The Lost Gospel – Not Lost, and Not a Gospel!

Dr. Bob Cargill of the University of Iowa reviews The Lost Gospel by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson. In his view, it’s a stink-bomb of a Christmas present.

In part (emphases added)

Just don’t bother. Were it a Dan Brown-esque novel, positing a speculative interpretation about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene utilizing a fanciful allegorical interpretation of a document written six centuries after Jesus came and went, I’d say buy it and have fun. Fiction can be so much fun! But the problem with this book is that Mr. Jacobovici believes what he’s writing. He believes his interpretation is true. He wants it to be true. And that hovers somewhere between comical and scary.

I HAVE read the book and it really is worse than you might imagine. The text in question is neither “lost” nor a “gospel”, and the allegorical reading of the Syriac version of Joseph and Aseneth is little more than a wishful hope that it would be so, employing little more than name substitution and a desire to prove The DaVinci Code true. Absolutely no scholar will take this book seriously. It will not change Christianity. It will not change biblical scholarship. It’s just Simcha doing what he does best: direct-to-the-public pseudoscholarship just in time for Christmas.

Read the whole review for all the dirty details.

Another professor, Dr. Greg Carey, weighs in too. It’s a hoax. Although he says more, he observes,

We’re basically looking at a sensationalist money-making scheme here, and there’s nothing else to say about it.

and later (emphasis added),

…Simcha Jacobovichi is a notorious peddler of misleading theories. He promoted an ossuary as containing the bones of Jesus’ brother James, a theory that has been disconfirmed. He also developed a documentary that claimed to unveil the Jesus family tomb, also refuted by experts, and even claims to have uncovered the nails used in Jesus’ crucifixion. It’s a shame that the media ever pays attention to him, at least when he’s talking about Jesus.

Well, there is a place for calling out hucksters.

Finally, Dr. Michael J. Kruger notes that

They stand in a long line of conspiracy theorists who have claimed the same thing, including the recently debunkedGospel of Jesus’ Wife (see my articles on this manuscript here and here).

The title of Dr. Kruger’s post? “Was Jesus Married with Children? Here We Go Again“.

Indeed.