Phipps, a Pauline scholar by training, finds the near obsession with supernaturalism in contemporary Christianity troubling. He offers this book as a way not only to examine how supernatural elements became increasingly layered on to the original message of Christianity, but also to strip that supernatural veneer away so that Christianity will retain plausibility for a rational, scientifically inclined, post-Enlightenment, and postmodern humanity.

The nub of Phipps's argument is that the apostle Paul provides the best entrée into the earliest expression of Christianity. New Testament scholars have long known that the Pauline letters represent the oldest material in the canon, and some even start beginning courses in New Testament studies with a careful examination of Paul rather than of the gospels, which appear first in the received text.

Phipps lucidly shows how, based on the precise meaning of Greek words in the Pauline epistles, neither Paul nor those who were associated with him saw Jesus as a cosmic superman or some hybrid divine-human being—of which he was the only one in history. Rather, Phipps insists that Paul's Damascus Road experience, in which the apostle claimed to have seen the post-resurrection Jesus, was akin to other mystical experiences, one that occurred within the inner recesses of the self and thus had no metaphysical content per se. He also argues that Paul never claimed that Jesus had appeared to any in a post-mortem resuscitated body, the physical resurrection so central to many conservative and especially fundamentalist believers in the twenty-first century. Rather, the resurrection body was a spiritual body, again without metaphysical reality.

Yet Phipps knows—and demonstrates—that within a generation or two after Paul, supernatural aspects abounded in Christian writing. The evangelists added them in the gospels, particularly in some of the miracle stories (though Phipps discerns a non-supernatural core for many of them), claims for a virginal birth in two of the gospels, and many grandiose assertions in non-canonical materials that portray even the child Jesus as possessed of more power than a comic book hero. The original message became a kernel while the popular tradition became the husk. Besides Paul, only the hypothetical Q source behind some of the gospels escaped corruption, in the case of Q most likely because it antedated the passion for turning Jesus from the model human in whom the image of God shone brightly into an unbelievable being whose character denied all reason and science. A legendary superman replaced ideal human. For Phipps, the real miracle was not a reanimated corpse that frightened female followers on the first Easter morning, but the claim that agape, the highest expression of divine love, could actually exist in human form.

Part of what propelled even early Christianity to shed its sensible and sensitive understanding of Jesus was the felt need to compete with other religions, Hellenistic hero cults, and even with Roman emperors acclaimed as gods. The more the masses became fascinated with miraculous powers, the more Christianity added them, as did virtually every religious system. The “super, natural” (not supernatural) Jesus (361) scorned those who looked for signs and wonders. Thus for Phipps, this development represents a dangerous corruption of the original Christian message, for quickly miracles attributed to the apostles—even Paul—outdid those of Jesus, and soon popes required miracles that suspended the rational and scientific for one to be called a saint. This crass supernaturalism still threatens to render authentic Christianity a laughingstock, in Phipps's view.

What is the antidote or cure? For Phipps, it is simply to peel away the layers of legend and recapture the original myth articulated by Paul. As he says in the final paragraph, “The best vaccination for supernaturalism is Pauline Christianity” (362). But can the tradition now shed those layers? In some ways, the agenda Phipps proposes is akin to that advanced by Adolf von Harnack more than a century ago in his search for the pure gospel, one untainted especially by Hellenistic culture. But for Harnack, Paul was the culprit who started the transformation of a Hebraic gospel of monotheism marked by a love that united all humanity into one people. One also thinks of Rudolf Bultmann's efforts to demythologize Jesus and the gospels, though Bultmann, too, was smitten by a supposed Pauline-Hellenistic overlay he thought mutilated the word proclaimed by Jesus.

Harnack's quest and Bultmann's endeavors both represented impossible tasks, of course. Phipps's may be impossible as well. From the vantage of the twenty-first century, it seems absurd to think that one could strip Christianity of every vestige of supernaturalism, one layer at a time, and thus bask in its original Pauline essence. Organic growth, the complex character of how a mythos develops, and even the continuing yearning of people for something that is other than human to endow life with some transcendent meaning offer challenges to Phipps's task that may be impossible to overcome.

Phipps is right on target in understanding Pauline Christianity and the vortex of forces that took an embryonic tradition and made it into a supernatural religion. Yet it is also worth pondering how and why that which is transcendent—even if not as mind-boggling as a supernatural Jesus walking around in a reanimated corpse—meets a basic human need for millions. Sensitivity to the human psyche offers yet a different angle of vision from a naturalistic Pauline gospel, but the two together may help illuminate the continuing hold that an idealized human from Nazareth continues to exercise across the globe.