Gospel Thrillers! When Jesus Meets Robert Ludlum

Episode Outline:
0:00 Special episode: Andrew Jacobs on “gospel thrillers” and the vulnerable Bible
0:25 Bart introduces the episode and previews his Matthew course
5:34 What a “gospel thriller” is and why Andrew coined the term
7:10 Why these novels imagine a newly discovered gospel that could change everything
10:34 Why this is a mainstream cultural phenomenon, not just an evangelical one
12:46 The first example: The Q Document from 1964
16:53 How that novel ties together Cold War paranoia, China, the Vatican, and biblical secrets
20:38 What Andrew means by “the vulnerability of the Bible”
24:26 How biblical scholarship itself makes the Bible seem revisable and therefore vulnerable
25:35 Why the 1960s were such fertile ground for these stories
29:09 Real-life discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi as fuel for gospel-thriller imagination
35:35 The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and how scholarship can start to look like a thriller plot
39:12 Secret Mark, forgery debates, and why scholars still cannot let some cases go
43:02 The Gospel of Judas and the problem of interpretation, even when forgery is not the issue
45:40 Why these novels usually contain or neutralize the explosive gospel by the end
47:40 Conspiracy thinking, the Cold War, and the American taste for hidden powers behind the scenes
52:21 Andrew’s takeaway: the Bible is both culturally central and constantly vulnerable
53:51 Final plug for Gospel Thrillers and where to get it

Episode Description
Many listeners have read a relatively new kind of thriller -- about a mysterious discovery of a long-lost Gospel and the protagonist's attempt to make it public while being hounded in harrowing scenes by political or ecclesiastical forces of darkness (the Nazis! The Vatican!). In this episode Bart interviews the first scholar to discuss this genre, who in fact coined its name, in a book just now coming out: Andrew Jacobs, Senior Research Fellow at Harvard. The backstory is fascinating and illuminating: these books started to appear during the Cold War, in the context of the increasingly serious questioning of authority, imperialism, and colonialism, and just when biblical scholars were themselves publicizing new finds that called into question the traditional truths of Christianity. This context raises all kinds of questions. Why the sudden passion for Gospel conspiracy? Are academic scholars dealing with real-life discoveries themselves "objective" observers, or are they too caught up in the ideologies behind these novels?

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