The times are apparently not a-changin' for Bob Dylan, the American songwriter whose genius for giving the slip to his own musical shadow has long been celebrated by fans and a growing coterie of scholars. "There is but one Dylan," chuckles fellow countryman Stephen H Webb, and if that proclamation has a slight biblical air it is intentional. According to Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, in Indiana, Dylan's entire musical oeuvre of the past 45 years has been a superlative Christian work yet unfolding. He knows there will be those who beg to differ.
In his new book, Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved, the University of Chicago-educated theologian seems destined to raise even more hackles among his subject's secular followers than did the brief time in the late 1970s - date stamped by three muscular evangelical recordings, Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love - that is commonly regarded as the sum total of Dylan's flirtation with an aggressive "born-again" stance.
Webb's 190-page work, his seventh on religious themes, focuses on this period, but also, drawing on a variety of historical, religious and psychological texts, re-evaluates much of Dylan's output before and since, arguing that the Christian message was always there for anyone listening.
The explicitly gospel albums saw him in the pulpit for a while but, Webb points out, that's not to say he hasn't been in the pews the rest of the time.
Dylan's pastoral 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, for instance, Webb fetes as a limpid New Testament masterpiece, with 60-plus biblical allusions; most famously, the author notes, in All Along the Watchtower, the song later made a hit by Jimi Hendrix and based loosely on passages from the Book of Isaiah. Here, as elsewhere, Dylan was "a Christian for years before he or anyone else knew it", says Webb. "And it's not just Wesley Harding, either: his music, the cadence and the rhythms, were biblical long before that album."
As early as 1961, the still-tender folkie exhibited a moralism that was "very conservative to begin with, by which I mean his emphasis on individual responsibility, his scepticism about progress and utopianism always rooted in the eternal things". Indeed, even a boilerplate protest track of the era, such as With God on Our Side, according to Webb, shows the performer "theologising the question of personal responsibility in a whole new way".
Nothing is ever quite that simple with Dylan, of course, and neither is Webb's heavily footnoted treatise. Along with the obvious interviews and reviews taken from the popular media, the author presses into service ideas gleaned from Wilfred Mellers's scholarly tome, A Darker Shade of Pale, previous studies drawing links between Dylan and the Christian theologian Arnold Fruchtenbaum, along with some writings of the then German cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Dylan Redeemed cites the work of the British literary critic Christopher Ricks, a professor of poetry at Oxford University, who has written of his "gratitude" for Dylan's "heartfelt expression of faith".
Webb's reappraisal comes at a time of strengthening academic interest in Dylan, the college dropout who became rock's first big-ticket performer to receive an honorary degree from an Ivy League institution, Princeton University. Nowadays, he is as likely to be the subject of a full-blown symposium, like one at Stanford University some years back.
Betsy Bowden's Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan became the first of many scholarly dissertations on Dylan, 28 years ago. Today, Dylanology has virtually become a discipline in its own right, informing everything from published academic collections overseen by the University of St Andrews to the impressionistic new Todd Haynes-directed film, I'm Not There, much of it fashioning the subject into a mystery man of many enigmatic incarnations.
Webb isn't about to have a Bob each way. "Most Dylanologists," he complains, "admit that Dylan doesn't live up to their cultural narratives, and so what they usually end up saying is that there are many Dylans, that he's a shapeshifter, who disguises himself under a series of masks and that, in fact, there is no true Dylan."
That strikes the author as an "insult" to a 66-year-old performer responsible for a body of work more notable for its coherence over 32 studio albums than the product of a gnomic muse who recreates himself every time a new mood hits him.
One possible reason why the typical university aficionado cannot find the kind of cohesion Webb does in Dylan's work, he suggests, "is because what they're really looking into is a mirror".
Even Ricks is "insufficiently schooled in the kind of biblical theology that Dylan imbibed from a very early age: a kind of midwestern quasi-fundamentalism that seeped into his consciousness and has stayed there all these years".
Webb, the product of a straitlaced midwestern upbringing himself, certainly knows a 1970s family home as the place where what passed for music tended to be white gospel music. In such an environment it was Dylan's nicotine-scratched voice and urgent sound that served as a "domestic wedge" and whetted his appetite for what has become his latest project, in which he writes passionately about the experience of first hearing the singer's explicitly evangelical material in 1979.
Then again, the Dylan household, or the family Zimmerman, probably had other things on their spiritual mind, too: their Jewishness, for example, which has ignited a fair bit of scholarship in its own right. In neglecting this aspect of Dylan's documented experience might Webb lay himself open to similar accusations of theological myopia?
"Well, Dylan's always said he never considered himself deeply Jewish," the American professor responds warmly. "He always had a pretty distant relationship with his Judaism. Although there have been times when he tried to recover that Judaism. There's always been more attention given to his alleged flirtation with Judaism or occasional trip to Jerusalem or his participation in one of his sons' bar-mitzvahs than his much more overt claims about Christianity.
"I do think everybody would be much more comfortable with Dylan if he just became Jewish and gave up the whole Christian thing."
· Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved is published by Continuum International Publishing