Hidden Gospels
How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:28th Nov '02
Currently unavailable, currently targeted to be due back around 18th July 2025, but could change
Philip Jenkins is also the author of "Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis" and "Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History".
This text disputes the myth that Jesus was a subversive mystic whose true ideas were suppressed by early Church authorities. It offers as evidence the fact that supporting texts for this idea are younger than the gospels and resists its revolutionary claims as an alternative Christianity.The rediscovery of several lost texts of early Christianity, which contain long-lost accounts of the life of Jesus, has aroused great public interest and media excitement. Some writers claim that these 'hidden gospels' - particularly the famous Gospel of Thomas - provide revolutionary new information about the life of Jesus and about the early days of Christianity. This book tells how these ancient works were rediscovered, and how and why people came to make such far-reaching claims about them, claims which could have a dramatic effect on the faith and practice of contemporary Christianity. Although these texts have received a great deal of attention, Jenkins argues, their historical value is vastly inflated. Hidden Gospels debunks excessive claims about the historical value and importance of these texts, and argues that the writings are popular because they seem to justify radical, feminist, and post-modern positions in the modern churches.
Racy and provocative study ... entertaining. * Journal of Theological Studies *
Timely and well-researched book ... This book is a welcome antidote to contemporary fashions ... Jenkins has struck a belated and unfashionable blow for commonsense. * Journal of Ecclesiastical History *
An excellent book ... It combines a substantial knowledge of recent NT study with a sensitivity to the wider intellectual and cultural context that lends such study its greatest importance. It is written with the great intellectual virtues of care, rigour and lucidity, and is yet accessible to a wide readership ... it is very well informed, written in a style untrammelled by professional jargon, and betrays nothing in the way of an 'agenda' or ideé fixe. * Scottish Journal of Theology *
A sober, and sobering, account of how some scholars have enthusiastically embraced "new" or "hidden" gospels which just happen to support certain currently fashionable ideologies--and of just how unwarranted such claims actually are. * N.T. Wright DD, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey *
Jenkins has brilliantly identified the mythic dimension of the recent fascination with hidden gospels and alternative Christianities. * Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus *
Jenkins makes clear that the inflated claims of the boosters of the Gospel of Thomas are neither well founded nor all that new. This book places the recent 'selling of Nag Hammadi' within the larger context of American academic politics, social trends, and New Age religions, and does all this in a manner that remains accessible to the general reader. * John P. Meier, author of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus *
One of the many services of Mr Jenkins's fine, carefully argued book is to put discussion about what happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago on more reliable ground. * George Sim Johnston, Wall Street Journal (Europe), *
ISBN: 9780195156317
Dimensions: 219mm x 141mm x 18mm
Weight: 363g
272 pages