genuine conflict between Jesus and segments of the Jewish religious leadership. Likewise, Maccoby’s portrait of Paul as little more than a calculating “goy informer” strikes Carrère as psychologically implausible. The Paul who emerges from his own letters is conflicted, tormented, contradictory, and profoundly self-aware—a figure possessing, as Carrère puts it, a distinctly Dostoyevskian complexity. Such a man cannot be reduced to a cardboard villain.

Carrère’s disagreement with Maccoby reveals a broader truth about conspiracy theories and overly ambitious historical revisionism. They are almost always too tidy.

Reality is untidy. Human beings harbor mixed motives. Historical events emerge from tangled webs of personality, accident, conviction, fear, and unintended consequences. Conspiracy theories sweep away that complexity in favor of elegant explanations populated by unmistakable heroes, obvious villains, and a single hidden key that unlocks everything. They offer certainty at a discount.

The appeal is understandable. Complexity exhausts us. Ambiguity frustrates us. We long for stories that snap together with the satisfying precision of puzzle pieces. Yet the cleaner the explanation becomes, the more likely it is that reality has been shaved down to fit it. Tidiness often comes at the expense of truth.

As Carrère wrestles with Christianity—a religion that has fascinated, converted, disillusioned, and continued to haunt him over decades—he refuses to surrender to what I call Narrative Tidiness: the impulse to compress complicated history into emotionally satisfying stories with unmistakable heroes, villains, and motives. He is willing to question Christian orthodoxy. He is equally willing to question the critics who promise to explain Christianity away with a single master theory.

For Carrère, intellectual honesty requires resisting myths on both sides. The moment history becomes too neat, it has probably ceased to be history.