The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels by Philip Jenkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels by Philip Jenkins Tony Burke The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. By Philip Jenkins. (New York: Basic Books. 2015. Pp. ix, 326. $27.99. ISBN 978-0-465-06692-6.) Even readers with a casual interest in Christian apocrypha know the familiar myth of the “lost gospels”—that a developing Orthodox Church created a canon that served their theological and political interests, declared all other texts about the early church “apocryphal,” and effectively suppressed the literature until its rediscovery in the past few centuries. Jenkins aims to correct this “questionable historical narrative” (p. 6) by demonstrating instead that apocryphal texts continued to be valued and employed—even created—by the Church long after efforts to close the canon in the fourth century. Philip Jenkins focuses on what he calls the “long middle” of Christian history, between 400 and 1500 (p. 25). He traces the use of supposedly “lost gospels” throughout the period, either through references in other works (including a mention of the Gospel of Thomas in 1285), manuscripts (the Gospel of Peter, for example, is found in an eighth-century codex), compilations of earlier texts (such as Jacob de Voragine’s The Golden Legend), festivals (created based on traditions found in such texts as the Protevangelium of James or the Dormition of Mary), doctrines (Christ’s Descent to Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus), and their use in literature and drama (the Descent is used prominently, for example, in Dante Alghieri’s Inferno and in the York Mystery Plays). Certainly the Church did on occasion encourage churchgoers to avoid some texts, but outside the stretch of the Roman Empire, they were less able to do so. Jenkins discusses the use and survival of apocrypha in areas such as Britain, Ireland, Armenia, and Ethiopia. He notes also that, in some areas, the shape of the Bible was much different, including the expansive Ethiopic canon. Not only were apocryphal texts available in these areas, some were even considered canonical. Jenkins illustrates well that early apocrypha that continued to fill a need in the Church were never lost, whereas those that did not merely fell out of use. Only in a few cases, he argues, were texts actually actively suppressed; for the most part, they simply “lost their audiences, perhaps because they were felt to be irrelevant or old-fashioned,” or their contents were “absorbed into more substantial or better-written works” (p. 32). New apocrypha were also created to satisfy new needs, and some attention is paid by Jenkins to apocrypha created by the Bogomils such as the Secret Supper (pp. 179–82) and modern texts such as the Archko Volume (pp. 246–47). [End Page 820] Some texts are missing, of course. Jenkins could say more about apocrypha circulating in Syriac Christianity (of which he is quite knowledgeable), and apocrypha created in late antiquity—particularly in Coptic Christianity, where we see the creation of the genre of “pseudo-apostolic memoirs,” but also in the West and Greek East—to establish festivals and shrines for the post-Constantinian world. For the most part, Jenkins is positive about the value of reading apocryphal texts for understanding Christian history and art, but at the end of the book he strays into apologetic territory, decrying efforts to change the canon and championing the canonical texts as better “historical documents” (p. 252). Also, Jenkins’s argument that apocrypha were rarely suppressed lacks some certainty. This is observable in his constant back-and-forth statements about their suppression (e.g., “ordinary people were losing access to the old traditions,” p. 235) and their endurance (e.g., only two pages later appears, “Noncanonical scriptures were never wholly absent from church life,” p. 237). Jenkins’s arguments are not entirely new to scholars of Christian apocrypha and cognate disciplines such as medieval studies, many of whom have been trying to bring attention to late-antique and medieval apocrypha for some time. But he masterfully assembles a broad range of historical data about these more recent works...