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Keeping up with all the new Jesus books these days takes a scorecard. Just about the time one thing is behind us, a new one pops up on the radar. There is no doubt that The Da Vinci Code movie has spawned an array of works trying to take Dan Brown to the next level. Not all these efforts possess the same significance, but they all are trying to hype a revised understanding of Christian history. We may well be entering an era of more discussion about early Christian history than has existed in decades.

It is important to appreciate that many people asking questions or embracing the recent materials have no background in church history, so they have no way of assessing what is being said. Their questions are quite sincere in light of the repeated message they are hearing that the new materials should change our view of church history. However, the group that is producing this material is quite certain that these new finds do change our history significantly, even though the new finds do not really reach back to the first century. Such hype needs to be shown for what it really is, more efforts to discredit Jesus, the apostles, and the Bible and to exchange these central elements of Christian faith for a less unique, domesticated form of Christianity.

The latest cycle of hype began with The Jesus Papers. This work by one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, represents a continued effort to find the roots of Jesus' work outside of Israel and Judaism. In scenes that are only loosely connected, the author posits that Jesus spent time in Egypt at a secondary (and deviant) temple in Egypt. He also is far too quick to associate Jesus with Mithras and Osiris myths. There is absolutely no evidence for Jesus making such a trip to Egypt during his adult life or late childhood. Baigent also claims that there are papers that argue Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to Egypt as late as A.D. 45.

These papers, which he claims to have seen, were part of a second-hand story that he heard. The text he saw was in a language he could not read. So there is nothing provided that allows for any verification of such claims. This work appears to be little more than an attempt to string together some related topics on mysticism and religion and link them to a Jesus who circulated in places we have no evidence he ever was at the times suggested. More than that, the idea that Jesus would have survived crucifixion, the most violent means of Roman capital punishment, is also quite unlikely. John Reed has addressed this inadequacy in a piece on Beliefnet.com. He summarizes the book as a "revisionist fantasy masquerading as legitimate history." Reed also notes that Baigent's appeal to Zealots is historically suspect. So there is nothing here of historical merit.

The second work was the glitzy release of the Gospel of Judas. This is a much more serious find. It is a legitimate work of the second century, preserved in a fourth-century manuscript. Many reports claimed that this work was "authentic," but all that means is that the text is a legitimate ancient work. It is not a comment on the accuracy of its statements about Judas. We know this work comes from the second century because of the developed Gnostic cosmology that is a part of it. This movement attributed creation not to God but to underling gods, who often are described as getting creation wrong so that matter is corrupt. This is the case in Judas, where the point of salvation is to save the spirit only, and where Adam and Eve are created by a lesser god alternatively called Sakla or Saklas in the Coptic.

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April (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50