But in truth he had for some while been thinking about Jesus. "Reading around the subject," he says. "I love late antiquity because it's a time of immense competition among religions. The old gods, the Greek and Roman gods, were gradually being replaced by rather fearsome or demanding new gods, such as the one that the Christians were bringing from the region we call Palestine. At the same time, Greek thought had combined with religious feelings from a little further east and produced something then known as gnosticism . . . "(Yeah, I can relate. I have a go at angst sometimes, but I tend to lose momentum pretty soon and start being happy again. But these days, for those so minded, the Simulation Argument can provide a form of Gnosticism in which the angst is optional.)
It is at moments like this, that one sees the remnants of Pullman the teacher. "It's the idea that this world is a false creation of an evil demiurge," he continues, voice calm and dry, "and not the real place created by the real God, and that all of us have inside us a sort of spark of divinity that was stolen from the real God and that explains what our task is — we have to escape and get back to the real source." He smiles faintly. "Now that's a hell of a good story because it accounts for so many things: it accounts for why there's evil and suffering and sickness and so on; it accounts for why those who think deeply don't feel at home in the world; and it gives us something to do. It's one of the best stories of all time. But it's not true." He adds a polite qualification: "I don't think."
When did he decide it wasn't true? "Well I went through a very gnostic phase in my 20s," he recalls. "I read a lot of stuff about it and tried to feel the sort of angst appropriate to someone who's a prisoner of a material world. But I don't do angst very well. As the man who wanted to be a philosopher said to Dr Johnson, 'Cheerfulness keeps breaking through.' Heh-HA!" He has a linty sort of laugh, not hearty or loud, but something quickly brushed off.
"And so I came to realise that this world was actually rather a good place, which is full of things that make you laugh and things that make you happy and things that make you feel good physically, and so I gradually abandoned the idea of the evil demiurges who had created this ghastly world, and realised actually that this is our home, it's where we belong, and there ain't no elsewhere." He pauses. "So that's where I am now, spiritually speaking. Which I never do, because I don't like that word." What word would he use? "Um . . ." he ponders. "Philosophically speaking. Intellectually speaking. Emotionally speaking."
On his new book:
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ was recently reviewed in the Guardian by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a great supporter of Pullman. "I think he was generous," Pullman says. "Much more generous than might have been expected, but he is a good and kindly man. And predictably, but correctly, in effect he said, 'This wasn't as good as the Bible.'" Several critics have made a similar observation. "I know," he says, a little tetchy. "But I wasn't trying to write an alternative Gospel. What I was trying to do was tell the story of Jesus in a different kind of way. And make a fable out of it." He hopes in fact that his book will lead people back to the Bible itself. "Because then they will see how many contradictions and inconsistencies there are between the gospels," he explains, "instead of this single monolithic story."There's much more and it's worth a read.
Earlier Pullman coverage here.