Let us begin with a story: Archaeologists find an ancient tomb with previously unseen scrolls. Those scrolls turn out to be from the first century, and they contain some of Jesus’s original teachings, previously undiscovered. Worried that this new gospel undermines their authority by rendering their teachings obsolete, Christian authorities and their political allies try to keep the discovery secret. But the secret eventually gets out, and a grateful world learns the truth.

While this story roughly follows the plot of an actual novel (The Lost Tomb, 2008), its narrative likely sounds familiar even if you have not read it. Why? In Andrew Jacobs’s deeply multidisciplinary, insightfully researched, and engagingly written book, he answers this question in at least two broad ways. First, he welcomes readers into a literary genre he describes as “Gospel Thrillers.” Published mostly in English in the United States, Gospel Thrillers follow a “common formula” that includes a newly discovered first-century gospel that features surprising new information about Jesus; a protagonist seeking to find and reveal the gospel’s contents; and political or religious antagonists who oppose any revelation of the discovery (4–5). Citing this formula, Jacobs excludes a variety of books from his analysis that share some of the genre’s features; in the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, for example, nobody discovers a new gospel. Yet even without including books on the formula’s fringes, Jacobs compellingly demonstrates the coherence and popularity of a genre otherwise dismissed as little more than a common narrative trope.

More than the popularity of the genre itself, a second and more significant set of reasons why Gospel Thrillers feel familiar involves their tendency to channel pervasive cultural preoccupations. Rather than attempting to demonstrate the influence of Gospel Thrillers on popular culture, he reveals the sets of cultural tensions, anxieties, and trends that continually have animated the genre since it first emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. As Jacobs shows through six chapters, Gospel Thrillers not only have manifested far-reaching trends – such as the Cold War context of apocalyptic and conspiratorial thinking – but also emerged out of more specific anxieties about the Christian Bible. Gospel Thrillers function as a form of testimony to the “common well of fears and desires, the what ifs that perennially emanate from a Christian Bible open, and vulnerable, to transformation” (118). To bring all of this into view, Jacobs draws on histories of the religious and political cultures of the United States as well as scholarship from his primary field of biblical studies.

Throughout the book, Jacobs shows how developments in the field of biblical studies have reflected and propelled many of the same cultural tensions and anxieties that Gospel Thriller novels reveal. The book’s first chapter examines the phenomenon of “Bible Hunters,” a term for the Euro-American philologists, paleographers, and missionaries who searched during the nineteenth century for ancient biblical texts that could help allay anxieties about the Bible’s reliability. These anxieties were prompted in part by new academic efforts to identify the sources behind the books of the Bible and to correct the Bible’s text. Later appearing as fictional characters in twentieth-century Gospel Thrillers, Bible Hunters also were guided by Orientalist biases that led them to see the monastic libraries of the Middle East as repositories of potential treasures that had remained unappreciated by people who lacked western knowledge and expertise. Tracing the influence of theological anxieties and scholarly hubris into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jacobs devotes the book’s final chapter to more recent efforts to recover the true gospel. Jacobs compellingly notes that scholarly efforts in biblical studies to identify the source gospel known as “Q,” for example, developed alongside the emergence of Gospel Thrillers. Both phenomena drew support from perennial anxieties about the Bible no less than from a cultural atmosphere of conspiratorial thinking.

In the book’s middle chapters, Jacobs focuses in particular on the ways that conspiratorial cultures of the twentieth century’s latter half shaped attitudes toward the Bible, as reflected in popular culture as well as the era’s emerging genre of Gospel Thrillers. During the peak decades of the Cold War, he argues, “the Bible became an object of speculation, consternation, and even conspiratorial thinking in US politics and culture” (54). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the emergence of the state of Israel both validated and intensified this atmosphere of conspiratorial thinking. While the Dead Sea scrolls amplified the notion that biblical texts and truths remain undiscovered or suppressed, western support for Israel fed Gospel Thriller stories based on the fantasy that Euro-Americans could recover biblical truth from the lands of the Bible – with the support of fictitious Israelis who “combine military efficiency with advanced technical skill” and “draw a contrast with the ‘backward’ Arab populations” (96). Israel’s westernization also inspired Gospel Thrillers focused on “the ambiguous Jewishness of Jesus,” in ways that complement biblical studies scholarship that attempts “to take seriously the historical Jewishness of Jesus” (110).

Overall, Jacobs’s book persuasively dispels what he describes as a common assumption within the field of biblical studies: the notion that its work is “objective and depersonalized” (9). Continually, Jacobs shows how human knowledge networks, personal identities, and personal motives have shaped understandings of the Bible – including understandings focused on its supposed truth as well as its apparent vulnerability. A chapter on “knowledge brokers” in Gospel Thrillers chronicles narratives that “highlight how important personal motivations and desires are in the quest for biblical truth” (155). While conspiracy narratives within novels and outside them reflect a good measure of fantasy, he suggests, their possibility and plausibility fundamentally depend on a cultural foundation built by real people in real places. Moreover, conspiracy narratives proliferate around tensions and anxieties for which ultimate resolutions and answers are impossible to obtain beyond the realm of fantasy.

Some readers likely would be interested in this book for the same reasons that others might find it peculiar. The book’s peculiarity lies in the expansiveness of its multidisciplinarity, which results in chapters that do not always explore US history, biblical studies, and Gospel Thriller novels in even proportions. But this peculiar analytical ambition places Jacobs’s work alongside other indispensable recent scholarship that reveals the cultural histories that swirl around the Bible and its authority. Virtually any student of biblical studies or contemporary Christianity would benefit tremendously by grappling with Jacobs’s overarching emphasis on the personal motives behind developments in the field of biblical studies, and his consistent use of historical and literary analyses provides readers with a steady stream of examples that students could explore further. Jacobs’s study would pair well with any particular Gospel Thriller or other novel on the genre’s fringes – whether already published, or yet to come.