The Man in the Scarlet Robe begins with a powerful chunk of scripture: the verses from Matthew 27 that describe the taunts and tortures leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s a jarring, ugly scene, and one that’s been largely absent from Sunday school tellings of the Christ story. But its presence here makes a point: if we in the Western world are bored with the life of Jesus, it’s because we know practically nothing about him. It’s in the gritty details that his humanity, his wisdom, and – maybe – his divinity begin to shine through.

Defining the historical Jesus is no easy task; to attempt it is to wander through a minefield of religious politics. Even in the late 1990s, the scholars who make up the Jesus Seminar (an annual gathering of revisionist religious academics) risk fundamentalist ire with every public pronouncement.

It’s this world – this community of myth-crushing, new-wave religious scholarship – that The Man in the Scarlet Robe is really about. So we read tales of in-fighting at the Jesus Seminar and debates over who really wrote the Gospels, and we wonder, along with Michael McAteer and Michael Steinhauser, whether the story of the Resurrection grew out of pagan myths.

All fascinating stuff, but it leaves a larger issue – that a good number of people worldwide still call Jesus their Lord and Saviour – almost completely untouched. For many believers, the ideas discussed here are the vilest kind of blasphemy. Even for moderate Christians, this will be deeply unsettling stuff.

Fair enough. Academics are supposed to rock the boat. But to ignore the consequences of myth-breaking, especially in a book aimed at popular audiences, seems shortsighted.

Who Is This Jesus?, on the other hand, is written only for pious believers. Its tiny size and shabby printing make it feel like a street-corner tract, but Michael Green’s little book is an elegant, passionately written defence of Christianity. There is no academic smugness here; Green is bursting with Good News, and he would rather share it than bother with trivialities like the Jesus Seminar.

With chapter titles like “What was He like?” and “Can we meet Him?”, Green is clearly preaching to the converted (or at least those on the brink of conversion). But his writing is folksy and appealing, and there is none of the shrill tone so common in devotional guidebooks.

The past 15 years have seen an explosion of revisionist thought about Jesus; the Jesus Seminar is now famous enough to warrant annual coverage in Time magazine. But many of the Seminar’s originally outrageous claims have won a kind of mainstream acceptance. There are new writers, though, who are completely happy to carry on pushing the boundaries of faith and history.

With Jesus of the Apocalypse, Barbara Thiering pushes the Jesus story into such unfamiliar territory that it almost becomes unrecognizable. Christianity was actually founded by Herod the Great. Jesus married – twice – and had a son named Jesus Justus. He survived the crucifixion, lived to the ripe old age of 76, and presided over the institutionalization of what would become the Catholic Church.

None of these ideas is new (they in fact bear a striking resemblance to Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ); writers have been known to put a middle-aged Jesus in India, Ireland, Africa, or anywhere else that suited them. But Thiering’s account is, she says, based on scripture. With all the earnest seriousness of a diehard conspiracy theorist, she explains that the book of Revelation is not prophecy at all; it’s a precise, detailed history of the life of Jesus after the crucifixion.

Revelation, Thiering says, must be read as if it’s been written in a code. Words that sound general actually have very specific meanings, and the dragons and beasts and horses of the Apocalypse are really hidden references to people who lived in the first century AD. The technique and much of the code can be found in – you guessed it – the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There is not a whiff of any of this in all the scholarship surveyed in The Man in the Scarlet Robe; Thiering is very much on her own here. But she mishandles her position. Where Jesus of the Apocalypse could have read like a gripping detective story, or a challenging hint at a new theory of scripture, or a high feat of kookiness, it commits the worst sin of all: it’s boring. Thiering starts by assuming the reader buys her idea, and then plods through her revisionist history twice. Hardly a gripping read. For an idea as promising as this, that’s a big disappointment.

The Jesus Conspiracy is a high feat of kookiness. In fastidious detail, Holger Kersten and Elmar Gruber spin delightful tales about the Shroud of Turin’s role in centuries-old cover-ups and deceptions. The Shroud – a linen cloth that bears the ghostly image of a crucified man – has long been treasured as the burial cloth of Jesus. But in the late 1980s, the Vatican had it carbon dated. The results put its origins in the Middle Ages, more or less ending its status as a Holy Relic.

But Kersten and Gruber see a sinister plot behind it all. In experiments to determine how the image formed in the first place, they report, they discover that the body must be warm. In other words, the man whose image the Shroud bears was alive while he was wrapped in the cloth.

Nothing, we read, could be more threatening to the Vatican’s power than evidence that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. The cloth provides that evidence, but the Vatican – through rigged carbon dating – has managed to discredit it as a medieval fake.

This book has an air of ridiculousness that will disappoint readers in search of the real historic Jesus. But in the age of Area 51 and Black Helicopters Over America, maybe faith-by-paranoia isn’t such a bad idea.