"This Piece of Parchment Will Shake the World": The Mystery of Mar Saba and the Evangelical Prototype of a Secular Fiction Genre

The 1940 evangelical novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter shares with a later, secular genre of novels I call gospel thrillers a common plot (the discovery of a new gospel from the first century and a race to prove or disprove its authenticity) but also common anxieties about biblical authority mapped onto geopolitical, theological, and personal registers. I triangulate these themes with the modern professional study of the Bible, which has also produced a vulnerable yet authoritative biblical text and which has, in surprising fashion, resurrected for its own purposes The Mystery of Mar Saba.