A WORLD FULL OF GODS

With dazzling panache, Cambridge don Hopkins takes on one of the most intriguing questions of ancient history: how did Christianity, an obscure new faith whose leader was dead, triumph in the Roman empire?

Hopkins’s analysis is largely familiar. The author makes much of himself for examining Christianity in the light of Judaism and contemporary paganism, but this “contextual” approach has long since become a no-brainer for every scholar of early Christianity worth his salt. Many of his claims, however, are shocking. Take Hopkins’s assertion that “the historical Jesus is a mirage.” The popular New Testament scholars who have been breaking their teeth trying to figure out what Jesus really said and did, in Hopkins’s view, are wasting their time. The Gospel writers altered Jesus’ sayings so extensively that it is impossible to figure out what he really said, what he was really like. And Hopkins challenges not only the Jesus Seminar, but many orthodox believers as well, with his bold claims that the Gospel writers (and the Church Fathers who participated in the process of canonization) didn’t want to make Jesus easily “understood.” The Gospels, he claims, did not ever intend to “settle the question as to who Jesus was,” but to encourage debate and inquiry, and to offer enough different portraits of Jesus—Jesus the rebel, Jesus the drunk, Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the healer—so that he could be whatever the believer wanted him to be. Most noteworthy, though, is the format Hopkins makes use of: far from offering us a dry scholarly monologue, the author intersperses straightforward academic prose with more daring, imaginative stuff—the fictional memoirs of two time-travelers who find themselves in Pompeii, for example, and interviews for a TV special about the Dead Sea Scrolls (fans of British TV will appreciate Hopkins’s hysterical rendering of a Jeremy Paxman–esque interviewer).

The first book anyone should read this year about early Christianity.