Finally! Words cannot describe how excited I am that this labour of love is finally published. For the last four or five years I’ve been working on this book continuously, while all of life—covid, changing jobs four times, moving countries—happened. And now it is finally out!
I absolutely love the cover of the little baby Jesus petting a dragon. It’s from a medieval Bible as an illustration to the Christmas narrative in the gospels. But, in the Bible there is no dragon! The illustrator decided to add an image from a gospel that was written about two to three hundred years after all the others and was never included in the Bible!
Ancient (and contemporary) Christians have always written and loved adaptations and extensions to the stories they love, or just edited or changed them. This phenomenon has always intrigued me and I wanted to write a book that helped understand why people would write, for example, a new ending to Mark, a third letter to the Corinthians, a gospel about Jesus’s naughty childhood years, the acts of Thomas or John.
Somewhere in 2018 I heard of the field of Fan Studies that, amongst other things, looks at so-called fan fiction—short stories, novellas and even books written by fans and published in zines and online. As someone who wrote Douglas Adams fan fiction in my teenage years this immediately resonated with me. I had an aha moment. I just had to write this book.
My book basically compares fans to early Christians, both groups really like something and both groups create vast universes of texts based on their love. I try to answer age-old scholarly questions (like: ‘why would you write such a text?’ and ‘what does such a text achieve?’) and also new one inspired by fan studies (like: ‘if all these texts are out there, doesn’t that change how you read the originals?).
The book is out there, and sadly still a bit pricey. You can read an excerpt on Google Books. And if you want a copy and can’t get ahold of one from a library: hit me up and I’m sure I can help.
