Alternative Christs.
Miller, Timothy
Alternative Christs. Edited by Olav Hammer. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009. x + 305 pp. $93.00 cloth.
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 Hjarpe 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.
doi: 10.1017/S0009640710001927
Timothy Miller
University of Kansas
