It is difficult to overstate either the iconic status of Jesus of Nazareth or the intensity of subsequent Christological disputation. Particularly controversial for the Church were questions relating to correlation between Christ's humanity and divinity, and the precise relationship between the Son and the Father. Frustratingly, the writers of the oldest Christian sources did not share the interest of future generations in formulating precise answers to these questions. Consequentially, much Christian theology has been an exercise in ‘filling in the gaps’ left by the sources as much as interpreting them. Although a body of classical Christian orthodoxy developed, as these fifteen essays ably demonstrate, many ‘alternative’ formulations of the nature and significance of the Christ figure can be found within both Christian and other traditions. As Hammer explains in his introduction, the greatest innovation is found precisely at those points where little is said (such as the childhood of Jesus). The next three essays discuss the earliest post-canonical formulations of Christology: among ‘Gnostic’ Christians (van den Broek); in the New Testament Apocrypha (Thomassen); and among the Manicheans (Beduhn). While the Gnostics and Manicheans lapsed into ‘heresy’, the New Testament Apocrypha contains at least some material which although fanciful, plugs the holes in the literature in a more or less proto-orthodox fashion. Aside from the visions advanced by two individuals: the eighteenth-century Swedish rationalist Swedenborg (Hanegraaff) and the sixteenth-century proto-feminist Postel (Brach), the remaining essays focus on the use of Jesus in major religions and movements: Islam (Hjärpe), Hinduism (Malkovsky) and Mormonism (Davies), in which Jesus essentially contributes to a (very American) epic. However, the more exotic is also represented with treatments of the Theosophical movement (Santucci), Ariosophy (Goodrick-Clarke), New Age (Lewis) and UFO Christologies (Rothstein). Thematic links emerge between these contributions. New Age and Hinduism emphasise Jesus as an ethical model; Ariosophy's Jesus helps to create a nationalistic vision of a pure race, while in Mormonism the same figure contributes to an American epic. In both Gnosticism and UFO religion Jesus is presented (in some senses at least) as an ‘alien’ saviour. The collection is concluded with an exploration of modern Jesus legends (Hammer), arguing that even these alternative visions rarely represent a total rejection of earlier tradition, but rather an adaptation of them in dialogue with contemporaneous external social and intellectual movements. This is an impressively broad range of highly informative essays. A surprising omission is the lack of treatment on the diverse Christologies of the New Testament. As a result, the collection gives the impression that there is a clear and uncomplicated trajectory from the canonical material to ‘orthodoxy’, and that the biblical witness is itself univocal, when in fact there is a sense in which all presentations of Christ are ‘alternative’.