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Secret Scrolls is the very first examination of some forty novels in which someone discovers a new gospel. Sometimes it turns out to be a hoax; will it be debunked before it can work its mischief? If it proves genuine, will it be brought to light? Or will corrupt church officials manage to prevent it?
The book evaluates what each author has to say about historical Jesus scholarship or New Testament research in general. Sometimes the authors have done their homework; other times they haven't bothered, and they wind up dishing up crazy rewrites of history and outlandish theories.
These novels deal with abiding issues of faith, even without some new discovery. As soon as one engages in biblical apologetics, one has stepped onto the marshy ground of probabilistic arguments, an entirely different epistemology that automatically replaces simple faith. And so one comes to hold one's religious convictions more tentatively, having become genuinely vulnerable to new evidence. One may not remain a believer for long. On the other hand, one invites fanaticism if one's faith is dangerously predicated on the assurance that no new discovery will send one back to the drawing board.
Secret Scrolls assesses what each author imagines it would take to derail and debunk Christianity. How mighty a blow must be dealt before the religion would fall? Dan Brown's notion that a married Jesus would debunk the Nicene Creed is laughable.
As Wilbert Francis Howard once argued in his brief and fascinating history of New Testament research, there is a genuine "romance of New Testament scholarship," and many of us are delighted to have the adventure continue in the speculative imaginations of capable novelists. These books can both entertain and educate, and so will Secret Scrolls.
"By means of fictions both wild and realistic, Price shakes up and reshuffles conventional wisdom and helps us to escape the mental blinders and shackles of traditional assumptions about the historical Jesus--shackles that have prevented us from perceiving the empty spaces where expected evidence is absent and have restrained us from pursuing hitherto-unnoticed evidence whithersoever it would lead us."
--Frank R. Zindler
author of The Jesus the Jews Never Knew
"Robert M. Price is today's most gifted chronicler of religion's weird frontiers. His expertise ranges from the minutiae of Biblical criticism and religious history to the most rambunctious corners of popular culture--and oh, the connections he discerns! One of the stranger creatures to emerge at the junction of religion and pop culture has been the 'lost gospel' genre of fiction, which has not only been lucrative but sometimes frighteningly influential. In Price's Secret Scrolls, the 'lost gospel' genre receives the analysis it has always deserved--and as Mencken might have said, it gets it good and hard."
--Tom Flynn
editor of Free Inquiry magazine and The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief
"Robert M. Price's Secret Scrolls, a study of the curious subgenre of Lost Gospel novels, is written with his customary melding of immense learning and lively prose. Starting with a now-obscure novel of 1904 and proceeding through such popular works as Irving Wallace's The Word and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Price's treatise is itself a literary and theological thriller of the first order."
--S. T. Joshi
author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life and The Unbelievers
Robert M. Price, PhD Drew University, has served as Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College, pastor of First Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey, and Director of the Metro NY Center for Inquiry. Among his many books he is the author of Beyond Born Again, The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts, Deconstructing Jesus, and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.
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