PHILIP PULLMAN'S NEW JESUS NOVEL is reviewed in the London
Times:
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
Pullman’s retelling of the life of Jesus is a poor substitute for the King James Bible
Jeanette Winterson
There is an interesting piece of New Testament apocrypha called The Acts of Thomas. Thomas, otherwise known as Didymus (from the Greek for twin), otherwise known as Judas, is the twin brother of Jesus.
The text is a Gnostic one, and Gnosticism was the seductive heresy that the evolving early Christian Church worked hard to suppress. Pre-Christian in origin, Gnosticism is a doctrine of dualism that allows for an untainted spirit and a corrupted body. Salvation is through knowledge (gnosis) of this composite self.
[...]
Philip Pullman’s retelling of the Gospels splits Jesus and Christ into a pair of hostile twins. The good man Jesus is a leader and a teacher. His brother Christ is the scoundrel motivated by expediency and posterity. While Jesus tells his followers to take no thought for the morrow, Christ is secretly writing down everything that Jesus says, with his eye on the future publishing deal.
Her verdict:
So while I can see that Pullman wants us to remember that any religious text is both a palimpsest and revisionary, his own revisionism fails to win me over, not because I am a believer but because the Bible stories are better.
[...]
All of Jesus’s miracles in the Gospels are an affront to literalness — the dead are raised, the blind see — and an invitation towards energy, creativity and the possibility of a different order.
Pullman doesn’t want to understand this, and that may be why he has chosen to use a flat language, which makes me long for the rich and problematic language of the King James Bible, where the words themselves move us away from too much literalness towards an opening in the mind. Pullman’s text is instruction-manual English. It reads like The Good News Bible, but for atheists.
[...]
Pullman himself more or less ratifies this conclusion in an
interview in the Toronto
Star:
Q. What has the response been?
A. There has been a lot of coverage and a number of nice reviews. The general tendency has been to say that it’s not as good as the Bible, but it sort of works.