4. The Many Lives of Jesus

This chapter examines some of the sources of the Jesus information available in 1400. We begin with the Qur'an, to explain both its special nature and its importance for the Jesus cult. Turning beyond canon, we then consider four unusual kinds of Jesus-related written documents: charters that spoke in legal language, gospel harmonies that blended the four canonical Gospels into a single narrative, a passage from Mirkhvand's paracanonical expansion of the Qur'an, and the Toledot Jesu, a hostile retelling of the Jesus life from a Jewish perspective. These elaborations and elisions of the canonical material reveal the priorities and values of the societies that first created and then repeated them. They also employ a range of approaches, from the poetic and deep-ken recognition that those who choose not to see were literally blind, to the fifteenth-century discovery or manufacture of a first-century Jewish apologetic speaking directly to an imagined audience that thought with the plain ken.