The many faces of Christ
Subtitle: the thousand-year story of the survival and influence of the lost gospels
By: Philip Jenkins
Publisher: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9780465066926
Subjects: Origin; Apocryphal Gospels; Christianity
Description: "In The Many Faces of Christ religious historian Philip Jenkins refutes our most basic assumptions about the Lost Gospels and the history of Christianity. He reveals that hundreds of alternative gospels were never lost, but survived and in many cases remained influential texts, both outside and within the official Church. We are taught that these alternative scriptures--such as the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, or Judas--represented intoxicating, daring and often bizarre ideas that were wholly suppressed by the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. In bringing order to the tumult, the Church canonized only four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The rest, according to this standard account, were lost, destroyed, or hidden. But more than a thousand years after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made his Roman Empire do the same, the Christian world retained a much broader range of scriptures than would be imaginable today"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-307) and index.
Table of contents: title: Gospel truths : the myth of the lost gospels; title: Christ's many faces : the survival of the old gospels in a wider Christian world; title: The isles of the West : how Irish and British churches kept ancient Christian cultures alive; title: Old gospels never die : ancient gospels that gave the medieval church its best-known images of Christ; title: Two Marys : how alternative gospels continued to present the feminine face of God; title: The new Old Testament : tales of patriarchs and prophets that became Christian gospels; title: Out of the past : the heretical sects that preserved ancient alternative scriptures for a thousand years; title: Beyond the horizon : Muslim and Jewish versions of the earliest Christian traditions; title: After darkness, light : how the Reformation era drove the ancient gospels from the churches; title: Scriptures unlimited? : the place of alternative scriptures in Christianity.