Forget the intellectual arrogance and muddled thinking of militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. If you are a non-believer, this is the book to bolster your non-belief. And it will have even committed Christians questioning their faith. Philip Pullman says The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a book “about how stories become stories”.
Or, to put it another way, how the Bible could be a crafty fabrication. So he takes the gospel stories on which the pillars of Christianity are built and retells them as if they had been spun by a 1st century version of Alastair Campbell.
And by writing in a way which mimics the sparse and simple prose of the New Testament, Pullman makes his book even more effective. His premise is that Mary gave birth not to one baby in Bethlehem, but two; so we have Jesus, and his twin brother Christ. Jesus grows up to be a famous itinerant preacher and miracle worker; his brother becomes his secret chronicler.
It is not Christ’s purpose to record the life of Jesus as history but to set down his essential “truth”, which means adding extra details of his own choosing as he goes along. It is this embellishment which leads to the creation of a divine figure and a Christian church and, in posterity, the two brothers are fused into one as Jesus Christ.
In a lesser writer than Pullman this would be just a construction designed to show off his cleverness as a literary architect. But in his hands it becomes a plausible alternative to the greatest story every told, and only a totally closed mind would not look afresh at the Son of God through Pullman’s eyes.
He writes up the good man Jesus as a wise and inspiring teacher who genuinely believes he is doing God’s bidding. But the scoundrel Christ goes further, and writes him up as the incarnation of God. In this version Jesus accomplishes his first “miracle” when he turns water into wine at a party in Cana not by magic, but by having a quiet word with the steward who has hidden the good stuff away, shaming him into producing it. It is Christ who adds the water to the wine.
Jesus feeds the 5,000 not with the five loaves and two fishes at his disposal but by leading by example. As he shares out the meagre supplies he encourages everyone else to empty their pouches until there’s enough to go around. It is Christ who spots the dove who hovers over Jesus at his baptism by John. “It might have been an omen. Christ wondered what it might mean and imagined what a voice might say if it spoke from heaven and told him.” And it is Christ who adds the temptations of the Devil to his brother’s 40 days in the wilderness.
A mysterious stranger who may be an angel, or merely a mortal political activist, enters the narrative and gives Christ’s scribblings their purpose. The stranger convinces Christ that much good can come of his brother’s ministry, but only if a popular church can be founded on the back of it. And that will only happen if people believe Jesus is more than a man. So, in this story, Christ plays the part of Judas Iscariot and betrays his brother, because only in that way can Jesus die, rise from the dead and create a movement which has lasted 2,000 years and has two billion followers. When the apostle Peter denies Jesus three times and a cock coincidentally crows it is Christ who makes a note of it for later use. And when Jesus’ body is spirited away from the tomb, the risen Jesus seen by Mary Magdalen and the disciples is, of course, his twin brother.
But it is in the Garden of Gethsemane before the crucifixion that Pullman makes his central point: that religion is one massive and destructive mistake. And he makes it so brilliantly that Dawkins and Hitchens do not even come near. Jesus is not just having doubts but losing his faith, and he fears that in the absence of God any church formed because of him will be corrupt and self-serving.
Pullman’s words are an uncomfortable foretelling of the current Roman Catholic paedophile priests scandal. “Any priest who wants to indulge his secret appetites, his greed, his lust, his cruelty, will find himself like a wolf in a field of lambs where the shepherd is bound and gagged and blinded,” says Pullman’s Jesus.
“No one will even think of questioning the rightness of what this holy man does in private; and his little victims will cry to heaven for pity, and their tears will wet his hands, and he’ll wipe them on his robe and press them together piously and cast his eyes upwards and the people will say what a fine thing it is to have such a holy man as priest, how well he takes care of the children…”
Unless Hollywood recognises the potential of this book, it may not get the readership of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, more’s the pity. Nor will it knock Dawkins and Hitchens off the celebrity atheist circuit, which is even more of a shame.
Pullman’s Jesus is an extraordinary man but, as this author tells it, only a man. And without any hard evidence to the contrary that has to be a possibility; Jesus Christ as confidence trick, and Christians his deluded dupes.
I do not believe the gospels are made-up stories. But Pullman shows how they could be. So read this wonderful book. And, as soon as you have read it, read it again.
