John Gray at The New Statesman:
There were “many Jesuses, many Christs – many of them unimaginably strange to us today” – alongside other magi who resembled some of these Christs. Sometimes Jesus had a physical body; at others he was an apparition that left no footprints. There was a Jesus who warned his disciples against “filthy intercourse” and instructed them never to have children. In one account, an angry young Jesus curses a small boy, who becomes withered and deformed; later Jesus curses another boy, who falls down dead. There were Jesuses that hung in agony on the cross, and others who suffered no pain. In addition to diverse Jesuses, there was Apollonius, a first-century Greek philosopher and miracle-worker, sometimes called “the pagan Christ”.
Much of Nixey’s case rests on the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Bible contains only four gospels, which gave us the received image of Jesus. But there were many others, with titles such as the “Gospel of Thomas” and the “Gospel of Truth”, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea.
more here.