| Christians around the world celebrate Easter today, commemorating the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. More than two millennia after his (temporary) death, books about the New Testament prophet remain “a publishing constant and a popular craze,” the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik noted, in 2010, in a survey of both the Gospels and the more notable new works. The recent texts offer surprises: Jesus wasn’t necessarily a carpenter, Gopnik learns, identifying the linguistic source of the confusion. The Roman census that sparked the return of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, cited in Luke, was an “obvious invention,” a logistical non-starter that no Roman bureaucrat would have approved. But Gopnik isn’t interested in debunking old stories; instead, the piece is often an appreciative appraisal of its subject, whose personality and famous statements may have been literally lost in translation. Buddha, Gandhi, and Sherlock Holmes all make appearances, as historical and literary analogues. So does a tombstone in Germany that might belong, one scholar believes, to a soldier who could have been Jesus’ father. The details are fascinating, but they yield a paradox. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith,” Gopnik observes. “The more one knows, the less one knows.” | 
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