Most professing Christians, it is safe to say, believe in and follow Christ, which is to say the Jesus portrayed in the canonical New Testament and interpreted by the socially dominant Christian institutions. That Christ, however, is certainly not the only possible one. Anyone even moderately familiar with modern scholarship on ancient texts knows, one, that there are many pieces and versions of the Jesus story that for one reason or another were not included in the canon, and, two, that the documents that achieved canonical status did so for political reasons, not because they were unique repositories of perfect divine truth. At the same time, other points of view were suppressed, and unfortunately much of what we know, for example, of Gnostic and Manichaean understandings of Jesus comes from polemics opposing these pernicious “heresies.”
Fortunately, scholarship over the last few decades has gone far in setting the record straight on some of the alternative understandings of Jesus. Olav Hammer has assembled an impressive group of scholars to present a remarkable array of studies of depictions of Christs little known outside the small world of academic specialists on the subject.
Hammer begins with an introduction that surveys the divergent world of Christologies in the early centuries of Christianity and then carries the story forward, looking at later alternative Jesus stories, many of them based on alleged revelatory experiences. Then Roelof van den Broek provides an introduction to Gnostic understandings of Christ-“understandings” in the plural because Gnosticism itself was so diverse as to barely hold together as a category. Next, Einar Thomassen surveys presentations of Jesus in the New Testament apocrypha—again a diverse group of portrayals of Jesus, including a shape-shifting Jesus reminiscent of a trickster in Native American traditions, a child Jesus with miraculous powers, and a Jesus who taught secret wisdom.
Jason BeDuhn then surveys some of the many Manichaean portrayals of the Christ figure, drawing on recent studies that recast earlier understandings of Manichaeism, which were often shaped by the polemical works of Augustine, who sharply opposed this Asian-influenced version of the faith. Jan Hjärpe plumbs the Muslim understanding of Jesus—“Isa”—as presented in the Quran, the Hadith, and elsewhere. Urzula Szulakowska's fascinating chapter examines the role of Jesus in medieval alchemy, whose practitioners saw themselves as Christians, although they were condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike. Jean-Pierre Brach presents a female Messiah conceived by the French diplomat and traveler Guillaume Postel. Next, the eminent scholar of Western esotericism, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, limns the mystical Christ of Emanuel Swedenborg, focusing on Swedenborg's interpretation of the Trinity.
A persistent tradition says that Jesus spent part (or even most) of his life in India, even though there is little evidence of Christianity in that country until missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century. Whatever the truth behind the contention, Jesus has had some relatively recent visibility there because several national leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been attracted to his ethics. Hinduism has ample room for Jesus within its broad confines, and Bradley Malkovsky outlines just how Hinduism has influenced, and been influenced by, various understandings of the Christian savior who, some argue, learned his work from Hinduism. Douglas J. Davies then presents the Mormon Jesus—a Jesus who visited the Americas, according to the Book of Mormon, and may have been married (God, after all, is married in Mormon theology). Theosophy has also offered its own portrayal of Jesus as human, but a teacher, initiate, adept, and master—and it says its claims are based on ancient sources, as James A. Santucci writes. Then Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke presents us with the Aryan Christ, whose adherents have argued that Jesus came to redeem a humanity that had fallen from perfection due to its practice of miscegenation—with animals.
James R. Lewis examines the Jesus of a small, contemporary religious movement, the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, which draws on elements of Sikhism, the Sant Mat tradition, and esoteric Christianity. The Aetherius Society, characterized by Mikael Rothstein, is a UFO religion, and its Jesus comes from the alleged visionary experiences of the movement's founder, George King. Finally, editor Hammer concludes with a survey of modern Jesus legends, looking at recent twists on the Jesus-in-India story, John Allegro's linguistics-based argument that “Christ” was really a code name for a psychedelic mushroom, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Jesus, and even Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.
It seems to be customary to note in reviews of edited volumes that the contributions are uneven in quality. That must inevitably be true, to some degree, but the criticism hardly works here. The approaches and materials of the several authors are different, of course, but each one of the chapters is meticulously researched, clearly written, and grounded in the wide-ranging and innovative research of the last few decades. There is no chapter here that would not be enlightening to any but the most specialized scholar.
As Hammer concludes (290), there is no reason to believe that the canonical Jesus stories are any more historically reliable than the “heretical” versions. Indeed, it could be argued that the fact that huge swaths of Christianity emphasize a rigid doctrinal and textual orthodoxy impoverishes us, giving us only one narrow slice of a great story. Hammer and his colleagues have done us an excellent service in showing the great diversity of understandings of Jesus in these fine survey articles. The book will be too expensive for most individuals to purchase, but it should find a home in many a library.
