Academic Thrillers: The formulaic plot of Gospel Thrillers, with their personal, political, and theological anxieties, occasionally bursts into the real world when new discoveries (real or forged) generate anxiety within, and outside of, academic biblical studies. That the fictional and real-world narratives in such cases as the Secret Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Judas, and Gospel of Jesus’s Wife mirror so closely the overblown world of Gospel Thrillers shows how deeply these fears and anxieties penetrate into cultural and political consciousness.

The genius of this genre of Gospel Thrillers is its ability to amplify but also contain the endless fears and anxieties generated by the vulnerable Bible produced by modern biblical studies.

Birth of a Genre: “Conspiracy theory” rises steeply during the Cold War in the United States, including conspiratorial thinking about the Bible. A new genre, “Gospel Thrillers,” emerges at the same time and a close reading of the first Gospel Thriller, The Q Document (1964), shows how this conspiratorial atmosphere reshapes the personal, theological, and political stakes examined in Chapter 1 of this book.

Knowledge Brokers: Unlike modern biblical studies, Gospel Thrillers allow readers to dwell on the personal stakes and motives involved in reimagining Christian origins. They do this through the characters of key knowledge brokers: ambitious academics, native informants, secretive priests, and humble monks confuse any quest for truth in the quest for Christian origins.

Shifting Sands: Gospel Thrillers that center on new “Dead Sea Scrolls” amplify but also contain conspiratorial anxieties focused on the ambiguous Westernness of Israel as a site of biblical origins and discovery. The Jewishness of Jesus is also probed in this set of Gospel Thrillers, often embodied in the religious ambiguity of their protagonists.

What are “Gospel Thrillers” and what can we learn from them? The introduction provides a clear delineation of the novels this study looks at (thrillers that posit a new gospel has been found) and the themes that emerge from them (the political, theological, and personal stakes of new biblical “discoveries” and conspiracies about Christian origins).

Texts and Sects: Since the 1960s, readers have been fascinated with the possibility of heresy at the origins of Christianity and with “apocrypha” that were “excluded” from the Christian Bible (especially inspired by the Nag Hammadi gnostic texts). Gospel Thrillers amplify the excitement about lost texts but also express acute anxiety about heretical Christian sects: ultimately, they allow orthodox status quo to prevail.

The Bible Hunters: This chapters describes the background from which the political, theological, and personal stakes of the Gospel Thrillers emerge in the colonial context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often encoded in fictional “tales of adventure.” A new political climate of modern discoveries (Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi library) signal the shift from “adventure” to “thrillers.”