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Particularly striking in Allen's account is how far back some of the purportedly "modern" and "critical" arguments go. Her earlier chapters show the second-century archcritic Celsus to have better claim on the title "first of the demythologizers" than D. F. Strauss, much less Rudolph Bultmann. So, too, Allen traces the fundamental modern critical disjunction between "the Jesus of history" and "the Christ of faith" to the second-century career of the heretic Marcion. Indeed, she asserts that "few modern skeptics about Jesus have improved on the theories of the early pagan critics." So much, then, for the breathless announcements of cutting-edge scholarship by the Elaine Pagelses and John Spongs who, in fact, offer theories that are decades, if not centuries, old.

From a more traditional point of view, Allen's account raises intriguing questions. Why, for starters, do traditional/orthodox/conservative critics get so little space in her story—and, to be fair to her, in most summaries of the history of biblical criticism? Allen notes with approval the nineteenth-century work of Konstantin von Tischendorf, who gave us a rendition of the Greek New Testament that still stands as the basis for all modern translations. And she does mention contemporary scholars such as N. T. Wright and Martin Hengel. But Tischendorf was a textual critic and thus did not work on the same problems as the life-of-Jesus scholars. Wright and Hengel barely get mentioned. And the work of previous worthies such as J. B. Lightfoot and Adolf von Schlatter receives little or no attention. This is a pity, because a survey of more conservative scholarship would have served as an important test of Allen's hypothesis.

What happens, in other words, when orthodoxy is assumed? Have evangelicals, like their heterodox counterparts, simply remade the figure of Jesus in their own image? Yale scholar Jaroslav Pelikan's book Jesus Through the Centuries has shown that, in fact, all Christians everywhere have tended to picture Christ according to their ethnic, economic, and political situations as well as according to their distinctive theological beliefs. And given that Jesus is the representative for all humanity, some of that variegation of portraiture is understandable and even splendid.

But when modern North American evangelicals picture Jesus on T-shirts as a righteous Rambo (yet recall "Behold, the Lamb of God"), or archdefender of the nuclear family (but see "Who are my mother and my brothers?"), or champion of our political causes (but "my kingdom is not of this world"), then we also are guilty of—to use a Bible word—idolatry.

The biblical presentation of Jesus refuses to remain nicely confined to any of our containers. In particular, Allen shows how one picture after another of Jesus in this long line of nontraditional portraits fails before one question dear to the hearts of all faithful Christians: "What about the Cross?"

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December 7 1998, Vol. 42, No. 14