After all, Spoto is best known for his glossy celebrity bios like Diana: The Last Year; his star subjects certainly inspire "worship," but hardly the quality that prompts a dozen generations to, say, pack up and live with the lepers.
However, this prolific profiler of the rich and famous is actually Dr. Donald Spoto, who taught Christian theology at the university level for twenty years.
And for six years, Dr. Spoto was Brother Donald, a Roman Catholic monk.
Packing that kind of double-barreled resume, Spoto suddenly seems singularly qualified to write a life of Christ for pre-millennial post moderns--believers or not.
But don't scream: Spoto's Nazarene is thankfully not the "Hippie Jesus" Plastic Action Figure beloved of liberal preachers, easily bendable into relevant, politically-correct poses.
Nor is He the split-personality spook of televangelists: that pro-death penalty Savior who was executed by the State; who hated gays and abortions so much He never mentioned them once--you know: the Republican.
That leaves the general public with a Jesus who's half Jim Morrison, half Mr. Rogers. And professional Christians of all persuasions puzzle over Sunday's empty pews...
Guided by faith and scholarship, Spoto refuses to adopt any agenda.
New-Agers will squirm at his observation that "the current obsession with angels may be one of the surest signs of the decadence of authentic religion in American life."
As for calling God "She": don't get Spoto started.
Yet he's no cookie-cutter conservative, either. Using the very Bible right-wingers love to thump, Spoto show's there's little scriptural support for their obsessions about sexual morality and male-only priesthoods.
Spoto's Ph.D. in theology, and his bracing prose, make him a Stephen Jay Gould of scripture. Non-Christians in particular should appreciate his handling of those two "problem areas": Jesus' birth, and His death and resurrection.
Spoto presents his arguments like a lawyer:
"If the empty tomb is a late fiction invented by Christians to express faith in Jesus' ongoing life among them, why would it be framed almost exclusively in terms of women witnesses, who were illegal and inadmissible according to Jewish principles of evidence?"
He levels withering, well-deserved sarcasm at skeptics whose arguments against the Resurrection are actually less believable that the Resurrection itself:
"Other fantasists have Jesus meeting up with Mary Magdalene and hopping off to Spain, were they marry, settle down, raise a family-and presumably work on their memoirs or obtain a Gucci franchise. This," sniffs Spoto, "is the stuff of Hollywood."
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