The Kingdom

This book is about the first fifty years of Christianity. Emmanuel Carrère conducted a fascinating study on the early disciples of Christ, including the four evangelists and the groups they have formed. Or how the message of Christ is re-translated, formatted, distributed in the first communities around the Mediterranean. We attend different recruitment strategies of the first disciples, rivalries and alliances, the adventures of these far-traveling evangelists, all described in detail. Often Carrère imagine how it could have happened, for lack of documents or quite precise documents, but when he invented the honesty to say so. Always with comparisons with events or actors of the contemporary era (Bin Laden, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin), which, while avoiding anachronisms, allow to understand these events 20 centuries old but have helped shape our History. Certainly more competent books, most scholars have been written on the subject. I tried to read one or the other, but these works have fallen from my hand after a few pages. This big book one, I devoured the beginning to the end. An extraordinary evocation of what could be the mood and time of life, you'd be there.
But before that we are entitled to the minutes of the conversion and three years of Christianity Emmanuel Carrère himself, he made a rather fascinating analysis. Especially it has fulfilled at the time twenty books of the Bible comments, kept in a cupboard, and allow it to review these years from the original material. The tone is distanced and somewhat surprised: he finds the will to "believe" at all costs, at the same excluding the roots of his faith in psychoanalysis he undertakes, the conviction that it is cons-intuitive nature of its beliefs which is the index of their truth, religious practices assiduous as lifeline deal with depression. But it is the reduction of spirituality to beliefs, so prevalent in the Christian world, which especially characterizes this period of his life. And inspired practices of Buddhism and Hinduism as meditation and yoga that lead him to some reconciliation with what has been the aspiration of the time.