Modern gospel scholars give us new portraits of Jesus every spring - just in time for Easter...Is it true that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene? Was Jesus a Cynic? or a mystic? Maybe even a Gnostic? Is it true that he faked his own death and fled the Holy Land to Egypt? And then he wrote letters to the Jewish court, declaring that they were making mistakes about him. That he never called himself the Son of God? Is it true? that twenty-five years after the crucifixion he celebrated the anniversary of the Last Supper with his friends? Is it true that Jesus' tomb has been found? And his father's grave? That there are other sources that reveal to us about the life and teachings of Jesus. What was not included in the New Testament gospels? That such sources include the Dead Sea Scrolls? That the church hid the truth for many centuries? Or maybe there simply was no Jesus? All these and many other statements can be found in books about Jesus that are read today. The more unusual the portrait, the further it is from traditional ideas about Jesus, the more attention the popular media pays to it. Why are some researchers so inclined to fabricate “new Jesuses”? Craig Evans shows us why most New Testament scholars do not and should not take such claims seriously. What methods, what preconditions encourage them to distort the truth? Is a more sober approach to the search for the real Jesus possible?

A world-renowned Bible specialist, archaeologist, expert on ancient languages and an expert on apocrypha exposes fashionable images of Jesus of Nazareth: Dan Brown's scandalous books "The Da Vinci Code", Michael Baigent's "Jesus Papers", etc., the ideas of radical scientists, the secrets of the Gospel of Judas and other ancient apocrypha - the truth is much more interesting than all such "discoveries" and "sensations"! Commenting on recent sensational works, from scientific studies such as Bart Ehrman's The Twisted Words of Jesus or James Tabor's The Jesus Dynasty, to popular works such as Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers or Tom Harper's The Pagan Christ, Craig Evans offers us a sober and thoughtful approach to assessing the sources that can give us new information about the historical Jesus.