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blahflowersIn my continuing short books series The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman certainly qualifies. Not only was my copy 245 pages long but each page seemed to have larger left and right margins than most other books so the text was spread out over more pages. That's not a criticism though, because it's a cracking little book.
Predictably, considering Pullman's background, this is an atheist's retelling of the Bible story. There are no miracles and everything has a rational explanation. I doubt it'll go down well with any Christian that doesn't like anything that questions their imaginary friends but I think this paints a positive picture of Jesus the moral philosopher, which I'll come back to in a second. So young bride Mary has sex with one of the local men who is playing on her religious gullibility but gives birth to twins, Jesus and another character who we only ever know by his nickname 'Christ', though his later actions make it clear who he really is. As they grow to adulthood Jesus becomes a radical prophet who gathers followers to him as he talks of the immanent arrival of the Kingdom of God, while Christ finds himself mostly overlooked amongst his brother's disciples and seeks to chronicle his work while coming in to contact with the forces that seek to bring Jesus down.
Pullman's writing style for this is like one of those bibles that retell the Bible stories in modern English. Everything is explained, or explainable, but not in a 'hah! miracles aren't real!' way but more in the tones of one who doesn't believe they have any relevance to whether Jesus is really the son of God or not. So therefore Jesus didn't turn water in to wine at the wedding, he found out where the chief waiter who was planning to sell it on had hidden it. And when people checked their bags it turned out there were more than a few fish and slices of bread to feed the crowd that came to hear Jesus speak. With the case of curing the sick it's all a bit Monty Python where it's either difficult to prove that people were genuinely sick before Jesus cured them or that conversely that their ailments stayed gone after the contact high went away.
I wrote somewhere several years ago that I felt The Last Temptation of Christ was a much better film about the sacrifices Jesus may have made if he ever existed than The Passion of the Christ in which we get several hours of an alien being whipped. The latter Jesus is not one of us and so any pain and discomfort he might feel is rather akin to a Member of the House of Lords being asked to spend a week living on a council estate, at the end he knows he's going back to his big palatial mansion and will never want for anything again. The Jesus of Last Temptation is weak and frail and doesn't know for sure whether he's made a terrible mistake. In The Good Man's central scene, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, we have a man not so much asking for the cup to pass to another but who doubts that the cup is really there at all any more. Jesus doesn't believe that proof denies faith and that faith without proof is foolish, that he could well be leading people astray by accident rather than design but that there's nothing he can do to back out now. Being professionally godless I don't feel any need to worship anyone, but I can respect a character that is a human being rather than a cypher for someone's masochism.
Christ ends up betraying Jesus to try and help him, a mysterious figure convinces Christ that a sacrifice is needed to turn Jesus from just another small-time desert crackpot into the founder of a major religion which will help millions. And like many characters in fiction, in scrabbling ever harder to try and achieve his ends, Christ finds himself further away from what he craves. What's remarkable that even in the somewhat sparse style of this pseudo-gospel is that Pullman still manages to make his central character breathe, even while his others are intentionally somewhat distant. The mysterious stranger is the only possibly supernatural character, standing as he seems to for the habit of religions to form a church for the sake of respectability and to make it easier for them to persecute the different, a dead Jesus, Muhammad, Lenin or Gandhi can say whatever you want him to say. All those that claim to speak for God would probably be a little more circumspect if they really believed he was looking over their shoulder.
In the end I think this book probably has something for everyone that isn't a staunch Bible literalist of the kind that ignores all the positive messages of the Harry Potter series just because they are wizards. Jesus isn't the Paul Daniels of Judea but his message is a positive one and not distorted by two thousand years of spokesmanship. It also won't take you long to get through, which is surely a bargain in itself.
Predictably, considering Pullman's background, this is an atheist's retelling of the Bible story. There are no miracles and everything has a rational explanation. I doubt it'll go down well with any Christian that doesn't like anything that questions their imaginary friends but I think this paints a positive picture of Jesus the moral philosopher, which I'll come back to in a second. So young bride Mary has sex with one of the local men who is playing on her religious gullibility but gives birth to twins, Jesus and another character who we only ever know by his nickname 'Christ', though his later actions make it clear who he really is. As they grow to adulthood Jesus becomes a radical prophet who gathers followers to him as he talks of the immanent arrival of the Kingdom of God, while Christ finds himself mostly overlooked amongst his brother's disciples and seeks to chronicle his work while coming in to contact with the forces that seek to bring Jesus down.
Pullman's writing style for this is like one of those bibles that retell the Bible stories in modern English. Everything is explained, or explainable, but not in a 'hah! miracles aren't real!' way but more in the tones of one who doesn't believe they have any relevance to whether Jesus is really the son of God or not. So therefore Jesus didn't turn water in to wine at the wedding, he found out where the chief waiter who was planning to sell it on had hidden it. And when people checked their bags it turned out there were more than a few fish and slices of bread to feed the crowd that came to hear Jesus speak. With the case of curing the sick it's all a bit Monty Python where it's either difficult to prove that people were genuinely sick before Jesus cured them or that conversely that their ailments stayed gone after the contact high went away.
I wrote somewhere several years ago that I felt The Last Temptation of Christ was a much better film about the sacrifices Jesus may have made if he ever existed than The Passion of the Christ in which we get several hours of an alien being whipped. The latter Jesus is not one of us and so any pain and discomfort he might feel is rather akin to a Member of the House of Lords being asked to spend a week living on a council estate, at the end he knows he's going back to his big palatial mansion and will never want for anything again. The Jesus of Last Temptation is weak and frail and doesn't know for sure whether he's made a terrible mistake. In The Good Man's central scene, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, we have a man not so much asking for the cup to pass to another but who doubts that the cup is really there at all any more. Jesus doesn't believe that proof denies faith and that faith without proof is foolish, that he could well be leading people astray by accident rather than design but that there's nothing he can do to back out now. Being professionally godless I don't feel any need to worship anyone, but I can respect a character that is a human being rather than a cypher for someone's masochism.
Christ ends up betraying Jesus to try and help him, a mysterious figure convinces Christ that a sacrifice is needed to turn Jesus from just another small-time desert crackpot into the founder of a major religion which will help millions. And like many characters in fiction, in scrabbling ever harder to try and achieve his ends, Christ finds himself further away from what he craves. What's remarkable that even in the somewhat sparse style of this pseudo-gospel is that Pullman still manages to make his central character breathe, even while his others are intentionally somewhat distant. The mysterious stranger is the only possibly supernatural character, standing as he seems to for the habit of religions to form a church for the sake of respectability and to make it easier for them to persecute the different, a dead Jesus, Muhammad, Lenin or Gandhi can say whatever you want him to say. All those that claim to speak for God would probably be a little more circumspect if they really believed he was looking over their shoulder.
In the end I think this book probably has something for everyone that isn't a staunch Bible literalist of the kind that ignores all the positive messages of the Harry Potter series just because they are wizards. Jesus isn't the Paul Daniels of Judea but his message is a positive one and not distorted by two thousand years of spokesmanship. It also won't take you long to get through, which is surely a bargain in itself.