Megan's Book - chosen for the "Xmas in July" Book Club Meeting
An excerpt of a review by Salley Vickers of The Telegraph, UK
Published: 6:00AM BST 02 Apr 2010
Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ was bound to become something of a hornet’s nest. Known for his dislike of organised religion and the unflattering portrait of God in his trilogy His Dark Materials, Pullman has been branded as a latter-day anti-Christ by those who evidently feel that the Christian spirit is best served by threat and unreflective antagonism.
Written at the prompting of one of Pullman’s admirers, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams - who asked Pullman during a public debate why having tackled God he had neglected to write about the figure of Jesus - the Pullman version of the Gospel stories is inevitably, well, unchristian. What it is certainly not, however, is anti-Jesus – which is the book’s main point.
What Pullman has done is to take the Gospel accounts of Jesus and weave them into a story that runs along the lines of the Gospel narratives, but with one radical innovation. (The book is the latest in a series of retellings of myths, published by Canongate.) He splits the character of Jesus of Nazareth into twin brothers, one named Jesus, the other Christ. Jesus is the lusty healthy baby, born at ease with his physical person; Christ is the sickly child whom his mother favours, and it is he who is found lying in the feeding trough by shepherds and then by the astrologers from the East who have come bearing gifts to the promised “Messiah”.
From here on, the life of Jesus as we have known it is described in prose that skilfully recapitulates the simplicity of the original material, with each twin acting out different parts. Christ, the weaker twin, is the goody-goody who sucks up to his elders by studying holy texts and astounds them with his precocious rabbinical wisdom. Jesus, on the other hand, is the one who learns carpentry from his father and is favoured by the other children. As they reach manhood, their characters polarise: Christ becomes cautious, fanciful and partial to metaphysics, while Jesus is passionate, antinomian and enamoured of the world’s realities.
As the story further unfolds, we witness Christ playing the traditional parts of, first, Satan in the wilderness, when he urges Jesus to provide miracles to help persuade his followers of the imminence of the coming “Kingdom of God” and, finally, the Judas figure who betrays his brother with a fatal kiss. This last is due to the machinations of the sinister “stranger”, also described as an “angel”, who is inserted into the story as the demonic principle behind the distortion of Jesus’s teachings and the founding of the Christian Church.
The chief heresy in Pullman’s narrative, so far as Christian belief is concerned, is that here Jesus really does die and his resurrection is a publicity stunt organised by the “stranger”, with Christ playing the part of his allegedly risen brother and attracting the limelight his adoring mother has raised him to crave. The other major departure is the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. Where the canonical Jesus despairs of his Father’s love and begs that his bitter fate be taken from him, in Pullman’s version it is not so much God who abandons Jesus as Jesus abandoning God. “From time to time we’ll remember you, like a grandfather who was loved once, but who has died, and we’ll tell stories about you.”
Pullman is a supreme storyteller who knows better than anyone that a myth needs no justification.
Written at the prompting of one of Pullman’s admirers, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams - who asked Pullman during a public debate why having tackled God he had neglected to write about the figure of Jesus - the Pullman version of the Gospel stories is inevitably, well, unchristian. What it is certainly not, however, is anti-Jesus – which is the book’s main point.
What Pullman has done is to take the Gospel accounts of Jesus and weave them into a story that runs along the lines of the Gospel narratives, but with one radical innovation. (The book is the latest in a series of retellings of myths, published by Canongate.) He splits the character of Jesus of Nazareth into twin brothers, one named Jesus, the other Christ. Jesus is the lusty healthy baby, born at ease with his physical person; Christ is the sickly child whom his mother favours, and it is he who is found lying in the feeding trough by shepherds and then by the astrologers from the East who have come bearing gifts to the promised “Messiah”.
From here on, the life of Jesus as we have known it is described in prose that skilfully recapitulates the simplicity of the original material, with each twin acting out different parts. Christ, the weaker twin, is the goody-goody who sucks up to his elders by studying holy texts and astounds them with his precocious rabbinical wisdom. Jesus, on the other hand, is the one who learns carpentry from his father and is favoured by the other children. As they reach manhood, their characters polarise: Christ becomes cautious, fanciful and partial to metaphysics, while Jesus is passionate, antinomian and enamoured of the world’s realities.
As the story further unfolds, we witness Christ playing the traditional parts of, first, Satan in the wilderness, when he urges Jesus to provide miracles to help persuade his followers of the imminence of the coming “Kingdom of God” and, finally, the Judas figure who betrays his brother with a fatal kiss. This last is due to the machinations of the sinister “stranger”, also described as an “angel”, who is inserted into the story as the demonic principle behind the distortion of Jesus’s teachings and the founding of the Christian Church.
The chief heresy in Pullman’s narrative, so far as Christian belief is concerned, is that here Jesus really does die and his resurrection is a publicity stunt organised by the “stranger”, with Christ playing the part of his allegedly risen brother and attracting the limelight his adoring mother has raised him to crave. The other major departure is the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. Where the canonical Jesus despairs of his Father’s love and begs that his bitter fate be taken from him, in Pullman’s version it is not so much God who abandons Jesus as Jesus abandoning God. “From time to time we’ll remember you, like a grandfather who was loved once, but who has died, and we’ll tell stories about you.”
Pullman is a supreme storyteller who knows better than anyone that a myth needs no justification.
