The Mazeppist

A Transgressive Transcendentalist manifesto.

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Location: Dar ul-Falsafah, Colorado, United States

Part Irish, part Dervish, ecstatic humanist, critical Modernist, transgressive Transcendentalist.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Renan's Life of Jesus

 

Renan's Life of Jesus is a noble and, for the most part, credible reading of the four canonical gospels. Unfortunately, it is marred by gratuitous (if sporadic) outbursts against what he called "Islamism"—and which appear to have been inspired, at least in part, by the relative neglect which the decline of the Ottoman empire visited upon Palestine when he visited it in the mid-19th century.

Otherwise, the book has much to recommend it.

A Tolstoyan Christianity—i.e., one stripped of magical thinking and miracle mongering—is nascent in its pages. Tolstoy studied Renan's Life in 1878.

 


 

Ironically, only Islam has been successful in delivering Christ from Christianity—which appears to have been Renan's motivation for writing the book.

Bigotry blinds. 

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