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The Gospel of Lie: A Grieving Christian Searches the Bible for a New Jesus

“An extremely personal book and an audacious journey into heresy. An intricate detective story that at times tests the sanity of an original thinker who offers his full consciousness to bring this ambitious labor to a satisfying conclusion.” Lance Owens, host of gnosis.org , “...very well written, extremely intriguing, and conveys a huge amount of information on Gospel criticism and Gnosticism. A remarkable, if mystifying, work!” Robert M Price, author of The Reason Driven Life “A moving story—I was glad to read it.” Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels “A powerful story of a grieving man's search for spiritual solace that touches deeply into our hearts. The introduction alone contains hidden treasures.” Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller, Gnostic Bishop “Developing a book that shares many themes with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Mr. Lie finds it perfectly normal to quote Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion side by side with obscure apocryphal gospels and even sprinkles some biblical criticism worthy of Bart Ehrman on the top. Luckily, his indiscriminate borrowings don’t shatter the tubes and his experiment turns out to be exactly as intended: a fiendishly clever parody of conspiracy theories and the paranoia they breed.” T. R. Demeglio, religious scholar and critic In his last book, Joshua Lie examines how the Evangelists misquoted the Old Testament to prove Jesus was the Messiah and embarks on a journey where he misquotes the four Gospels themselves to advance a Jesus that no Christian has ever dreamt of. The Nag Hammadi Library, the Gospel of Judas, the mysteries of the Manicheans and the Cathars, the alchemical endeavors of Carl Jung and the terrifying visions of Lovecraft and William Blake – all sources that he blends together to paint his personal savior. Lie notices that many things attributed to Jesus in the bible make little sense and decides that the best way to pass his ideas is to offer them as new answers to old problems. By a sleight of hand, he offers shocking, yet convincing, explanations to some of the strangest things attributed to Jesus. We finally know why Jesus cursed the Canaanite woman, rebuked Mary at the wedding of Cana, and uttered his famous cry at the cross: ‘God why have you forsaken me?’ Lie pretends to adopt the Gnostic exegesis of the bible, which maintains that Jesus was a divine being who descended to the earth to save his fallen lover Sophia. Lie argues that Jesus’ entire mission was one of spiritual wedding and claims that all the women that Jesus encountered in the Gospels were allegorical for Sophia, each representing her in one of the stages of her spiritual development. And so Lie proceeds, following the steps of Jesus till the moment when the redeemer, crucified, hugs Sophia and submits his spirit in her embrace. A minor mistake, however, reveals the entire work to be the product of his grievance at the loss of his granddaughter. Sadly, it is at this tragic moment that his gospel comes to an abrupt end; for Lie, unable to comprehend the mystery of the resurrection and experience the solace it brings, abandons his draft to finally wither and die. This could have very well been the end of Lie’s tragic story, were it not for his good friend Fady Riad who discovers the manuscript and takes an oath upon himself to have it completed and published. “Your book will be finished, and your Jesus will be resurrected.” He promises his friend in a dream. As Riad studies the draft, however, he soon realizes that it is riddled with various loose ends that make completing it virtually impossible. Nonetheless, Riad doesn’t give up, knowing that there is no price that he won’t pay to honor the legacy of his late friend...