A Marxist Looks at Jesus [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Dr Milan Machovetf was Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague from 1953 to 1970. He remains a loyal Marxist, but has nevertheless written a book on Jesus which is far removed from the crudities and evident hostility of previous Marxist works on the subject. One might say, before reading Machoved, that to have a Marxist writing respectfully and intelligently about Jesus is in itself a remarkable fact. And so it is. But Machovecí is much more important than that: even if one does not agree with all he says, he makes a contribution to our knowledge of Jesus by looking at the evidence about him through a Marxist lens. Theology, one could say, is too important an activity to be left to believing theologians. It is important to know how it strikes vmbelieving contemporaries. The fact that Machoved began teaching in Prague in 1953 is of some significance. He became professor in the worst days of Stalinism - and Novotny in Czechoslovakia was a very thorough and faithful Stalinist. The horrors of that period are discreetly evoked in this book when he speaks of 'painful human tragedies' and judicial errors' which millions of men had to undergo (p. 26), and of the sufferings of those who were 'victims of the abuse of centrahsed power in the show trials' (p. 27). Machovec''does not attempt to deny the fact of profound injustice, and indeed provides a Marxist interpretation of 'carrying one's cross daily': there will be times, he notes, when a Marxist will have to choose 'to suffer injustice rather than contribute to it' (p. 34). Marxism in its communist form — others are possible — had become a state religion, pronouncing its bans and excommunications, and backing them up with force. By the early 1960s there was a perceptible change of atmosphere. Stalin had been denounced. Pope John in the encyclical Pacem in Tenis, which was almost his last will and testa-