Cinemorphosis

Tag: christianity

  • Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Exactly three months from today, I’ll turn 64. Which means I now live in that strange hinterland between actuarial footnote and walking myth. If adolescence introduces a 13-year-old to waves of chemical chaos and operatic feelings, one’s sixties bring their own interior weather system—gusts of existential dread, sudden squalls of nostalgia, and long humid stretches of unnameable longing.

    One thing I’ve learned: I detest cowardice in the face of mortality. I’m not after false bravado or some barrel-chested denial of death. What I want is a middle path—courage without spiritual negligence, composure without cosmic amnesia. My Jewish relatives on my mother’s side don’t see the need for salvation—certainly not in the harrowing Christian sense of eternal stakes. Meanwhile, my Catholic father’s family insists you better not die with your pants down. Meaning: be ready. Eternity, like a TSA agent, does not tolerate surprises.

    These opposing legacies leave me bouncing between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Pascal’s cold-blooded Wager. What if belief is a cosmic bet and I’m holding a busted flush? The writer Jerry L. Walls offers a possible lifeline with his arguments for post-mortem salvation—but only if you squint hard enough and don’t mind a theological gray zone. Still, I’m annoyed—and I mean truly annoyed—that I remain agnostic on the most important question of all. 

    But let’s leave eschatology for now and talk about something far more pressing: my inexplicable, almost primal desire to move to the tropics.

    More specifically, Florida. Yes, that Florida—the state of my birth, the national punchline. But in my dreams, it’s not today’s meth-and-misrule Florida. It’s a mythic, fragrant Eden—a sensual vision of coconut palms, mango air, tropical rain falling like music, and an ocean that feels more like the Mother’s Womb than a giant salty death trap. It’s not a real place. It’s Jung’s beach resort.

    Unfortunately, my wife refuses to move there. Too many reasons to name. So I’ve drafted a respectable Plan B: South Carolina. Still sticky, still green, still filled with those sweet tropical mangoes that perfume your skin. Close enough to my psychic homeland. Good enough for the myth to survive.

    And while we’re speaking of myths—let’s talk about the one in my mirror.

    I want to look like the teenage Adonis I once was. Not in some delusional “Silver Sneakers” sort of way, but with genuine conviction. I hit the garage gym, slam down protein and fish oil, and pop creatine like I’m prepping for Mr. Olympia 2089. Deep down, I know my aging joints and erratic hormones are staging a quiet rebellion. But I lift anyway, as if my Mythical Self must match the Mythical Seascape. Call it folly, call it denial—but when reality stings, myth becomes the better moisturizer.

    Then there are The Big Questions, hovering like philosophical fruit flies:
    Does life have meaning?
    Is ennui a moral failure or simply being awake in a stupid world?
    Is anhedonia just a side effect of broadband internet?
    Are our souls sculpted by divine intention or evolutionary leftovers?
    Why are the most sincere believers often either morally wholesome or the most toxic people alive?
    And why is sincerity—God help us—no guarantee of goodness?

    I should care about these questions. But honestly, I care more about my morning bowl of buckwheat groats slathered with mango slices and a French-press tsunami of dark roast. I care about losing ten pounds before my doctor lectures me about cholesterol. I care about making it to 64 with most of my joints intact and my mind still more interested in Kierkegaard than clickbait.

    And I suppose that’s the final humility: I’ve lived long enough to know I don’t have the answers. Like any person, I wish I could be comforted by certainty and absolutes. The only certainty and absolute I have is to be humble in the face of my skepticism and doubts. 

  • Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.

    His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.

    Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”

    That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.

    And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.

    But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.

    And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.

    We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.

    We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.

    Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.

    We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.

    If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.

  • There Is No Such Thing as a Holy Grail Watch

    There Is No Such Thing as a Holy Grail Watch

    The watch-obsessive’s quest for the so-called Holy Grail of watches is not heroic—it’s theatrical, maudlin, and embarrassingly earnest. He speaks of it with reverence, as if he’s Sir Galahad in a NATO strap. But what he’s chasing isn’t a singular object of desire—it’s a shapeshifting chimera, a delusion dressed in brushed stainless steel.

    Today’s grail is a bronze diver with gilt indices. Tomorrow it’s a minimalist field watch with a sandwich dial. By the weekend it’ll be a 41mm titanium chronograph with a “stealth” finish. Each new acquisition is preceded by the familiar declarations: This is it. The one. The final piece. And yet, within weeks—days, even—that “final piece” becomes just another stepping stone in a never-ending wrist safari.

    There is no grail. There is only motion sickness.

    The watch obsessive, in his tortured enthusiasm, is less knight and more Tantalus. In Greek mythology, Tantalus is doomed to stand waist-deep in a pool of cool water beneath a tree dripping with ripe, fragrant fruit. But as he reaches out—just a bit more—the water recedes, the fruit retreats. His thirst is never quenched. His hunger never satisfied. Only the illusion of satisfaction persists.

    And so it goes with the watch addict. His fingertips brush the bezel. His nostrils catch a whiff of Horween leather. His YouTube thumbnails promise “GRAIL ACHIEVED” in all caps. But it’s never real. The moment fades. The watch, once unboxed and adored, begins its quiet drift into mediocrity. It no longer sings. It just ticks.

    And like a fool with a ring light, he’ll sit in front of his camera, describing the myth of Tantalus with tragic flair—his voice trembling as if he’s reciting Homeric verse—while wearing a watch he no longer loves, but can’t yet admit has failed him.

    Because admitting that would mean facing the truth: the grail isn’t late—it’s a lie.

  • Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    In the early 90s, my brother managed a spa restaurant at the Grand Wailea in Maui—a temple of eucalyptus steam and $18 cucumber water. His girlfriend, the head chef, ruled the kitchen with the calm authority of a health-conscious empress. I visited one summer and found myself one morning alone at breakfast, sipping coffee and trying to look like a man deep in thought rather than a tourist waiting on papaya boats.

    At the table next to mine sat a striking brunette with the kind of diamond on her finger that doubles as a paperweight. She started talking. To me. Boldly, intimately, as if we were two old conspirators.

    She was thirty-five, married, and bored. Grew up in Santa Monica. Modeled a little. Dabbled in chaos. Now she was married to a man forty years her senior—a retired Navy officer turned business tycoon currently swimming laps in the resort pool while his wife flirted with the help. She pointed out one of the servers, a freckled boy in his early twenties pouring her orange juice with the dreamy smile of a man about to be devoured.

    “I’m sleeping with him,” she said, as casually as if she were announcing she’d tried the papaya last time and found it too sweet.

    She spoke of her marriage like a real estate deal: mutually beneficial, emotionally vacant, and efficiently managed. Her husband financed her yoga retreats. She provided him with public companionship and discreet absence. After breakfast, she was off to a vegetarian cooking class to learn how to live forever.

    She told me she was researching longevity, obsessed with health, and that she was trying to convince her husband to move to Sedona, Arizona—“the best place in the country to live a long life,” she said.

    Back then, I filed Sedona away in the brain folder labeled someday. That place. The Holy Grail of Health. A desert Shangri-La where your body becomes pure and your soul gets exfoliated.

    I didn’t make it there until a few weeks ago.

    We drove in from Prescott, and I’ll admit it: the landscape is jaw-dropping. Red rock formations that looked carved by gods on steroids. Mountains with biceps. Cliffs that scowl. One ridge looked like Zeus doing a lat spread.

    Then we hit the town.

    One-lane highway. Organic restaurants. Shops selling mystical crystals and dreamcatchers made in China. Every storefront promising to “align your energy” or “awaken your inner light”—assuming you have a functioning credit card.

    We took a bus tour. The guide cheerfully explained that tech billionaires ship their Lamborghinis in on trucks just to drive them through town for a week of synchronized flexing, tantric massages, and moon-circle manifesting.

    The mysticism was so heavy-handed it became farce. At a matcha tea stand, a man with unblinking eyes dropped a sugar butterfly into my daughter’s drink and, with complete sincerity, instructed her to make a wish so the butterfly could “help it manifest.”

    That was the moment.

    That was when I realized I hated Sedona. Not the place—God no. The place is stunning. I hated the idea of Sedona.

    Sedona the place is geology and wonder.
    Sedona the idea is a branded hallucination.

    It’s the lie that you can downshift your soul into first gear while screaming through town in a Lamborghini. It’s the peacock strut of spiritual materialism—buying essential oils and amethyst pendants as if they’ll excuse the $5 million home and the $10 million ego inside it.

    Sedona wants you to believe you can live forever if you just buy enough gluten-free sage bundles and whisper affirmations into your Yeti thermos.

    The sugar butterfly? It’s not a wish. It’s a warning.

  • The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship

    The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship


    Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys and veteran of the tech world, argues that many recent college graduates, adrift without a guiding philosophy or any grounding in the psychological architecture of religion, redirect their spiritual hunger toward the workplace. In particular, they latch onto tech companies as secular stand-ins for organized faith. These firms offer more than a paycheck—they offer a sense of belonging, higher purpose, and the illusion of transcendence.

    The tech campus becomes a modern monastery, where the faithful eat, sleep, exercise, and labor. With its cappuccino bars, Michelin-level cafeterias, on-site laundry, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries, the workplace becomes not just a job, but a lifestyle. Employees live in an upgraded dormitory fantasy—one where comfort masks control.

    At the heart of this corporate spirituality is the CEO, the charismatic founder who plays the role of messiah. Workers are fed lofty slogans about “changing the world” and “disrupting paradigms” while toiling for long hours in service of a vision that often benefits only the top brass. The leader isn’t just admired—he’s revered. The Kool-Aid is organic, gluten-free, and laced with grandiosity.

    This phenomenon has become cultural fodder, explored with increasing skepticism in shows like Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs. Documentaries such as The Inventor, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened expose the blend of megalomania, fraud, and collective delusion behind these so-called missions.

    What drives this mass suspension of disbelief? Part of the answer lies in what Derek Thompson calls “Workism”—the belief that one’s job is the core of one’s identity and life’s meaning. Combined with groupthink and CEO idolatry, Workism completes a trifecta of modern manipulation. In this new faith, the altar is a standing desk, and salvation is just one IPO away.

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.

  • The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    I was sixteen. My parents were recently divorced. Once a month, I’d visit my father at his swanky apartment and we’d discuss my future.

    One night, my father stared at me across the dinner table, a slab of rare steak leaking its red juices into a mountain of mashed potatoes. He squinted, as if trying to determine whether I was his son or a lost philosophy major who’d wandered in from a patchouli-scented commune.

    “So,” he said, carving off a bloody corner, “what are your career plans?”

    I gave him the truth. “Not totally sure, but I’m leaning toward philosophy.”

    He dropped his knife like I’d just confessed to joining a nudist circus. “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?”

    “The search for meaning,” I said.

    He snorted and chased his chew with a gulp of red wine, as if meaninglessness required lubrication. “Don’t waste your time.”

    “Meaning is a waste of time?”

    He wiped his mouth like he was preparing to deliver a TED Talk from the underworld. “Let me tell you a little story.”

    And then came one of Dad’s home-brewed parables—equal parts whiskey, cynicism, and divine apathy:

    “A young man, about your age, stood on a beach and looked up at the heavens. ‘God,’ he said, ‘help me find meaning.’ And God, being the cosmic wiseass that He is, replied, ‘Look at all the rocks around you. One of them has the meaning of life written on it. Go find it.’ The young man looked around—millions of rocks—and said, ‘But God, that’ll take forever.’ And God said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”

    I already regretted everything.

    “Decades passed. The man turned over every rock. He aged like a leather shoe abandoned in the desert. No inscription. He grew sunburned, brittle, and spiritually constipated. Finally, in his nineties, he looked up at the sky, trembling with rage, and shouted, ‘God! I’ve been faithful! No pleasure, no joy, no Netflix—just rock-flipping! And I found nothing!’”

    Dad leaned in, eyes gleaming.

    “And God said: ‘That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.’”

    There was a silence. Even the mashed potatoes seemed stunned.

    I blinked. “Where in the hell did you hear that story?”

    He leaned back, smug as a snake on a warm rock. “Made it up. For your benefit.”

    “My benefit? What am I supposed to take from this bleak little fable?”

    He ticked the lessons off like commandments: “One, God doesn’t give a shit. Two, there is no meaning. Three, stop thinking so damn much and just live your life.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I muttered. “Cruising around in your fancy car, living in your swanky bachelor pad, drinking overpriced wine.”

    “Worry not, my son,” he said, swirling his cabernet like it owed him rent. “You’ll get yours someday.”

    “So you’ve found paradise?”

    He shrugged. “Far from it. But it’s got central air. And that’ll have to do.”

  • The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    For decades, I was enthralled by Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity—a book that crackled with contrarian flair and gave voice to my suspicions about Paul, the man I once called the theological arsonist of early Christianity. Maccoby offered the ultimate takedown: Paul wasn’t just a problematic apostle; he was a Gentile infiltrator, a second-rate intellect with delusions of rabbinic grandeur, and the architect of a theological Frankenstein stitched together from Jewish scripture and pagan mystery cults. I ate it up.

    But after multiple re-readings and exposure to rigorous critiques—particularly Jaroslav Pelikan’s withering 1986 review in Commentary, “The Real Paul?”—I find myself sobering up from Maccoby’s intoxicating polemic. It’s dawning on me that The Mythmaker didn’t so much reveal Paul as reinforce my own biases. Maccoby flattered the part of me that wanted Paul to be the villain in Christianity’s origin story—the man who hijacked Jesus’ message and replaced it with doctrinal imperialism.

    The prose, which once struck me as prophetic, now reads as grandiose. Maccoby’s tone vacillates between scholarly and shrill, and there’s a whiff of insecurity behind the rhetorical swagger. His portrait of Paul as a self-aggrandizing opportunist is delivered with the juicy intensity of a novelist crafting an antihero, not a historian reconstructing a life. The final chapter, which connects Paul’s theology to the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, still has force—but even there, the execution leans more on indignation than historical rigor.

    Maccoby’s thesis—Paul as a failed would-be rabbi who, thwarted by his mediocrity, built a new religion in his own image—is clever, plausible in parts, and undeniably dramatic. But it’s also marred by speculative psychoanalysis and gaping holes in historical evidence. As Pelikan deftly notes, Maccoby accuses Paul of being a fantasist while committing the same literary sin: manufacturing internal motives and dramatic arcs that aren’t supported by any reliable record. Even the irony is Pauline.

    Pelikan, writing as a Christian scholar, grants that Maccoby’s critique of Paul’s legacy—particularly regarding anti-Semitism—is worthy of serious attention. And he’s right. There’s a case to be made that Pauline theology contributed to the long and bloody shadow Christianity has cast over Jewish identity. But the leap from theological critique to historical assassination is too far, too fast, and too loose with the facts.

    What Maccoby misses—or refuses to see—is Paul’s theological brilliance. In a world obsessed with glory and power, Paul offered something almost unthinkable: a God who descends rather than ascends, who chooses suffering over status, who empties himself in the service of love. Philippians 2 is not the work of a hack. It is a theological Everest. In the image of a humbled God, Paul delivers something transcendent—an inversion of divine power that has echoed through two millennia.

    No, Paul was not a mythmaker in the pejorative sense. He was, for better or worse, a visionary. Flawed, fiery, and yes, sometimes maddening—but never mediocre.

    In the end, Maccoby gives us a Paul who is more caricature than character—more villainous foil than complex man. The truth is harder to pin down, but also more interesting: Paul is neither saint nor saboteur. He is one of the most consequential minds in human history, a man whose theological imagination reshaped the contours of the divine. That kind of mind deserves more than debunking—it demands engagement, even when it provokes discomfort.