139 - Strange Tales About Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels

Strange Tales About Jesus:
A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels
By Per Beskow
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1983. 135 pp. $6.95.

"The book is mainly about forgeries," writes Per Beskow, a Patristic scholar in Lund, Sweden. It is intended to supplement E. J. Goodspeed's Modern Apocrypha (1956), an earlier edition of which went by the title Strange New Gospels (1931). The English edition of Beskow's book, translated from the Swedish by the author himself, has been adapted to an American audience.

The "modern apocrypha" discussed by Beskow go by such titles as "The Death Warrant by Jesus," "The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ," "The Aquarian Gospel," "The Essene Letter," and the like. Three documents included in Beskow's survey are of more than passing interest: "The Gospel of Barnabas," actually several centuries old and still used in Islamic apologetics to undergird the view that Jesus was the forerunner of the prophet Mohammed; "The Secret Gospel of Mark," which caused a considerable stir in scholarly circles little more than a decade ago because of the claims made on its behalf by Professor Morton Smith of Columbia University; and "The Book of Mormon," the scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and thus a potentially controversial inclusion. Beskow seeks both to undercut the claims for authenticity made on behalf of these works in recent times and to define for the reader the proper warrants for the evaluation of such claims.

In his conclusion, Beskow writes that "none of the alleged Gospels gives us a deeper knowledge of Jesus ... most of these apocrypha make exceptionally dull reading." The same verdict applies to the many ancient apocryphal Gospels. A recurrent theme in the works surveyed by Beskow is that Jesus did not really die on Good Friday. Thus they seek to evade what is the strangest tale of all about Jesus, that of the Crucified Messiah as recounted in the canonical Gospels. These do not make dull reading.

Martinus C. de Boer
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.