Abstract
Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code, much-maligned by biblical scholars for its misrepresentation of apocryphal gospels, is only one example of a large subgenre of thrillers in which revelations from lost gospels or the discovery of the corpse of Jesus threaten to destroy Christianity. Price surveys more than forty of these novels, from Guy Thorne's When It Was Dark (1904) through to Gregg Loomis's The Coptic Secret (2009). For those of us who enjoy integrating popular culture into our teaching or research, Secret Scrolls would seem to be a useful resource.
Each novel is afforded a summary and a discussion of the author's use and/or abuse of biblical scholarship. Price praises some of the authors for having done their homework, but most, he says, “don't bother, and they wind up dishing up Sunday School platitudes, followed up with crazy rewrites of history and outlandish theories” (p. 2). Certain motifs are common. They typically feature a desperate band of churchmen who oppose the newly discovered texts—to prevent, suppress, or destroy the lost gospel in order to protect the status quo and the authority of the church. Price likens this response to the crises of faith that apologetic thinkers may encounter when defending the Bible from skepticism—“every intellectually alert believer struggles with the same fears,” he writes, “even without some new discovery setting off the alarm” (p. 3). Price also sees in the novels an attraction for the “disappointed believer” who delights in “seeing their old enemy taken down by some new discovery that debunks the authority of their slave-masters” (pp. 4–5).
In many of the novels, the lost gospel that is discovered is Q, the common source believed to have been used by Matthew and Luke, though the Q in these thrillers is much different from scholars' reconstructions. In John Hall Roberts's The Q Document (1964), Q is a summary of Jesus' teachings written in his own hand, in which he claims to be the Messiah and will die, rise, and then march against the Romans. Q is identified as a lost Gospel of James in Irving Wallace's The Word (1972), praised by Price for being a “well-written page-turner” and “the greatest single vehicle for popularizing critical New Testament scholarship before [The Da Vinci Code] and since” (p. 47). This Gospel of James is said to be written by Jesus' brother and it reports, among other things, that Jesus survived the cross, resumed his ministry, was crucified again in Rome, and then rose from the dead. In Gospel Truths (1992), J. G. Sandom identifies Q with the Book of Thomas the Contender, known to scholars as one of the texts found among the Nag Hammadi Library. These few examples illustrate the novelists' willingness to draw upon biblical scholarship, even scholarship on the Christian Apocrypha, and an equal readiness to distort the facts to create their fiction.
Some readers may find it surprising that Price criticizes the authors for their “outlandish theories” given the idiosyncratic scholarship he invokes to contextualize the novels. For example, Price favors a second-century origin for the New Testament Gospels (p. 72), claims the recently-discovered Gospel of Judas is a hoax perpetrated by a member of the team of scholars who first published it (pp. 74, 181, 329), speculates that Paul's account of the 500 witnesses to the resurrection (1 Cor 15:5–8) is an addition to the letter by a later scribe influenced by the Acts of Pilate (p. 89), supports the theory of David Trobisch that the New Testament was “put together and heavily rewritten by Polycarp, a bowdlerized book intended to suppress evidence of an earlier, ‘heretical’ diversity of belief and practice” (p. 169), and applauds the work of maverick scholars Barbara Thiering and Robert Eisenman, who link Jesus to the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 101–02, 198). Price can lend his support to any theory he wants, but it does not serve his readers well to present these minority viewpoints as if they were the consensus.
Price also inserts into his commentary diatribes against born-again Christians and biblical literalists, dated pop culture references (“Back to the Future,” Dungeons and Dragons, Rick Nelson), and harsh reviews of the less scholarly novels (Bettye Johnson's Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls is called “absolutely awful,” p. 273; the plot of Elizabeth Peters's The Dead Sea Cipher is “unsurprising” and “unimaginative,” p. 46). These all detract from the utility of the book, which is neither the pedagogical resource that it could be nor the thoughtful and thorough study of the “lost gospel” genre—examining the reasons for its popularity, or the needs it satisfies in readers—that it presents it-self to be.