Category: Confessions

With fewer than one hundred pages remaining in The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère confesses that he has postponed writing about the apostle John. Of all the apostles, John is the one who unsettles him most.

Luke is easy to love. He is congenial, eager to please, and recognizably human in his longing to belong. Paul can be abrasive, impulsive, and argumentative, yet he repeatedly exposes his own deepest flaws. His confessions make him accessible. We may not always like Paul, but we know him.

John is another matter entirely.

Carrère calls him “the most elusive, the most multifaceted.” He is the mysterious author behind the Fourth Gospel, the John who must be carefully distinguished from the many other Johns who populate the New Testament. This is John, the son of Zebedee.

His story hardly begins with saintliness.

Jesus nicknames him and his brother James Boanerges—”sons of thunder”—because both possess volcanic tempers. Luke recounts an episode in which John rebukes a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name simply because the man does not belong to their circle. His miracles, John believes, lack the proper credentials. Jesus immediately rebukes him: “Whoever is not against you is for you.”

Later, after a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, James and John ask permission to call down fire from heaven upon its inhabitants. Once again Jesus rejects their thirst for vengeance. Mark and Luke also portray the brothers as transparently ambitious, maneuvering for the highest positions beside Christ’s throne. Pride and wrath seem to flow through them as naturally as blood.

Yet by the time we reach the Fourth Gospel, something astonishing has happened.

John has become “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

As Jesus hangs dying upon the cross, it is John—not Peter, not James—whom he entrusts with the care of his mother.

How does such a transformation occur?

Carrère remains skeptical that the rough, impulsive fisherman could later have written the dazzling and feverish visions of Revelation. He imagines instead that decades of experience reshaped John into someone almost unrecognizable. The hotheaded youth slowly hardened into one of Christianity’s towering patriarchs.

“The agitated youth has become a grand old man,” Carrère writes.

Old age, however, did not soften his life.

According to Tertullian, John survived torture and even a vat of boiling oil before eventually settling in Ephesus. Throughout those years he faithfully cared for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

It is in Ephesus that Carrère notices the profound difference between Paul and John.

Paul, despite his notorious moods, remained approachable. You could seek him out, argue with him, receive instruction from him, even challenge him. His authority emerged through conversation.

John’s authority emerged through absence.

Carrère imagines him as remote, solemn, and almost forbidding.

“When you saw him,” he writes, “you bowed as if he were a supreme pontiff: intimidating, inaccessible, floating on a cloud of incense.”

John rarely appeared in public. He and Mary lived almost entirely in seclusion. People spoke of them in lowered voices. Their home acquired the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Everything surrounding them seemed wrapped in silence, reverence, and mystery.

John embodies what might be called Mystical Distance: the condition in which a person’s rarity, silence, and withdrawal from ordinary life increase rather than diminish his perceived authority, causing others to experience him less as a companion than as a sacred mystery.

This aura leaves Carrère uneasy.

John’s lofty remoteness creates distance rather than intimacy.

Peter does exactly the opposite.

Carrère feels instinctively at home with Peter because Peter is gloriously, painfully human. He boasts that he will never abandon Jesus. When the moment of testing arrives, he collapses almost immediately. Jesus predicts the betrayal in advance, yet Peter insists with magnificent confidence, “Never, Lord.”

Then he denies him.

Again.

And again.

Carrère recognizes himself in that pattern.

Indeed, he recognizes all of us.

We spend our lives making solemn promises to our highest ideals only to betray them when comfort, fear, vanity, or self-preservation begins whispering in our ears. Whether we call ourselves believers or skeptics, we reenact Peter’s failure thousands of times. Every day presents another opportunity to remain faithful, and every day we discover fresh ways to compromise.

Oddly enough, this realization comforts Carrère.

Christianity does not pretend that Peter’s failures never happened. It remembers every denial in painful detail. Yet it also refuses to let those betrayals become Peter’s final identity. The disciple who failed most publicly becomes the disciple entrusted with the Church.

For Carrère, this reveals something extraordinary about Christianity.

Its deepest appeal is not its miracles.

Nor its theology.

Nor even its promises of salvation.

Its deepest appeal is its startling willingness to embrace people who repeatedly fail their own highest convictions.

Carrère remains an agnostic.

Yet this vision of grace continues to haunt him.

He cannot entirely believe.

But neither can he entirely leave.

Perhaps that lingering attachment is itself evidence of what he calls Christianity’s “pure goodness”—a goodness powerful enough to bind even those who cannot confidently call themselves believers.

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.