THE JESUS MYSTERIES
by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
HarperCollins, London 1999
This is a powerful book, and its impact, like a rolling express train, accelerates as one is carried along, page after page, through the authors' demolition of the Literalist Christian tradition. Literalist has a capital 'L' because the history of the western world's religious faith has been the story of the triumph of one strand of early Christian development, and the ruthless suppression of all others. One comes away from this book with the gut feeling that this 'triumph' was perhaps the greatest disaster ever to befall our civilization. Certainly, it was the most crippling.