Dubious But a Lot of Fun
Christianity is filled with writings that purport to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life. Many are forgeries, i.e., they are based on real traditions, but the writers put fake names on them to give them greater authority. The orthodox gospel of Matthew is one such example. Apocryphal writings of this kind have been surfacing for centuries with their "discoverers" often claiming to find them under extraordinary circumstances. The Archko Volume is one such work. The first edition revealed direct plagiarism from the novel Ben Hur, and this certainly cast doubt on everything else in the book. But there is still a mystery about it. Did the authors McIntosh and Twyman make up everything, or if they had created a collection of forgeries, were their writings still based on other documents? If so, what documents? Some Archko writings are intriguing; for example, people interested in UFOs will find remarkable passages here, and this in a book that was published in the late 1800's long before popular UFO awareness. The Archko Volume also contains my favorite apocryphal writing: "Gamaliel's interview with Joseph and Mary and others concerning Jesus" which presents us with an amusing account of Jesus as a lazy young man born of an ugly disagreeable father and a chubby mother who despaired that her son would amount to anything. Hardly the makings of a savior! Alas, New Testament scholars are right to reject the Archko documents since no trace of them have ever been found anywhere else, and the Ben Hur connection was an embarrassment, to say the least. Still, I give this book three stars for its fun value and for the little bit of mystery that it still provides.

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