cover image And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus

And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus

Selina O’Grady. St. Martin’s, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-01681-2

In this mundane and dreary book, O’Grady treads monotonously familiar and well-covered territory regarding the development of the world’s religions during the first century C.E. Ranging over various cultures, their gods, and their religious groups—from Judaism to Buddhism and Jainism to ancient Chinese religion—she offers the unsurprising thesis that many gods died out because they failed to rise above their local identities and because religious leaders failed to develop the power and hope that their religions might offer in the face of other political or cultural threats. In the case of China, for example, rulers embraced Confucianism, a philosophy more than a religion, and disseminated it to few other than the culture’s elite, to whom it had great appeal. O’Grady points out that Isiacism—the cult of Isis—which featured a compassionate goddess and a life after death, was a serious competitor to early Christianity, but the Romans adopted the latter as the empire’s religion. Her rather unsurprising conclusion is that Christianity won the day in Rome because of Paul’s preaching of a universalism that proclaimed equality in the face of inequality and displacement in the sprawling new cities in the empire. O’Grady’s dull and unrevealing book fails to live up to its overly sensational title. (Apr.)