Spotlight On... The Alternative Jesus
Books Offer a Decidedly Different View
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald -- Publishers Weekly, 3/21/2007 10:06:00 AM
The publishing world’s current passion for speculative religious histories is unfolding alongside a kindred species—titles that explore how certain racy accounts might warrant new understandings of Jesus.
The books include viewpoints both familiar and largely unknown in Western culture. What they have in common is a penchant for framing the figure of Jesus without regard for any church-imposed dogma or strictures.
Readers in search of ancient, church-rejected source material get it in Jesus: The Unauthorized Version (Jan.) from Penguin/New American Library. They also get an edited assemblage of what these Gnostic sources—such as the heretical gospels of Thomas and Philip—have to say about Jesus’ birth, childhood and relationship to Mary Magdalene.
The book isn’t the first to re-frame Jesus. Gnostic texts came to light more than 60 years ago, and authors from Elaine Pagels to Dan Brown have popularized their contents. Now British journalist Mian Ridge has edited the material in a manner that NAL editor Claire Zion said is “shorter, less expensive ($12.95) and more accessible.”
“This book really boils it down to the key issues that people are curious about,” Zion said. “People say, ‘What do you mean Jesus had siblings?’ Well, here are excerpts from the text that say that. You can read them and make your own decisions.”
In Sylvia Browne’s The Mystical Life of Jesus: An Uncommon Perspective on the Life of Christ (Penguin/Dutton, Nov. 2006), the Catholic schoolteacher-turned-psychic draws jointly on ancient Gnostic sources and Francine, her “spirit guide” who reveals the mind and emotions of Jesus at key moments in his life. Though her voice is unique, her approach of understanding Jesus without the lens of church dogma is not. She travels a path well-trodden by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and so-called “Jesus freaks,” who in the 1960s aspired to reclaim Jesus from the establishment church.
In June, Crystal Clarity publishes Revelations of Christ: Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda. The text claims to reflect the views of Autobiography of a Yogi author Yogananda, as told to his American disciple, Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters). A $150,000 marketing campaign will include direct mail to some 10,000 Christian congregations during the summer.
“Eastern religions have always had a perspective on Jesus,” said Crystal Clarity president and publisher Sean Meshorer. “Jesus in these traditions—the Christ—is seen as fully realized a spiritual master as anyone who has ever walked the Earth, but not the only one.” Meshorer believes American Christians are more open to hearing that view than they were in the past.
“We really see the main market for it being practicing Christians, or [people] who would like to be Christians but whose faith has been shaken by things like The Da Vinci Code” and other challenges to church-based faith, Meshorer said. Just because a person has trouble with the institutional church, he said, “that doesn’t mean you need to have problems with Christ. They’re two different things.”
