Andrew S. Jacobs, "Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

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I'm Mike Motia, and today we're talking with Andrew Jacobs about his book, Gospel Spellers, Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible. Andrew Jacobs is senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Women at Harvard Divinity School. He's the editor of Cambridge University Press's Book Series, Elements of Religion in Late Antiquity. And he's the author and editor of five different books, his 2016 book, Epiphanyus of Cypress, Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity. One, the Phillipsff Best Book Prize from the American Society of Shred Chitri. And Andrew also just finished a stint as the president of the North American Pacific Society. Gospel Thrillers takes a seemingly fringe genre of literature that emerges in the 1960s and shows how it reflects and refracts some much larger trends, trends in the US, in contemporary Christianity, and in the fears and desires that the Bible continues to generate. What if these books ask, "There were a newly discovered first century Gospel, who's shocking contents, promised to overturn everything we thought we knew about Christ, Christian origins, and Western civilization?" Now we don't have that text yet, but that we can ask the question, "Show some cracks in a supposed bedrock of society." And not have hazard, not random cracks, but cracks in the hidden but organizing structures that make it possible to tell these stories in the first place. As you heard, Gospel Thrillers and your mind immediately went to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, you're not totally off. But these fillers, they don't just look at existing sources, however creatively interpreted by Brown they were. They find whole new texts that could, as they often say, change the world. The real question for Andrew, though, is what fears and what desires do these stories elicit and illuminate? These novels, they're not from evangelical presses, they're by mainstream publishers and for mainstream audiences. And these little novels, they implicate just about everyone. Their politics and their theologies and their ideologies are the worlds we all live in, Andrew Arcus. Now some certainly doom-read these stories and others probably delighted in them. For some, the Bible is that solid rock amidst a world of shifting sand and to lose its stability is almost too painful to consider, and maybe for that reason, and even better read. But for others, the Bible is so obviously a hoax meant to oppress that it must be part of a conspiracy. Either way, there's a temptation these days to believe that we all live in a uniquely conspiratorial time that the internet kind of brainwashed us. But the authority of the Bible and the pervasiveness of conspiratorial thinking have been intertwined in the U.S. for a long time. To my students, QAnon and PizzaGate and DeepStates and Christian Nationalists seem Satan-working at the Senate, can seem at once silly and ubiquitous, conspiracies and Christianity they're everywhere. But it's hard to know what to make of them or how to situate them. Andrew, I hope, is here to help with that. But this book is also about biblical scholarship. Each chapter opens with a twining, one real-life story of biblical scholarship, and then another a fictional one. These thrillers, Andrew Arcus, they're not just frivolous stories that don't understand the real world of biblical scholarship. They're dramatizing motives and social forces that actually haunt academic work, and that haunt American relationships with the Bible or broadly. They're about how that desire to find the text or the meaning simultaneously reveals of vulnerability, that we don't have the text or the meaning, on which so much of Western civilization rests. These novels, yes, they are page-turning, plot-twisting stories that distill vague affects into cluttered proof thrills. They also provide something though that no Bible scholar can. They provide closure. They let readers live with the adventures of the Indiana Joneses of Divinity schools, and then they let readers leave. Their bound covers make it safe to fantasize about the Bible's vulnerability. They let us dream, and then they let us wake up and go about our lives, even if we unconsciously carry those dream worlds, those what-ifs with us. So Andrew, hi, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? And how did you come to write this book? Sure, thank you for that great intro. My name is Andrew Jacobs. I study religion and antiquity the first or six, seven century CE or so. Primarily early Christianity, I taught in California for a couple of decades, and now I'm a semi-independence scholar in the Boston area, teaching around at different institutions, and I've always taught widely in religious studies, religious theory, and also biblical studies. So that's part of how I came to write this book. I always had the interest in sort of popular representations of religion, and serendipitously, gosh, about 20 years ago, now I came across some of these thrillers in a used bookstore. They were from the 1970s, I think. And I thought they were using mainly for the portrayal of biblical studies and scholarship, but as time went on, I realized that this was not just a few books in the 70s. This was dozens and dozens of books that had been fearing over decades, and something was going on in that. And it took me a while to figure out what that thing was, that it was this relationship, this intertwining of scholarly approaches, popular fascination, of conspiracy, of a desire for the Bible to be this totemic bedrock, but also this sort of simultaneous desire for the Bible, maybe to lose a little bit of its power in US society. So that's where I landed when finally I sort of sat down after doing other books in the meantime to think about how these novels articulate, magnify, and ultimately contain conspiratorial fears and desires about the Bible in US culture. So it's not really a literary study of these novels per se. It's a cultural study of the Bible in US politics and ideology through the magnifying lens of these novels. Yeah, that's great. So let's jump into this. What is a gospel thriller? This is a term you kind of coined, right? I did. I coined this term to get at both the genre of these novels. They are thrillers in a classical sense. This is a sort of Cold War era genre, the persist in the modern period. Usually it's going to be about something like politics or nuclear secrets. These happen to be about the Bible and gospel because these are about the Christian Bible. So sometimes I get asked, are there Torah thrillers or Quran thrillers? And the answer is no, not really because that's not the Bible full stop that US culture is interested in. It's a Protestant Bible, it's a Christian Bible, and Christian origins is the place for both practical and ideological reasons that these thrillers land. So they all share a plot. There's a lost gospel. It's either been found or is rumored to exist. It contains some shocking truth about Jesus or Christian origins. It comes from the hand of Jesus or one of the apostles. So it is an actual autograph that is written by someone in the first century who knew Jesus if not Jesus himself. And in the course of the novel, a protagonist stumbles upon the existence of this lost gospel and there are shadowy forces that are intent on concealing it or revealing it or taking it or and there's a race against time where this protagonist is trying to find the truth. So that's the kind of essence of the thriller genre that it's fast paced. There are conspiratorial forces and truth is at stake. All of these but one originally composed in English. They've all been published by mainstream US presses. So this is a real publishing phenomenon, but not a genre that exists sort of outside of my own identification. That's why I had to come up with a term for it. Yeah, yeah, like we're not going to walk into a bookstore and find the gospel thriller section. Maybe at least not yet. Yeah, so you take us as you put it from the Cold War to QAnon. And while we might think that conspiracy theories are like really acute today, the paranoid style of politics is at least as old as the Cold War. And you argue that these thrillers they start in the Cold War not because that's when stories of Bible hunting and forgery start. Those are old and older. But these new stories they kind of reflect Cold War politics. The Cold War is different from previous armed conflicts. In part because there's no clear winners. We don't have like allies and Nazis are good and evil. The Cold War gives us an ideological struggle where superpower, they battle with propaganda and with content as much as with guns. So we don't have clear winners in a Cold War in a similar way that there's not clear meetings in these Bible stories. So the gospel thriller you write, it emerges out of two intertwining contexts of US culture. One is biblical authority and the other one is conspiracy theory. So can you explain what you mean by those contexts? What does it mean by biblical authority? And then what makes the Cold War kind of so rich for conspiratorial thinking? And then what happens when they intertwine? It is true that both the Bible and conspiracy theory have really deep historical roots in US history. I mean really going back to the founding era. But in the 1960s they start to intertwine in new ways. So the thinking about the Bible and conspiracy theory kind of shift gears both in terms of content but also in terms of aesthetics. So if you think of conspiracy theory there are lots of ways that has been talked about especially beginning in the 1960s when this became on people's radar. Is it about bureaucratization that is more and more of our life is handled by unseen forces and who's controlling those forces into what end? There's definitely a fear of communist infiltration. The idea that the person you are speaking to may not actually be the person you think they are but may be representing ideologies that are actually opposed to you. And this is particularly when we get sort of McCarthyite conspirator of thinking it's about infiltrators in the US government. This is the roots of our own kind of deep state conspiracy theories. On the right wing we have that fear of communist infiltration but at the same time in the Cold War there's this fear on the left wing of military profiteering that all of this kind of ideological war mongering is actually about power and control and economics and not really about what people actually believe and all this gets repackaged in political discourse and popular culture and really it's about a shift in media. So conspiratorial thinking now becomes deeply embedded aesthetically in media and then as we get into the 90s and 2000s in social media and that magnifies and amplifies the presence of conspiratorial thinking in new kinds of ways. So the content can shift right so if we're not worried so much about communist infiltrators in the government now worried about some secretive collection of people trading in young children to drink their blood and live forever. I mean the the content is not so important as the fact that it's happening under our noses and there are clues all around us that can be decoded. That's the aesthetics of conspiracy theory. How does the Bible come into that? I mean usually conspiracy theories are not about something like the Bible but the Bible again has always been this kind of totem of US identity in various kinds of ways and a site of conflict among different kinds of people who claim US identity. So in the 19th century and early 20th century you had Protestants and Catholics debating over which Bible should be a public Bible but then what happens in the 1960s is all of that discourse gets shifted because we now have this much stronger separation of church and state that comes into play in the 1960s and there's a host of sort of legal history about why this happens but at the end of the day what happens in the early 1960s is for the first time things like school prayer and public reading of the Bible in publicly funded schools is forbidden by the Supreme Court and suddenly the presence of the Bible itself as the sort of totem of US identity is called into question and people are either cheering for its downfall or trying to come up with ways to restore it to its center and come together in this kind of conspiratorial thinking about the Bible who is displacing the Bible who's upholding the Bible the family that brings the lawsuit about the Bible and public reading are accused of being as you know surprised communist infiltrators who are trying to bring down the US Christian pious government and delivered them the hands of the Reds and so on and so forth so it's just this this combination of forces so the Bible becomes one site in which people begin to question what is the truth around me and are there clues that something else might be going on yeah that's that's really helpful and nice way to get us into this so I want to ask you about the first and kind of genre setting a gospel thriller it's called the Q document it's going to come out in 1964 but let me try to like give some some other context to that so in 1963 the mentoring candidate was still out in theaters until it was pulled after JFK's assassination by 1965 it gets replayed on CBS also in 1963 is that Supreme Court case so kind of right after this Supreme Court case that stops mandatory Bible readings in public school and prayer in public school this thriller is going to come out and those cases they show how the role of the Bible in public life was changing but perceptions about the Bible were also changing and you mentioned a few things with this so the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nakamadi texts emerge about a decade or two before this and those texts they really changed scholarly understandings of early Christian and biblical worlds also the RSV the revised standard version of the Bible comes out in 1952 its first copy was presented to President Truman and like any new translation there was controversy around around it but you know beyond any of the specifics of you know this or that verse the controversy it was raising a kind of broader awareness that the Bible is what's translated that there's some kind of gap between the text we see and the original meaning and maybe even more technically the critical Greek edition that scholars today still use that the first version of it came out in 1898 and we're about to get our I think 29th edition so if my math is right here then that's like what every four or five years we get a enough of a change that like really good scholars think enough of a change in what really good scholars think the Bible originally said that they feel the need to make a spy a new one right and the details of the beginnings they don't matter that much here what your analysis is really showing is that kind of while scholars are working away on their Greek fragments there's this broader set of fears and desires that are merging from that work like scholars think they're getting better and more precise Bibles and everyone else just knows that it's changing so maybe you can kind of correct me or add to that that context but you know if our original gospel thriller is gonna land in more or less that that world you know what is this this novel this thriller the Q document who wrote it what's it about you know what kind of template does it set and and what what fears is it is it tapping into I think you're spot on that one of the things that really shifts the 1960s is the public awareness that the Bible can be revised so there were always different trans not always but there were many different translations of the Bible in the US living in the period 19th century but they were fairly context specific so you had Bibles for reading in church that was your King James you had Bibles for study that was the authorized version when the RSV came out in the 40s and then the 50s it hit in a very different way because now we're in this conspiratorial mind frame like well what is truth what is being hidden from me and people are very suspicious of this that it wasn't just a context specific translation it was revision like who are you to revise this um to what end are you saying that my Bible was wrong and the new discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls are Nakamadi which were from the 1940s um they didn't just add to the data set that people thought of when they thought of the Bible they also now became sources for changing and challenges to what had been perceived as the reliability of the Bible which for some people was good and for some people was bad right either the Bible needed to be revised or demoted altogether or it was under attack why were these people saying they could do this this is the kind of um tenor of discovery and revision that is now entering into the public consciousness in a different way going in the 1960s um the Q document as the first novel that sort of lands in this context as a thriller is actually a kind of modest version of the genre it was it was successful um there were others that were more successful there others were less successful the writer um wrote under a pseudonym it turns out he was a television writer in Los Angeles a couple years later he revealed to he was so the actual author was not that important right he just made up a pseudonym because he was also doing TV writing and journalism um in some ways it is absolutely standard of the formula that's going to develop over the 1960s and 70s into the 2020s in some ways it's a little anomalous um which I can get into so it is a novel that is set in Tokyo which in the 1960s uh was a kind of key trade intersection point between eastern west so it was very much propped up by western money and commerce but was definitely a portal to trade with the communist world um particularly china and the protagonist of this novel is an ex-academic named George Cooper who is living for vague reasons we find out in the course of the novel in a kind of self-imposed exile he's left academia he's left his home in the US and he's working kind of freelance to authenticate antiquities for a very shady importer who is both morally and physically grotesque um fillers are not subtle genres if we're going to have the sort of antagonist he's going to be very clear um and opposed to the kind of protagonist before us so Cooper is called into this man's office and asked to authenticate and translate several documents written in Latin and Aramaic and Mio Hebrew um and they had come from the collection of a rabbi turned Nazi collaborator who died in world war two so there's a lot of echoes of world war two and the shift between the moral clarity of that kind of conflict and the moral ambiguity of now this kind of cold war displacement of people and more. orals and ideologies. When Cooper translates these documents, he finds that they severely undermine Christian origins. These are our first century documents. Some record Jesus' actual words. That's the cue document of the title. And they reveal that he is a kind of, really almost clinically insane warrior Messiah. Like he's preaching an end of the world in ways that are flamboyantly different from the Jesus of the Gospels. He expects he's gonna rise from the dead and we learn from these documents when that doesn't happen. His disciples organize a cover-up. Paul involved in this cover-up, actually ends up murdering someone to cover it up. So some of these documents are proof that Paul was himself a murderer. These are obviously incredibly inflammatory documents. Cooper grows increasingly concerned what they're going to do to Christianity. These become public. If this grotesque dealer in arms and humans and antiquities can actually sell them to the highest bidder, that this will do a reprobial damage to Christianity. He even considers destroying them at some point rather than let them fall in the wrong hands. The climax of the novel is a backroom auction held between a, quote, red Chinese historian, a Marxist historian and a representative from the Vatican. And so it's very clearly laid out. Here we are sort of institutional religion versus communist lack of religion and they're vying for these documents, which if the Vatican gets them, they will surely suppress them. If the red Chinese get them, they will publish them. But that will be to the detriment of Christianity. At the last minute, Cooper realizes that these are forgeries and he's able to prove it. And this moment of danger is sort of dissipated. But we're left with this feeling that this is sort of one room in which one conflict is taking place amongst a network of shadowy rooms around the world where some other things will be happening. So the press for the book that appeared at the time actually distills its appeal a little better than the summer I gave. So I'm going to actually read, this is from an ad from the New York Times that ran for the hardback version. It then became copy that was on the back of the paperback. And I'll read from this ad, which is not necessarily super accurate to the content, but it is, in fact, accurate to the appeal. So it says, how long has it been since you stayed up all night reading a book? Why did red China want the queue document? Why did the Vatican said someone to buy it? Why did the Nazis believe in it, even though its discoverer was a Jew? Why did a Catholic priest contemplate murder because of it? What did the queue document reveal? It tells what happens when a 2,000 year old scroll the cast substantial doubt upon the divinity of Christ is discovered. So not necessarily accurate to the plot. There's a priest who momentarily is sort of thrown by this. It's not a scroll. It's fragments and so that's fine. But we have the key elements, right? This is a fast paced genre, the thriller. You will stay up all night because it moves and moves and moves you through the story. It embeds readers in various global conspiracies with both religious and political conflicts. We have red China. We have Nazis. We have the Vatican. These are very evocative kind of global forces in tension with each other. There is danger. There's no mention of the protagonist, which is interesting. There's just this sense of danger. There's a contemplation of murder. And at the center lies the Bible, right? So that last line, if you don't know with the queue document and this is about it, tells you what's at stake. It's Christ, Christian origins, and the Bible. Those are the appeals of the genre. Some of the other elements of queue document are less characteristic. We actually rarely have this kind of text-based academic protagonist that tends to be rare in the novels. For various kinds of reasons, the novels prefer when they do have an academic protagonist, they tend to be more archeological. I think because archeologists are resourceful. They're literally digging up unseen truth. Whereas the text itself is already suspect. So an expert in text is not necessarily the ideal protagonist. The setting in Japan is completely anomalous and has a lot to do with the author's own biography was stationed there after World War II. And so Nose, Tokyo, and Nose, it's surrounding so he can set something there. And interestingly, the idea that these are forged documents is relatively rare in the genre. Only a few early novels posit that this dangerous new discovery was actually forged for sinister reasons that the conspiracy is about forgery. Much more typically is the idea that these are true texts that have been hidden for decades, centuries, that that's the conspiracy, is the hiding of the truth and the danger of the truth coming out. I mean, these are both two sides the same coin. It's all about hidden knowledge and its dangers. But the forgery, while compelling for a moment, really kind of gives way very quickly in the 1970s to the threat of authentic real lost gospels. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. And we'll come back to the questions of forgery, I'm sure. But one of the key moments in these stories, as you laid out, is what you call the find. And this gets kind of, you know, it becomes like an outbirth of something that actually happens. So can you tell us the story of Muhammad the Wolf and then we'll kind of see how it shows up in fiction? One of the problems I'll say first that I had with this is the language of discovery is very problematic for lots of reasons. And particularly these novels do point out that oftentimes this is not a discovery so much as an uncovering or recovery. So the find is this really fascinating kind of narrative that appears in real life and in the novels, which locates the recovery or uncovering these texts in very particular kinds of social political locations. So if it's OK, I'm actually going to read the most commonly known version of the story of Muhammad the Wolf. This is from Edmund Wilson's 1955 New Yorker essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wilson writes, at the beginning of the essay, at some point, rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammad the Wolf was mining some goats near a cliff on the Western Shore of the Dead Sea. Climbing up after one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before and he idly through a stone into it. There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. The boy was frightened and ran away. But later he came back with another boy and together they explored the cave. Inside were several tall clay jars among fragments of other jars. They took off the bowl like lids. A very bad smell arose. This turned out to rise from dark, oblong lumps which were found in all the jars. When they got the lumps out of the cave, they saw they were wrapped up in lengths of linen and coated with a black layer of what seemed to be pitch or wax. They unrolled them and found long manuscripts and spried and parallel columns on thin sheets that had been sewn together. So these lumps are going to become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, although in fact, these seven original scrolls were just the tip of a massive iceberg in what would soon be huge excavations and recovery efforts in Israel and what was then Jordan where the caves were located in 1867. So we end up with thousands more fragments and pieces of scrolls that constitute the Dead Sea Scrolls. So what the story brings us is this really fascinating notion of how the find takes place in a foreign setting and it acknowledges that this is the Middle East, this foreign setting, it's not quite part of the colonial enterprise anymore, right? This is now in 1947 when these discovered, this is now part of the British Mandate, which is going to give way to independent states in the Middle East, it's no longer part of the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire. So the find takes place with natives, sort of uncovering things, but they remain unaware of what they found. So these still remain kind of destined for Western eyes in a way, it's a literal child who finds these and doesn't know what they are, just unrolls them in wonderment and turns them over eventually to clear Western hands. So it engages with both a reinforcement of the Middle East as a kind of inert container, this source of knowledge that's going to be ultimately Western, which by the way is also the Bible itself, right? This acknowledgement that the Bible itself comes from these Middle Eastern spaces, but is now a Western artifact in a very real way. So the find allows for that sort of transfer and recovery, but it also still troubles it. So in earlier narratives, when you had sort of Bible hunters, these were Westerners going into Eastern spaces and bringing out what they found. Now the find sort of erupts out of the landscape into native hands, and those native hands might have their own agendas, right? The foreignness of these sources, it has to be mediated by locals who might have their own ideas. So for instance, we have the story of Muhammad the Wolf. Nobody knows if this is actually a true story, right? This in fact wasn't the first story that was told. This is a story that emerged over the course of a couple of years. So by the 1950s, Evan Wilson can tell it, but we don't know that it's true. We know that it serves certain interests, both local and international interests. It serves the interests of the new state of Israel. [BLANK_AUDIO] of the interests of the Roman Catholics who are interpreting his texts. So it does the work of attempting to mediate the foreignness of the Bible into Western hands through this kind of fine narrative. Yeah. And so, you know, we get Dead Sea Scrolls. The other kind of big find around this time is the Nagamadi texts. And these texts, they're, you know, important for early Christian scholarship, but they they prompt all kinds of like fantasies about this kind of, you know, more original, less hierarchical, less, maybe orthodox, maybe less patriarchal version of Christianity than the forms that were eventually went out. And you know, one thing that the the fantasy of these thrillers clarify that scholarship often leaves in poet is the implications of these finds. Like scholars, we tend to say like, well, we're just trying to say what happened here. But there's this, you know, unstated and unstable set of meanings. It's kind of built into these these finds. And gospel thrillers, they really let readers fantasize about those, you know, behind the scenes forces, like the Catholic Church, who are holding back another kind of religious order that might have emerged or that might in the future emerge. And you call these these possible futures kind of tantalizing in that they're the stories they let readers imagine a different reality that is, there's kind of vivid enough that it can stoke desire for that other potential, but that it's never so close, they will actually exert that potentially destructive force. So, you know, maybe you can can get us into like what were scholars actually saying about about these texts, people like Elaine Pagels or Barterman. And then what kind of fantasy is do the novels project from them? And maybe you can kind of work through an example or two for that for us. Yeah, so the Nakamadi texts were found supposedly, again, a couple of years before the Dead Sea Scrolls, again, in a space that was transitioning from colonized colonial European controlled space into space that was held on its own. So the Nakamadi texts, much more even the Dead Sea Scrolls, really tested the relationship between Western states and the New Egyptian state, which basically said, if you don't return some of these documents that have already made the right of Egypt, no one's going to see anything ever again. So really put the point on the fact that local interests and Western interests had to negotiate in ways to get the truth. And what this find is so that, you know, the hidden fear and desire of the Dead Sea Scrolls was that something about Jesus would show up because that's the time these texts came from. Like this was the time Jesus was around. Maybe he was there. Maybe we'll have some smoking gun, which has never appeared, which is a zone set of conspiracy theories. The Nakamadi texts were clearly later Christian texts, but they had this sense of a road not taken and the different roads and byways of Christian development that could go back to the second or first century. We're not really sure. So I think it's useful as a contrast to look at the fine story for the Nakamadi texts. So I'm going to read the Elaine Pagels version. This is she wrote in her book, "Nostic Hospitals" in 1978, and she's telling the story that became in the 1970s the story of the fine. So she writes again, at the beginning of her book, 30 years after the 1945 discovery, the discoverer himself Mohamed Ali El-Saman told what happened. Shortly before he and his brother avenged their father's murder in a blood feud, they had settled their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for Sakakh, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around in a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar almost to meet your high. Mohamed Ali hesitated to break the jar, considering that a gin or spirit might live inside. But realizing it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar and discovered inside 13 prepyrus books bound in leather. So we had this amazing sort of fantasy of a Middle Eastern, you know, the very careful Arabic terms for the soft soil. There's a blood feud. They are doing much like the goat tender in the Dead Sea Scrolls story, also named Mohamed. They're doing very routine, domestic, almost pre-modern kinds of tasks that bring them then into contact with something even more ancient, but then is going to be transferred to the West in some sense. But what I find really telling about the story is that instead of the Dead Sea Scrolls where you had these sort of texts from the location where there were composed that were hidden in caves, here it's a jar that's been buried. These are texts that have moved from somewhere and discovered by locals who then don't have their own relationship to them. These pre-date or date away from the time and place they were found. The story is even less reliable than the Dead Sea Scrolls story, but what's evocative about it is this literal genina bottle, right? That's what paytles is describing that could emerge from the bottle and grant wishes to people who in the coming decades are going to express their continuing unhappiness with the conservative religion and the Bible and Christianity. So it becomes this kind of container for dreams and wishes of alternatives, paths, roads not taken, and the timing is really key. So the texts are found in 1945. Some are published very quickly, particularly in the gospel of Thomas, which is one of the more famous ones. Books from the first Codex are published in the 1950s. The others take a little more time. So when Elaine Pagels is a graduate student and counters them, they're still being translated and transcribed and published into English. And now we're in the 1960s, right? We're in the time of political, religious, institutional, upheaval, dissatisfaction with conservatism, patriarchy, misogyny, racism, war, all these things that conservative, white male Christianity scenes complicit in and reliant upon. And we have all of these liberation movements that are pushing against them. And these texts enter into those conversations as a way not to potentially derail Christianity, but restore Christianity. This is a fantasy that a pure older road not taken could be found that had been suppressed for centuries by mainstream Christianity, and therefore Christianity itself could be redeemed. If the Bible had to fall by the wayside for that to happen, so be it. If we replace the gospel of John with the gospel of Thomas, so much for the better, but we end up with something that is more life-affirming rather than high bound. It's more spiritual, rather than institutional, it's egalitarian, and it's tolerant. All these things that are liberatory in this 1960s, 1970s context. So when scholars like Pagels or Bart Eramon write about this road not taken or lost Christianity, it's almost always something that is more than what we've ended up with. That it is something that Pagels describes as a current that's been pushed underground that erupts to the surface in the 20th century in ways that it can now take hold, even though it didn't before. So when we encounter these in the novels, this impulse to recover an earlier better, even heretical Jesus, this gets even amplified. So Jesus becomes associated not with patriarchal religion, but often with, quote, Eastern philosophy, something which is about an internal self that's liberated rather than subject institutions, he embraces gender egalitarianism, he preaches liberation, sometimes explicitly compared to liberation theology, which is the sort of Marxist Christian philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s, he teaches tolerance, he says there's no need for clergy or scripture, he's this sort of fantasy, hippie, barefoot preaching Jesus of the 1960s, but now we discover him through these texts that have been suppressed for centuries. So at these go way beyond anything that we would see in the Nakamadi gospels, these nostic texts, but they play with those same impulses and magnify them 100 fold. Yeah, yeah, that's that's great. Can we talk about the role and representation of scholars? You know, even before gospel thrillers become a genre, we have these these bible hunter stories that you mentioned, and you know, some of these are fiction, some of them are not, like the first chapter opens with a story of a Constantine Titian Dorf in the mid-19th century discovering what is our oldest complete New Testament, and right after another scholar claims to have forged it, and that's like, that's a real story. But there's also kind of fictional versions of that that involve like a good professor doing kind of the opposite where he figures out that a scandalous gospel that claimed that Christ didn't really rise from the dead was actually a forgery made by the Nazis. This is where the the cute document is a kind of transitional story. But in that story, right, the moral core of the academic is like what saves Western civilization. By the time we get to the gospel thrillers though, kind of academics and experts, as you've said, are like they're more ambivalent. They're kind of they're like weirdos who don't actually fit into the society that they're trying to help, and scholars they end up treating the bible like a code to be cracked or a crime to be solved. But you know, readers' tastes and expectations have really changed by that, and you know, it's almost like academics think that they're living in an detective story when the public is actually reading the wires or something. You know, so can you tell us about the the role of what you call the knowledge broker in these conspiracy theories? Yeah, so it's interesting. So who are these your documents? Why are they important? Sorry. Sorry, I did. Oh, who are the brokers? What's the myth of unbroker knowledge? Yeah, sorry, you cut off. That's why I started talking. We'll get a fix. So the funny thing about George Cooper and the cute document is he's actually not his moral core does not come from being academic. His moral core actually comes when when he renounces the quote-unquote objective processes of history writing, which is as it's described in the book. You know, as a historian, he says to himself, he's just there to transmit knowledge, but his moral core is shaken by what that transmission can do. So it's actually when he really stops becoming an academic at last that he finds his moral core. There's something, I'm not going to say necessarily troubling about academic knowledge in the novels, but knowledge is in any conspiracy narrative, both the goal and the problem, because in the thriller conspiracy narrative, you don't know what's true or not. That's what you're trying to find out. Who is telling you the truth and who is concealing the truth? That is the heart of a thriller. That's what makes it a kind of cold war narrative as opposed to just people fighting with each other. So knowledge as a problem means that the people who can mediate knowledge are also potentially a problem. How do you know they're telling you the truth? So academics in these novels range from, as you say, the weirdo who just has a lot of information and their fingertips to actually people who could be very duplicitous. So in one of the novels, an early one called Judas or the Judas Gospel, there's a fine narrative where a sort of British submitisist on a disastrous excavation finds a scroll and his intent is to smuggle it out of Israel and blackmail the Vatican to get money for it. And that becomes a disaster for him and everybody needs. But this idea that his specific knowledge is going to be used for personal gain rather than for shedding light on the truth is this extreme example of what we see in a lot of the novels, which is that the people who give us knowledge are also subject to scrutiny. Now we have lots of different kinds of knowledge brokers in these novels. Part of this is just a practical concern. Readers need to get information about a world they don't know anything about. And this is true of all thrillers. So I'm going to have to explain what this new bomb does and why it needs to be stopped. Someone has to explain the intricacies of this cold war dynamic and so on because the reader by definition is not part of this world. That's true also of biblical studies in archaeology. Some novels do it more successfully, some don't, but you basically need mouthpieces in a narrative function to explain what's going on. So that's a kind of practical way to get readers of information. But then it also contains and frames expert knowledge and subjects it to a kind of scrutiny. So a lot of times people will go get knowledge from someone who has expertise and find out later they lie to them and that they're in fact racing against them to find their own version of the truth. We learn that knowledge is never disinterested. It always brokered by people who have specific kinds of desires of their own. Academics who hold this arcane knowledge may or may not be trustworthy. They may have their own theological motives, political motives, their own personal motives, vengeance, greed. Sometimes there are more noble motives. So when Cooper and the Q document thinks I may have to destroy these documents. That's a way of suppressing knowledge. But we meant to think that it's actually going to be on the side of good. Sometimes they are just duplicitous. That is they're just trying to exert their own will over the world in a way that is against what we think of as a kind of abstract quest for academic truth. There are other sorts of knowledge brokers that we've seen these novels too that are equally there to share knowledge but also show that the acquisition of knowledge is always going to be problematic. So I talk about sort of locals, natives which like a lot of thriller genres, there's a kind of capitalist consumption that we see through travel. So there's usually all kinds of global travel. And again, the reader has to be acclimated to new situations. So you often have locals who are tour guides or partners on the scene who help the protagonist out because the protagonist is white, western male and doesn't necessarily know what's going on. And these natives are sometimes kind of inert sort of containers of knowledge but also often have their own motives. So in a lot of novels that have an archaeological setting, there are locals who work on an archaeological dig and they're not just instruments of the white western archaeologists. They are locals with their own political, theological desires and personal motives that are tied up in the way that they access and broker knowledge for the visitor. And then there are clergy, right? So these are stories about religion and we think of institutional clergy as a wielding a kind of expertise but in the world of these thrillers, institutional expertise is almost always liable and susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. So to be a priest in the Vatican could mean that you were an expert in ancient languages and in the context of Jesus and ancient Heresy and so on or it could mean that you are a desirous of power and only to manipulate the knowledge and expertise that you have in order to steer the protagonist on the wrong path and claim that truth and power for yourself. The myth of unbroker knowledge, this is something that the novel's unmasked. So the way that, I'll just say modern US, Anglo-US biblical studies tends to work, is that scholars think of themselves as kind of disinterested people attempting to arrive at the truth who have set aside their own desires and motives in order to produce biblical knowledge. We're merely designing a better mouse trap, right? We're not interested in the mouse. We are merely deploying our own skills and expertise to arrive at something. When these novels portray academics alongside locals and clergy and other sorts of knowledge brokers as people with deep interests, they're really unmasking something that is actually probably true. None of us produce knowledge in a disinterested or uninterested fashion, right? We all come to what we do with various kinds of interests, which is not to say we are all members of a conspiracy, but it is to say that when we disavow those interests and imagine we are simply filtering knowledge through the kind of transparent lens of our expertise, we are misrepresenting in some way how we got to where we are and how we are producing the knowledge that people are then consuming. And I think these novels, even though they are incredibly exaggerated and I don't see any of us sort of accurately represented in them, which is totally fine, they are uncovering something that is actually really germane to understand how knowledge is produced in academic kinds of settings. At Equinox, that's high performance loving, iconic spaces that inspire, personal training backed by real data, unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and Pilates to strength and conditioning. Elevate your post-performance ritual with sonas, steam rooms, cold plunges, and more. are totally disinterested in our knowledge. That's always true, but I think you really bring that out when you talk about the Q Gospel and kind of situate it historically. So the Q Gospel, for people who don't know, it's a hypothetical Gospel that would solve the problem, the puzzle of the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and why they share so many stories. And you write, it's no coincidence that the rise of the Q Gospel in difficult studies tracks chronologically and thematically with the flourishing of the Gospel thrillers in U.S. popular culture since the 1960s. So let's leave aside the synoptic problem. We're not going to solve that one today. But what kind of unspoken assumptions of professional biblical studies does putting Q and the hypotheses around that together with Gospel thrillers? When we put those things in conversation, what do we see that we might not have seen before? I'm happy to leave aside the synoptic problem and whether or not Q really exists. And to be clear, Q as a theory emerges in the 19th century. Q as a cottage industry really takes off in the 70s and 80s. This is when we start to get dedicated international efforts to isolate Q, identify Q, theorize Q. We suddenly have scholarly and popular publications of Q with titles. They all call it the Lost Gospel. And we can see how clearly that just keys immediately into the sort of fears and desires in these novels. And of course, Q as a theory is picked up by these novelists, although almost never in the format that academics would produce Q. It just becomes a stand-in for what if we had the words that Jesus said. So the Q document in the novel, the Q document is not anything like the Q that scholars reconstructed the same in the Q that appears in half it has another novels that just latch onto this idea because it's such an evocative idea of Q. The rise of Q as a recoverable text in the 70s and 80s and 90s fascinates me because it does show how much academics are really operating under some of the same assumptions that are amplified and then contained in the Gospel thriller. So The idea is the gospel we have is not the original gospel. That's a very simple way of saying that people wrote it, based on earlier sources, sure. But something happened in the past to obscure the original gospel from our site. And now new discoveries and new methods can get us closer to their original. That first and third point are staples of biblical studies. The Bible we have has undergone processes of editing and new discoveries in ingenuity can get us closer to that original. It's that middle point that often gets obscured. Something happened in the past to obscure that original from our site. We talk about Matthew and Luke as editing, revising, collecting, but another way to talk about what Matthew and Luke did, if this is our theory, is that they got rid of Q, right? They altered Jesus's original words to shape a different kind of story and that Christianity from that moment on perpetuated that act of cover-up. That's an extreme way to talk about it and people that usually talk about it. But there's really no other way to think about why Q once existed and we no longer have it. But we can recover it, right? Q wasn't lost like Pompeii buried under a volcano, right? Q and its recovery tell us something about the process by which the Bible we have came to not be the Bible as it originally was. And the implications of that are not nearly antiquarian, right? It's not just that we are reconstructing Pompeii once we've uncovered it to reproduce something closer to Jesus's original words has much deeper implications for the Bible, for Christian origins, and for Christianity, than simply reconstructing a poem of Sappho, right? Yes, everyone loves Sappho, but this makes you different. Yeah, for sure. And the narrative is different. The narrative by which we got here is different, right? Sappho is legitimately just people stop copying it. We make in Bibles and we kept moving further away deliberately. I mean, I sound like a conspiracy theorist. You know, there are obviously natural sort of ways this happens, but the theory of recovering Q in the 20th century relies on the idea that it wasn't just lost, it was actually sort of sidelineed. Yeah, so there's Q, and then there's kind of a whole bunch of other nonfiction new gospels, like gospel of Judas, gospel of Judas wife, all kinds of things, right? Some of these are forged recently. Some of them are actually ancient texts. At least one of them is a text that most scholars now think was forged, but we're still debating kind of who forged it and when and why. And with all these finds, we see this kind of giant diversion that we've been talking about between, on the one hand, the like official rhetoric of the field of like we are, you know, calm, tweedy nerds just trying to get at the facts and like the lived reality of the kind of gossipy, motive of questioning, conspiracy, mindedness that surrounds so much of biblical scholarship. And like you said, like you know, part of what makes any field of the field of study is that presumably it's a personal that like anyone can verify its findings. But the like not so hidden secret is that's like really clear if you've ever been to an academic conference, is that the personalities and politics and theologies are kind of uncomfortably inseparable from scholarship. And maybe the most famous and important case of this is Morton Smith and the secret gospel of Mark. So can you tell us kind of how the gospel thriller helps us understand this story that has bounced around biblical scholarship for like more than 50 years? You know, who is Morton Smith? What is the secret gospel of Mark? And how does the thriller really help us understand this episode? - So Morton Smith was a classical historian. He actually had two doctorates because in the 1940s he had traveled to Israel and was trapped by World War II and so decided to learn Hebrew and get a second doctorate because why not and then return to the States and got a doctorate from Harvard. So he was expert in second type of Judaism in classical studies and in the 1950s he had a sabbatical and went back to the Marseille monastery outside Jerusalem where he had been in the 1940s during that first trip to the Middle East and he cataloged their library. It had been a very famous library in the Middle Ages. Most of that famous library had been moved off site to Jerusalem but there were still some books and he cataloged them and he found he said in copied in the fly leaves of a modern printed book from the 17th century written in a modern Greek hand excerpts from a letter supposedly written by a second century Christian in Clement about a secret gospel of Mark or scenes from a gospel of Mark that was Misty Cause which is sort of hidden or for the initiate but secret is a perfectly good translation. And there were sort of two scenes that could fit into a gospel of Mark. One was about a resurrection of a young man. It sounds a lot like the story of Lazarus although he's not named. And in the second instance, Jesus rejects the women relatives of this disciple whom he raised from the dead and whom he initiated. Morton Smith to photograph this text came back to the States in 1960 presented it at the Society of the Book of Literature and called it the secret gospel and claimed that it could go back to traditions about Jesus conducting ritual initiations with his disciples alone at night where sometimes the union might be physical as well as spiritual. This was the big headline that put everyone in a tizzy. It was controversial at the time. He finally published both incredibly detailed academic version of the text and then a popular account of its discovery both in 1973. People began to study it in earnest. Some people really did incorporate it into their understanding of the gospel histories. People actually came up with very interesting sophisticated theories about how this might have been part of an original gospel of Mark that was then excised in the way the Clements said that these were just for initiates and everyday people didn't read them. And they came up with ways that would fit into the history of the gospel of Mark. Other people thought that it was either a later forgery, maybe medieval or there were hints that it was a modern forgery but nothing during Smith's life. And then after he died, people began publicly, repeatedly accusing him of having forged this gospel to perpetrate a hoax on the academy. And those accusations have persisted if anything have intensified since he died in 1991. So find in 1958, first reported in 1960, published in 1973, he's dead in 1991. And this is now 2024 and a new book just came out last year with new theories about what this gospel could have come from. So we have not stopped talking about it. What began as a debate over this gospel fragment has morphed into what I think is a field coming to terms with its own vulnerabilities. If new discoveries that are safeguarded by experts can challenge and revise Christian origins of the Bible, what happens when that expertise could be misused? That is, we finally come to terms with the fact that we as scholars have motives and interests. And what if we are suspicious of this particular person's motives and interests? There is no evidence that Smith forged secret mark, I don't know if he did, I don't know if he didn't, or that he conspired to forge it, or that it was fooled by a forgery, which is another very plausible thing, like someone who could write modern Greek slip this in. What's fascinating to me is that the how it happened and why it happened had been moving shifting targets for decades, because what seems to be drawing people to this is not the mechanics of how someone might have done this, although people are very interested in that. But it's uncovering the danger within. How do we diagnose who is going to perpetrate some sort of fraud misusing their expertise? The only given in this story, whether it's Smith had theological motives, whether he had personal motives, political motives, whether he wanted vengeance on his colleagues, whether he had a gay agenda he was pushing, whether he wanted to promote himself, whether he wanted to change Christianity, because he wasn't self-actually in ordained a physical pillion priest, maybe any of all of these, they shifted completely over time, because what remains the given is the vulnerability of the Bible, and Smith as the representative of that vulnerability in the danger within. Gospel thrillers lay out and exaggerated strokes, these sorts of dangers, and they also imagine that there can be codebreakers who will solve them. This is, I think, what keeps perpetuating the Morton-Smith narratives, we think we're going to, someone thinks they're going to crack this code, because that's the essence of the conspiracy narrative. Codes appear that when we decode them, we get closer and closer to the truth. Maybe they lead to more clues, to more codes, and so on and so on, but people think that if they sort of massage this date along enough, they'll find the narrative by which Morton Smith arrived at what he did, if he did something in Egypt. To the point where there's even this sort of proto-Gospel thriller that I've looked at, it's actually an evangelical novel from the 1940s, which is about a Nazi hoax, and it's more of an adventure tale than a thriller, so I don't really classify it with my gospel thrillers, but it was written, it's called The Mystery of Marsaba, about a forged document placed in the monastery in Marsaba by Nazis, and in the 2000s, scholars said, "Aha, Morton Smith must have read this "and this gave him the idea," which the idea that you didn't need a motive, like you didn't need an inspiring aha for Morton Smith to latch onto at that point is very telling. It just means we're trying to accumulate more and more clues as to how this could have happened. I think it is to me a really fascinating story that keeps not going away, so there was this argument from scholars who came out last year, and then there was an article what two months ago in the Atlantic by Ariel Sabar who also came out. also wrote about the Gospel of Jesus' wife, again, trying to uncover clues in Morton Smith's personal and early professional history, which when you read it, if you're not sort of already part of this narrative of trying to find the conspiracy in the hoax, it just reads like a kind of salacious dive into someone's past who's been dead for like 35 years, and it doesn't make sense unless you put it in this larger context of biblical conspiracy and the desire to find clues and uncover it. Yeah, yeah, that's really great. We've taken a lot of your time, I know, but just to start to wrap up, I'm wondering, how you see this book fitting in your larger academic project? This is your sixth book, and we were at maps, and when you were introduced, and this was your most recent book, people were kind of like, wait, what? People were to book on Gospel through layers, and then when you actually read it, you understand why it takes someone with some expertise in late antiquity to write about and to understand this topic, but how do you see this book as part of your larger project, and maybe what kind of lessons do you see it giving to the study of the Bible and religion more broadly? It's something I thought about because this is a weird, I kept describing it as I've been working on it for more than a decade as a weird side project, and it definitely I think comes as much from my teaching life as my research life, so as someone who's taught biblical studies classes for a couple of decades, including fictional representations of the Bible and fiction based on biblical stories, like I've been very fascinated by the way in which antiquity and biblical antiquity and early Christianity are present in popular imagination. So I think that's something that plays into this. I think there are a couple other strands that are present in my work. I have very much, and this comes out in that profaniest book, been interested in understanding scholarship as an interested endeavor, that is that we come to it with interests that don't, you know, derail us from sort of academic professionalism, but also inform the kinds of things that we notice and see. We are not neutrally handling ancient evidence. We are telling a story about the past and the present, for present interest, along with interest in things like heresy, apocrypha, Christianity, Judaism, these all appear in the novels as themes, and also because they are part of the academic landscape are amplified and projecting the novels. And I think the way they move from ancient studies into a modern genre like a gospel thriller is maybe usefully unsettling. How do I locate myself at this intersection of interest and desires that gets kind of magnifying these novels? I mean, let's say these are not novels. I don't love these novels. I know I wasn't drawn to them because they're sort of amazing specimens of literature. I was drawn to them because they really hold up this kind of fun house mirror to the production of biblical knowledge, which, you know, this is some of the things we do. We teach the Bible in the academy, and we can kind of pretend that we're teaching it as kind of a body of ancient literature, but you know, there aren't departments of Homeric studies. There aren't seminaries dedicated to, you know, Virgil. These are texts that have real world significance and impact. And I think one way I see the significance of gospel thrillers, if it has any, is part of this project of historicizing historical criticism. Historical criticism begins as a theological project in the 19th century and by the late 20th century, it has become a kind of non-confessional way, as we tell our students to approach the Bible. Yes, yes, you can believe what you want, but we're interested in the historical critical. Well, historical criticism has a background in history and in ideologies that are attached to it. And one thing these novels do, weirdly, is they actually break open this kind of deep well of fears and desires that have pulsed through the historical critical approach to the Bible since probably the 19th century. Yeah, that's really great. Okay, so always our last question, what are you working on next? So I just have out now, I don't know if this comes on work on next, but I'm just published a translation of a text called the Life of Tecla. So the acts of Paul and Tecla is a very, very famous and well-known text from the 2nd century about this most likely fictional female apostle of Paul, disciple of Paul who herself becomes an apostle and then you're a martyr and then goes on to preach and baptize and just is fascinating heroin from late antiquity. And at some point in the 5th century, a very literate, very odd person who worked at her shrine in what's now Turkey wrote a fuller version of her life based on the acts in which she inserted all these like speeches and descriptions of landscape and really fascinating. So I did a translation of that for Cascade Press, a whipping stock in their early Christian apocalypse series. And that's just out this month. And my next big project is on conversion in late antiquity. So I'm interested in looking at narratives of ex-Jews that is Jews who have become Christian, not so much as a kind of social historical project. Why do people convert, what did it mean to convert? But why do people tell stories about conversion? How do stories of conversion produce something we recognize as religion? I'm really interested in theorizing the idea of conversion much more thoroughly than we presently do in a study of religion. And one way to get at this is to really focus on these narratives as narratives, that is as interested stories that people are telling in order to accomplish certain sorts of cultural aims. I guess sort of like gospel thrillers. Great, yeah, well I look forward to if we can have you back on when that comes out too. So be great. Yeah. Andrew, thanks so much. That's was such a pleasure. Okay. Bye. Put your limits, train with precision, see the results at equinox, that type performance loving, iconic spaces that inspire personal training backed by real data, unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and Pilates to strength and conditioning, elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges and more. You get free nights every night all year long plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. 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