"Stephen Prothero, chairman of the department of religion at Boston University, presents a cultural history of Jesus as American image and icon in vivid, engrossing detail...Within his narrative, ostensibly a popular and often entertaining account of the rendering of Jesus in song, story, and spirituality, the author has embedded a fairly detailed history of American religion itself."

--R. Scott Appleby, The New York Times

"Prothero mines not only sermons and theological tracts but also novels, biographies, songs, films, the press, and the visual arts to 'see how Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image'...American Jesus offers facts, anecdotes, and insights about its elusive and mystifying subject while tracing Jesus' journey from an abstract principle into a celebrity and, finally, an icon...Well written, judiciously argued, and impressively researched."

--Michael Massing, The New York Times Book Review

Publisher Web Site, December, 2004

Jesus the Black Messiah; Jesus the Jew; Jesus the Hindu sage; Jesus the Haight-Asbury hippie: these Jesus's join the traditional figure of Jesus Christ in American Jesus, which was acclaimed upon publication in hardcover as an altogether fresh exploration of American history--and as the liveliest book about Jesus to appear in English in years.

Our nation's changing images of Jesus, Stephen Prothero contends, are a kind of looking class into the national character. Even as most Christian believers cleave to a traditional faith, other people give Jesus a leading role as folk hero, pitchman, and countercultural icon. And so it has been since the nation's founding--from Thomas Jefferson, who took scissors to his New Testament to sort out true from false Jesus material; to the Jews, Buddhists and Muslims who fit Jesus into their own traditions; to the people who adapt Jesus for stage and screen and the Holy Land theme park.