Burton L. Mack scrupulously examines the Christian Testament and fleshes out both the social and the cultural context from which it emerged. In contrast to the widely held view of the gospels as complementary accounts of a single set of events, Mack offers a history of divergent Christian communities and their anonymous writers who wrote widely different chronicles for distinct purposes and audiences over a period of more than one hundred years.

He delineates how Christians in later centuries assigned the names of apostles and disciples to the anonymous stories about Jesus and his teachings, adjusted the chronology, and erased cultural differences in an effort to present a coherent history of the faith and invest the new church with authenticity.

Much as The Iliad and The Odyssey mythologize events and figures in the remote Greek past, the New Testament writings, Mack shows, transform the historical Jesus, a counter-cultural philosopher with no grand messianic pretensions, into the Christ, the dying and rising son of God. Ultimately, then, the New Testament consists of a powerful religious mythology comparable to those of other great religions.