The Welsh-born Philip Jenkins holds the title of distinguished professor of history at Baylor, and he is also an emeritus professor of humanities at Penn State, where he holds an endowed chair. His specialty over more than 35 years of scholarship has been the study of Christianity in both its historical and current demographic manifestations. On top of that, Jenkins is a hugely prolific writer, author of at least 25 books, most of them aimed not at scholarly specialists but at educated and intellectually curious laypeople who demand copious endnotes but also readability, which Jenkins has offered in spades.
I must confess here that, although I have met Jenkins personally just once and briefly, at an academic lecture about a decade ago, he has been a go-to phone source for several articles I have written on Christian topics. Although Jenkins is not an apologist for any particular Christian tradition, he is a refreshing dissident from the knee-jerk religious liberalism professed by most academics and journalists covering Christianity nowadays.
Jenkins’s two most notable books are The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, which argues that while Christianity may be dying in the culturally enfeebled West, it is flourishing in the pullulating global South, and Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, a work more germane to his new book, The Many Faces of Christ. In Hidden Gospels, Jenkins took issue with the theory, regnant among ideologically progressive New Testament scholars these days, that recently discovered Gnostic and other texts (such as the Dead Sea scrolls) have succeeded in undermining traditional notions of Christian orthodoxy. These scholars argue that early Christianity was never “orthodox” as we understand the word, but was actually a doctrinally chaotic phenomenon from its first-century beginnings, with little connection to the historical Jesus and what he might have taught.
Every early Christian community had its own competing gospel or gospels, the theory goes, and the four “canonical” Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—became canonical only because their interpretations of Jesus were embraced by the victors in a centuries-long political power struggle for control of the early church. Typically, the chief villain here is the Roman emperor Constantine, who elevated Christianity to quasi-official status during the early fourth century and then sought to impose a uniform belief system upon Christians by way of the Council of Nicea in a.d. 325 that ultimately produced the Nicene Creed.
The “orthodox” winners of the fourth-century theological battles supposedly not only rewrote earlier Christian history but actively suppressed Gnostic and other texts that, their proponents argue, offered equally valid interpretations of Jesus and his message. These alternative texts were in some instances just as antique and, thus, just as authoritative as the first-century “Big Four” (Jenkins’s term). Hence the huge amount of excitement, both among scholars and in the press, over the discovery of a treasure trove of long-buried fourth-century Gnostic manuscripts near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, and also over the more recent surfacing of the supposed Gospel of Judas in 2006 and the (probably forged) Gospel of Jesus’ Wife in 2012. Every time one of these “lost” documents of early Christianity pops up, there is rampant speculation about whether Christian belief as we know it is about to be blown to smithereens.
Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) asserted that Jesus and his female disciple Mary Magdalene got married and spawned a secret lineage—events that, according to Brown, the orthodox church worked tirelessly and murderously to cover up for centuries. His conspiratorial interpretation of Christian history was, in some ways, a pop version of some of the feminist leitmotifs in Gnostic interpretations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene that Elaine Pagels claimed to find in the Nag Hammadi texts she surveyed in her bestselling The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Lending credence to the theory of a cover-up was the fact that the Nag Hammadi manuscripts had been buried in desert caves, possibly to protect them from a book-burning purge by the orthodox.
Jenkins pointed out in Hidden Gospels that, to the contrary, many of the seminal Gnostic and related texts that have inspired all the modern excitement never really got lost and thus aren’t recent—or revolutionary—finds at all. One leading “lost” Gnostic theological work, Pistis Sophia, likely composed during the fourth century and outlining a complex Gnostic cosmology, was discovered in an obscure Coptic manuscript as early as 1773. So it has been a solid two centuries that skeptical Western intellectuals and artistes (among them Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, Gustav Holst, C.G. Jung, Robert Graves, and D.H. Lawrence) have been claiming to find in Gnosticism a more refined, sophisticated, spiritually pristine, and female-friendly version of Christianity than that of the orthodox church with its rigid rules and all-male hierarchy.
The Many Faces of Christ is, in many ways, an extension of some of the themes that Jenkins explored in Hidden Gospels. As he argued in Hidden Gospels—and again, contrary to current theories about official suppression—Jenkins writes here that, in fact, “the lost Christian gospels were never really lost. Rather, older scriptures were lost only in the sense that they dropped out of mainstream use for some churches, at some times, in certain parts of the world.”
The idea that many Christians neither desired nor accomplished the quashing of a huge range of alternative scriptures produced during Christianity’s earliest centuries is a bold and appealing thesis. Unfortunately, Jenkins never quite figures out how to make it cohesive. Many Faces‘ 10 chapters read more like 10 freestanding essays composed at different times for different purposes and, thus, containing a certain amount of chronologically and thematically overlapping material. And because Jenkins feels compelled to do justice to all of those “dozens” of obscure scriptures in just a few hundred pages, he tends to survey them at a fast, even breakneck, clip. Readers not already familiar with the world of early Christian literature may find The Many Faces of Christ a daunting and confusing read.
The topics of its individual chapters, however, are certainly fascinating. One of Jenkins’s points is that while the orthodox churches—those aligned with Byzantine imperial power in the East and with the power of the bishop of Rome in the West—adopted a relatively limited biblical canon that resembled today’s, churches that were outside the purview of the historical Roman Empire, most of which broke early with the orthodox in theological disputes over the nature of Jesus, recognized a much larger range of texts they regarded as canonical.
One Ethiopian church, for example, recognized a canonical Bible of some 81 books, in contrast to the standard North American Protestant canon of 66 books. The Ethiopian church has since largely resolved its doctrinal differences with the Eastern Orthodox; but its Bibles, like those of other Christian fringe groups, have preserved some authentically ancient “faces of Christ” that would cause surprise among modern Western Christians. In one startling Ethiopian New Testament text called the Book of the Covenant, Jesus describes himself as essentially his own father, adopting the appearance of the angel Gabriel in order to enter the Virgin Mary and beget himself.
The upshot was that breakaway churches and heretical sects in Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and other lands just outside the borders of the old empire preserved alternative scriptural texts dealing with both Old and New Testament figures that Westerners either deemed permanently lost or didn’t realize existed until the modern era. Jenkins argues that some of those scriptures were even known to the Jews and Muslims of late antiquity, who incorporated bits of their narratives into their own religious texts.
Furthermore, a large number of ancient alternative gospels and other texts were never deemed heretical by the orthodox church. In fact, they insinuated themselves so thoroughly into Christian culture and Christian liturgy that the vast majority of Christians came to regard the events those texts described as just as historical as the events of Jesus’ life contained in the canonical Gospels. They used those texts, as Jenkins points out, to fill in the narrative gaps they perceived in the canonical Gospels and to embellish what they saw as the canonical Bible’s theological meaning.
The most influential of those “apocryphal” gospels was the so-called Protoevangelium, or Infancy Gospel of James, a second-century Eastern Christian text that found its way into the West by way of a seventh-century Latin adaptation that today’s scholars dub the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. To this day, both Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox celebrate the feast of the “presentation” of the Virgin Mary as a young child by her parents at the Temple in Jerusalem—an episode in James/Pseudo-Matthew that is nowhere to be found in any canonical Gospel. We also owe the ox and ass of the Christmas crèche to mentions of those animals in James/Pseudo-Matthew. The Cherry Tree Carol, the medieval ballad in which the unborn Jesus causes a cherry tree to bow down to his pregnant mother as proof of her offspring’s divine origin, is based on an incident recorded in Pseudo-Matthew involving Mary and a palm tree, an incident that also appears (in somewhat different form) in the Koran.
Similarly, the traditional Catholic and Orthodox belief that the Virgin was taken bodily into Heaven at the end of her life derives in part from fourth- and fifth-century apocryphal texts. The Harrowing of Hell, Jesus’ descent into the underworld after his death to rescue Adam, Eve, and the patriarchs and prophets from the flames—an event celebrated for centuries in Christian iconography and medieval mystery plays—probably originated in an ancient compilation variously known as the Acts of Pilate and the Gospel of Nicodemus. From time to time, patristic and medieval theologians condemned this widespread use of noncanonical material, but it remained a mainstay of mainstream Christian art and devotional literature until the Reformation. At that point, at least in the West, both Protestants and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Counter-Reformation Catholics retreated to a strict adherence to the canonical Bible.
Occasionally, Jenkins seems to bite off more than he can chew. In his most adventurous chapter, entitled “Out of the Past,” he seeks to forge a thousand-year chain linking the Gnostics, the Manicheans of the third through seventh centuries, the Bogomils (anti-nomian heretics who flourished in the Balkans from the 10th through the 13th centuries), and the medieval Cathars of southern France, who disdained the priests and sacraments of the Roman Catholic church. Members of all four of those groups were arguably theological dualists who believed that the material world was corrupt and evil, the creation of an imperfect lesser divinity.
Many present-day medieval historians have concluded that the Cathars, at any rate, were actually more like evangelical Protestants than like Gnostics or Manicheans, although the Catholic inquisitors who interrogated them certainly accused them of dualism. But for Jenkins, tying the Cathars to more ancient heretics gives him a chance to speculate that “subterranean traditions” of dualism might have preserved in the West esoteric alternative scriptures—and indeed, esoteric alternative forms of Christianity itself—right under the noses of vigilant medieval heresy-hunters. Maybe so. But as Jenkins himself admits, there is very little evidence, textual or otherwise, to support this ambitious hypothesis.
Readers who manage to plow through the plethora of material that Jenkins has thrown at them here will find rich rewards and intriguing topics for further conjecture. Their task would be less overwhelming if The Many Faces of Christ were more carefully organized and contained more than a handful of tables and one lone map. Still, as Jenkins writes:
Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, last wrote on torts.
