JOHN YOO COULDN'T DEFEND...:

‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’ by Philip Pullman: The savior of man, and his ‘evil twin.’ (Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times)

"The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ" was commissioned by its publisher, Canongate, as part of a series in which the world's great myths "are retold in a contemporary and memorable way." This one comes up decidedly short of the mark. In part, that's because of Pullman's wholly unexpected ambivalence toward his subject. He's apparently fond — even admiring — of Jesus the defender of the poor and scourge of hypocrites. On the other hand, he loathes what Jesus' followers and the generations that came after them made of his teachings in the form of an institutional church.

Fair enough, but you'd expect a writer of Pullman's abilities to make something fruitful of the tension between his affection and his revulsion; instead, he falls back on the hoariest of conceits: the evil twin. In this version Mary bears twin sons. One is a healthy, rather impish boy who grows up to be a man's man and a fearless teacher, Jesus. The other, Mary's favorite, is sickish, bookish, reclusive and inclined to suck up to authority. She calls him Christ.

There's a sadly missed opportunity here, for one of the questions that has preoccupied Christian theologians has been how Jesus understood himself and his place in his community. It would have been interesting to watch an author of Pullman's talent engage that question from his outsider's perspective. Instead, readers are stuck with the "evil twin" shtick. Worse, Pullman sadly misuses the character he calls Christ, abusing him for didactic and polemical purposes. Thus, when Jesus goes into the desert to fast and pray for 40 days and nights, he is tempted not by Satan, as he is in the synoptic Gospels, but by his twin brother, Christ. The nature of that temptation is Christ's belief that Jesus' teachings must be housebroken so as to form the basis of a church that will last.

In other words, Pullman consigns the impulse toward institutionalization to the evil twin, thus missing another opportunity, for we live in a kind of golden age of scholarship concerning the origins of the great monotheistic creeds. One thing we know for certain, for example, is that Jesus and his followers understood themselves as acting entirely within the Jewish tradition. The parting between the two faiths would be long and, tragically, bitter. Hundreds of years after the crucifixion, Origen was admonishing Jesus' followers in 3rd century Alexandria against spending too much time in synagogues. Similarly, the evolution of what we would recognize as the institutional church — with its bishops and canon and edifices — was extremely gradual and very much a contingent product of the Roman world through which the movement inspired by Jesus' teachings first spread.

It's disappointing to have a committed secularist like Pullman, someone who, therefore, must be committed to historicism and factuality, ignore all this in favor of a melodramatic trick.

...that use of "must be."

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 30, 2010 6:18 PM