The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
Cat Power, Lord, Help the Poor and Needy
Jukebox (2008)
Synopsis: Pullman's retelling of the New Testament stories of Jesus casts him in a humanist light.
Review: I was unaware of this little book until I saw that Kelly had downloaded it for her Kindle. It made me curious so I started reading it on the airplane and it was pretty good. It gets a little boring in some parts if you're familiar with the depictions of Jesus's life from the Four Gospels; because it is a retelling so much of what has been told is just...um...retold. It's all worth it by the time you get to Jesus's lamentations in Gethsemane, however.
The whole book is fairly clever if not original. Pullman's version of the Jesus Christ story does not purport to be any sort of newly discovered account, and certainly makes no claim of divine revelation. It's simply a story, one where Mary conceived twins, one named Jesus and the other named Christ. Jesus was a virtuous rabble rouser, Christ a more conscientious and complicated scribe charged with the duty of writing down Jesus's doings. Christ is convinced that he ought to embellish the details a bit for the sake of future generations, and to ensure that the words and deeds of his brother not be diluted by mere mortal history. There's a fair amount of play going on with the archetypes--particularly Christ as Judas--which adds a new dimension to the theme of whether we're made in God's image or we've made him in ours that I've been hung up on for years. And like the Jefferson Bible, this book not only shows how easy it is to find virtue in Jesus's teachings without necessarily subscribing to the notion of his divinity, but also makes the case that there may be more virtue in the humanism of those teachings than in the versions concocted by superstitious and/or megalomaniacal religionists.
There's another interesting angle in there that, reading as a Mormon, kind of resonated with me. There's an "angel" who works with the brother Christ to instill a sense of purpose about the creation of Jesus's mythology. Coming from a Mormon background, it was interesting (disturbing?) to see the similarities between the angel's justifications for embellishing and whitewashing certain facts and arguments in favor of LDS correlation. And Boyd K. Packer's infamous "There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful" quote might as well be words right out of the angel's mouth.
Whether a believer or not or somewhere in between, it's a worthwhile read.
2 comments:
A better title of the book would have been "The Good Man Tim and the Scoundrel Tebow." Same thing.
That shit is uncanny. OG Tomlin got taken to church tonight, that's fo sho.
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