Volume 3, Number 1 · August 20, 1964
The Origins of Christianity
By M.I. Finley
The Primitive Church
by Maurice Goguel, translated by H.C. Snape
Macmillan, 610 pp., $14.95
Maurice Goguel died in 1955, having been for fifty years professor at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Protestante of the University of Paris. During that long and very productive life of scholarship all his effort was concentrated on a century-and-a-half of history, to 150 A.D. in round numbers. Such dedication, such apparent narrowness of range, such austerity of style and manner, such unwillingness to make concessions to readers—these are qualities we have been taught to think of as Germanic rather than French. Goguel himself quotes with approval a reviewer's remark that 'M. Renan thinks too much of beauty and not enough of truth.' And it must be admitted that there is not the slightest danger that Goguel's books will have the public success of Renan's Vie de Jésus, which ran into thirteen printings within a year of its appearance in 1863, followed by fifteen printings of an abridged popular edition the next year, and which has been translated into thirteen languages.
Review, 2402 words
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