FACT VS. FAITH

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Camped ostentatiously at the impact point of our age's need to believe and its need to know, and generating best sellers both for its fervent proponents and (lately) its detractors, the historical Jesus movement (Flash! Virgin birth a cover-up! Resurrection a fraud!) hardly wants for print. Yet in his Gospel Truth (Riverhead Books; 305 pages; $24.95), Russell Shorto provides a useful addition: an up-to-date survey and smart lay analysis of the theories that together constitute one of the stickiest challenges to traditional Christianity.

Shorto, a journalist, skillfully lays out the anomalies, allusions and stylistic shifts that have caused a wide spectrum of scholars to see the Gospels less as factual truth than as a product of faith and early Christian politics. He also examines the recent archaeological finds that revved the debate. Detouring occasionally (describing, for instance, a DNA study of the goats whose parched skins were used for the Dead Sea Scrolls), he picks and chooses among the available theories to arrive at a kind of aggregate anti-Gospel.

Shorto's sympathies lie with the movement: a chapter on leftish clerics weaving revisionism into their preaching is far more lucid than one titled "The Case Against." Yet he is at heart a synthesizer. "The trick," he notes, involves doing "two things at once: digging into history with one hand while tolling the beads of story with the other." That he does not detail the mechanics of that prestidigitation can't be held against him. Whoever shows the way to achieving it will be one of the next age's heroes.

--By David Van Biema