Category: Many Faces of Christ

Philip Jenkins, author of Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (2001), has posted a series of articles on Robert Graves’ 1946 novel King Jesus in anticipation of his latest book The Many Faces of Christ:The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels, due in October from Basic Books. The connection between Graves’ novel and the Christian Apocrypha is summed up as: “Obvious flaws apart, so much of King Jesus is fascinating, not least in terms of the alternative theories about Jesus and early Christianity that Graves presents. So many of these, moreover, are familiar to us today in the form of supposedly astonishing discoveries from recently found Gnostic gospels. Reading King Jesus, though, we see that these ideas were standard components of a 1940s bestseller, written the year before the celebrated finds at Nag Hammadi (and two years before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found).” Jenkins began discussing the novel in a post on Aletia, “Rediscovering King Jesus,” and then in three posts on Patheos (“King Jesus,” “Jesus the Essene,” and “Jesus, Ebionites and Jewish Christians”). Here is the abstract for The Many Faces of Christ:

The standard account of early Christianity tells us that the first centuries after Jesus’ death witnessed an efflorescence of Christian sects, each with its own gospel. We are taught that these alternative scriptures, which represented intoxicating, daring, and often bizarre ideas, were suppressed in the fourth and …