The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ and Other Essays: By Jay Haley. New York: Grossman Publishers, Inc., 1969. 146 pp.

This small volume's title essay, appearing in print for the first time, is an effort to find similarities between the mass movement of two millenia ago that resulted in the establishment of Christianity as a world force and more recent mass movements, such as the rise of communism. The leaders of contemporary movements can find precedence for all of their most reliable tactics in the methods of Christ. Viewed in this way, Christ becomes the first great activist, a genius who discovered single-handedly the basic principles of forming masses through leadership, protecting the mass movement from the authorities, and eventually arranging a showdown between the movement and the establishment. This thesis strikes this reviewer as plausible and refreshing in contrast with the usual view that makes Christ simply a saint whose teachings were appropriated for political purposes by a power group. The essay is documented by Biblical quotations—the only one of the essays having any documentation. Haley uses these passages to reconstruct a historical personage. Yet it would seem inevitable that these later Biblical writings are subject to the same distortions in the course of time as are other emotionally charged and oft repeated texts. The gospels are still being subjected to the defensively determined revisions of theologians; they have become myth as well as history. Rather than take them as data for biographical reconstruction, it would be more fruitful to think of them as documents relevant to the question of how masses of people go about making and using their heroes. In that light, what Haley views as individual biography would become a glimpse into the mythopoesis by which people endow their leaders with certain qualities. Haley's essay only repeats the inadequate notion that the masses are 'led' by 'leaders'.

The more clinical five essays reprinted in this volume continue the general theme of a power struggle, but they are often odd, obscure, and contorted in so