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As I dutifully filled out all the essential information that classifies a book review --- title, publisher, and so on --- I suddenly winced at having to plug in the term "nonfiction" under Michael Baigent's hotly controversial THE JESUS PAPERS.
It's not what you might think, however. In fact, it's not what the inherently biased seminary student part of me thought at first, either. After traveling with this sometimes irascible, often charming spiritual adventurer through the better part of 300 pages, I found myself emerging from the archaeological dust as neither convert nor combatant; certainly not what I expected upon starting the journey.
Instead, I feel as if I've experienced something that is part autobiography, part "Indiana Jones"-style travelogue, part competitive scholarly report, part historical fiction, and part poetic speculation --- with a considerable measure of anti-authoritarian rant (some of it quite justified) holding it all together.
Now there are plenty of folks offering up opinions on what Baigent's latest book is not, and I don't intend to crowd that end of the critical field. But even though I'm glad I read THE JESUS PAPERS on its own merit, I would be hard pressed to say what genre of work it really is, or who its primary audience should be. And in this day and age of post-modern cynicism over all things concerning religious institutions and beliefs, those are important issues.
If Baigent is aiming his theories about an Egyptian-trained mystic/messiah called Jesus, who was "rescued" from crucifixion and reportedly still alive as late as 45 AD, at academics, students and theologians, he has somewhat missed the mark, for most of what he proposes, relates, contests and re-examines is simply old news. For half a century and more, it's all been lectured on, argued over, footnoted, revised, and continually reconsidered in the light of newer understanding, just as any and all information should be. It's a well-worn truism to say that yesterday's historical facts often become today's fiction --- and vice-versa.
And if he is also concerned (as he's often stated in press interviews) with the conscientious layperson who is trying to discern between faith and fact, THE JESUS PAPERS may prove to be just too much concentrated and diverse material to take in all at once for those without the mixed blessing of a formal theological education.
That leaves Baigent and his work resting somewhat uneasily (for me, anyway) in the weird literary twilight zone of populist history that academics and the media find easy to dismiss and denigrate.
The actual "Jesus papers" --- a couple of briefly seen letter-fragments written to the Sanhedrin by someone who might have been Jesus --- fill only a few inconclusive pages near the beginning and end of a book whose entire raison-d'etre rides on them. So as a revelation of any great importance to biblical scholarship, they more or less bombed.
But even acknowledging the author's self-indulgent wanderings, theoretical dissonances, vague allusions and frequently unsupported assumptions, the book needs to be taken more seriously than that.
For example, the stories around the story are another matter. Baigent's journeys and personal experiences at a variety of ancient mystic sites are not only well told but often passionately and convincingly presented. Agree with him or not, he's no dilettante in the labyrinthine and sometimes life-threatening world of field archaeology; for him, the past truly lives, with or without the populist's ego.
Baigent also makes both general and professional readers more urgently aware of the dangers facing numerous historical artifacts (both writings and objects) that have become borderless international pawns, vulnerable to black-market thieves, secretive speculators, conservative church censors, political opportunists, and the inevitable ravages of time.
In short, if nothing else THE JESUS PAPERS reaffirms everyone's right to question any authorities or institutions that would have us categorically and uncritically believe one thing or another, simply on their say-so. What Baigent has called "the greatest cover-up in history" is in no small measure partly Christians' own doing as passive recipients of 2,000-year-old doctrines and traditions that have been shown by numerous preceding scholars to have little or no relationship to actual biblical records, gospel teachings, or cultural realities.
Michael Baigent did not change the core of my Protestant/Lutheran/Anglican theology, but he did plant a few more burrs under my saddle about why I believe what I do and whether the cracks in that belief are there because more light needs to get in.
--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)
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