EA Festival 2025: Which Jesus?

Following on from her award-winning book, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey has dared to topple yet more sacred cows in her new book, Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. It is one of the most fun and scintillating books about religious history ever written, if the waterfall of effusive reviews is to be believed. Making the case that there were diverse and contradictory depictions of Jesus in play during the first millennium, Heresy is exactly the kind of book that we savour at EA Festival. In the words of The Economist, ‘The best non-fiction kindles interest in a subject that you were not interested in before. Catherine Nixey achieves that in Heresy . . . It tells a moreish intellectual story and shakes up your understanding of Western history. At the same time, somewhat improbably, it supplies at least one good joke per paragraph; you have to keep turning back to enjoy them again.’