Kyle Smith's "Cult of the Dead"

Kyle Smith is Associate Professor and Director of the History of Religions Program at the University of Toronto. An award-winning teacher, he is the author or co-author of five books about Christian saints and martyrs.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his newest book, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book tells the apocryphal story of an exchange of letters between a first-century Mesopotamian king and Jesus of Nazareth. The king had written to Jesus hoping that the Galilean wonderworker would visit his kingdom and heal him of some incurable illness. In his response, Jesus declines the king’s invitation but promises to send one of his followers instead. As the legend about the correspondence between Jesus and the king developed, Jesus’s handwritten letter itself became a talisman with the power to heal. In later versions of the story, Jesus sends not a letter but a miracle-working image of his face imprinted on cloth.

As the chapter in which this story is found explains, the most renowned relics associated with Jesus were the objects that touched him during his death: the cross, the crown of thorns, the lance of the Roman soldier, and the shroud in which he was buried. Christians, so my book explains, cared immensely for the things associated with their holy dead, be they these objects of Jesus’s passion or the very bones of the martyrs themselves.

And by focusing on the cult of these martyrs—that is, by focusing on all the objects, rituals, and stories through which centuries of Christians have cared for and remembered their saints—this book tells the story of how Christianity became (and still remains) a cult of the dead.

Visit Kyle Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: Constantine and the Captive Christians of Persia.

--Marshal Zeringue