Letters from Heaven

I haven't read “Strange tales about Jesus”, but I have read a Swedish book by the same author, “Fynd och fusk i Bibelns värld” (Discovery and Fraud in the World of the Bible). Judging by the other customer reviews, “Strange tales” is either an English translation or a very similar book adapted for the world market. I think I can recommend it either way! Per Beskow, a scholar of Church history and a practicing Catholic, is surprisingly good at combining his scholarly erudition and religious faith with a popularized writing style and a kind of objectivity. This is still one of my favorite works of non-fiction. In Swedish, Beskow have also published a kind of sequel, dealing in more detail with the strange tale of Jesus actually being buried in Kashmir in northern India.

“Fynd och fusk” (and “Strange tales”) deal with a number of modern apocrypha – some would call them hoaxes – which purport to be ancient manuscripts telling the truth about Jesus, which usually turns out to be very different from the official story contained in the New Testament. Beskow mentions (and takes apart) the Book of Mormon, the Life of Issa, the Muslim “Gospel of Barnabas” and various pseudo-Essene scriptures. He also mentions the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, a channeled scripture freely based on the Life of Issa and other earlier “manuscript finds”. In a final chapter, he attacks Morton Smith's Mar Saba Letter, which is accepted as genuine by many scholars. Beskow believes that the letter, which strongly implies that Jesus was gay, is a forgery by Smith. (If it isn't, it's presumably just a polemic against the libertine Gnostic Carpocratians.)

As already mentioned, most of the strange new gospels are heterodox when compared with official Church tradition. The only exception are the Swedish “letters from Heaven”, a peculiar 18th century folk belief according to which letters from Jesus, God or Heaven sometimes fell from the skies in almost Fortean fashion. Apart from their provenance, these letters are completely traditional in their message and promise protection from evil if the discoverer keeps the Sunday Sabbath or makes deeds of Christian charity. I suppose you could see them as a benign precursor to modern chain-mails, which often threaten the receiver with bad luck unless they follow the instructions!

The main problem with Beskow, if you are a skeptic, is that he never questions the original gospels found in the Bible. Yet, one could easily tear them apart too, using the same historical-critical method employed by the author to expose the earthly provenance of 19th and 20th century apocrypha. What about, say, the differences between John and the synoptics? That being said, I nevertheless recommend “Strange tales about Jesus” to seekers and skeptics alike. After all, God or Spirit isn't dependent on some obscure manuscript being true or false…