Humane and timely take on Jesus story

Philip Hensher From: The Australian May 08, 2010

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
By Philip Pullman
Text, 192pp, $32.95

IN the 1920s, serious academic work was being done to analyse the recurrent structures of stories. Among these students was Vladimir Propp, whose Morphology of the Folktale is still a serious and striking piece of analysis.

Propp, after analysing numerous folktales, concluded that they could all be expressed in terms of functions: small narrative units, such as "an interdiction is addressed to the hero", that coalesce into a larger narrative.

Not all units are present in every narrative; however, they always occur in the same order. The striking thing about Propp's work is that it is easily applicable to all sorts of gripping narratives, including real-life news stories. One of the most famous narratives that fulfils it to a surprisingly extensive degree is the life of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels.

That is to say that the Bible, apart from anything else, knows the value of a good story. Philip Pullman's powerful and immensely resonant new book both drives a pile into the stories of the Gospels and harnesses their power.

The sober words "This is a story" printed on the back cover have a different meaning before and after the book is read.

Before, I presumed that Pullman was warning us off a literalism that would take the book as an attempt at historical truth. After, one realises that he is evoking the magic of a story; something that, in itself, has a kind of artistic sanctity and dignity. This is a long way from simple iconoclasm.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, to some extent, divides the ethical and the institutional in the history of Christianity and traces them back to a pair of originals, rather than one. Jesus has a twin brother, called Christ. Jesus is liked and loved by everyone, is frank and open.

Christ is shadowy and untrustworthy; he hungers for fame and, when his brother starts to attract attention, he makes a record. He wrote down every word, but resolved to improve the story later.

These written improvements are interesting. Christ has a taste for the miraculous; the episode of the loaves and the fishes was, in reality, only Jesus saying: "See how I share this food out? You do the same. There'll be enough for everyone."

Christ improves on that, tries to perform miracles himself, and emphasises the inexplicable in his brother's story.

Other people have told the story of Jesus with an intention to unearth the human reality that may have lain behind it. Jim Crace's remarkable Quarantine sets out to excavate the experiences that have come down to us as Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness.

Jean-Luc Godard's beautiful film, Je Vous Salue, Marie retells the Annunciation in a contemporary and psychologically realistic setting: Gabriel arrives on a plane with a note-taking small girl in tow.

All such attempts to apply literary techniques to the life of Jesus come ultimately from 19th-century writer Ernest Renan, who insisted in his immensely popular Life of Jesus that Jesus could have a biography just like any other man. The conventional danger courted by such retellings is that with honest intentions, the author, along with his sophisticated modern techniques, may drag along some sophisticated modern attitudes, too, leaving us with a Jesus more clouded than ever.

Norman Mailer's late-period The Gospel According to the Son was, for instance, witheringly described on its publication as the story of "a Jewish seminary student who has converted to Methodism but isn't sure why". And even reading distinguished historical accounts of Jesus' life, we invariably perceive contemporary biases. David Strauss's famous Das Leben Jesu, for instance, with its Pullman-influencing dismissal of the miracles as mythic, is clearly a product of 19th-century rationalism (and none the worse for that). Albert Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus, dominated by an interest in apocalypse, could not really have been written much before its publication date, soon before World War I.

Pullman is not attempting a historical reconstruction in the vein of Crace, or to carry out a wholesale cleansing of the miracle-mongers, like Jesus clearing the temple of moneylenders.

After all, as he tells us, this is a story. He loves the storytelling mood of the Gospels, the parables above all, and when the story seems to be best served by the inexplicable, as in the story of John the Baptist's barren mother, no easy explanation is offered.

There is some debunking, of course; the story of the "angel" who announces and brings about Mary's pregnancy with the twins is teasing and very sly.

But mostly, what Pullman is engaged with is an attempt to find a Jesus who is difficult, human, grumpy, funny, and struggling his way towards an ethical position.

Christ, under the guidance of a nameless stranger, codifies and improves on that position, lays the foundation for an immensely wealthy and worldly church, and is persuaded by that stranger that the best basis for the church will be supplied by his betraying his brother to the Romans. Who is the stranger? An angel? A man?

He tells Christ that he is not Satan, but perhaps Satan would always say that.

In an absorbingly fresh rendering of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' message, both radical and paradoxical, is made once again difficult to swallow. In the passage giving a version of the Agony in the Garden, Jesus talks about the horror of the church to come, its marble palaces and its tendency to allow its agents to abuse children.

What he offers in its place is not even pantheistic but a romantic rapture before the facts of the natural world, in which there is no necessity for a god.

"You're not there. You've never heard me. I'd do better to talk to a tree, to talk to a dog, an owl, a little grasshopper."

The chapter is presented as a view out of despair; but there is an enormous dollop of hope in it. Of course, it is the sort of hope that would hardly have existed before the last decades of the 20th century. In my view, the beauty and honesty of the position -- is it an ethical position or an aesthetic one? -- dismisses the objection.

Christ lives on. Of course, under the instruction of the stranger, he betrays Jesus to the Roman authorities and, after his death, engineers the "miracle" of the resurrection. With blunt utilitarianism, he and his mentor make us see how very useful both events would be to a growing and authoritarian church; useful, too, one imagines, to let a figure called Judas take the blame for one of these.

It is uncomfortable to go on reading, and see, with all too plausible detail, how the disciples meet Christ subsequently, and start to discuss with hair-splitting ingenuity just why it is that the resurrected Jesus does not have marks in his palm, does not have the broken legs of the victim of a crucifixion, but might have a spear-mark in his side.

In this conversation, we see the beginnings of theology, and the end of a sense of amazement. At the end of the book, Christ, now married to Martha, wonders in despair just what he has done: "This is the tragedy: without the story, there will be no church, and without the church, Jesus will be forgotten."

In Pullman's great trilogy, His Dark Materials, the value of oblivion is strongly stated: the dead flow away with relief and happiness, their consciousness erased and their atoms flowing back into the world. And the virtues of storytelling are praised as strongly, as creatures are entranced or consoled by the power of narrative, which feeds memory.

These two positions, perhaps not contradictory at all, lie beneath The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Storytelling is the reason people listen to Jesus, and his sometimes puzzling stories are the reason he goes on being remembered and talked about.

Being forgotten and disappearing from memory, however, is not such a bad thing if the alternative is a church "like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door".

A good story carries its own means of survival within it; it is the prime example of what Richard Dawkins calls a meme. Perhaps it would be best, however, if even the best of stories, like the real men and women who sometimes people them, were allowed to fade into oblivion and forgetfulness.

To this end, Pullman, with this beautifully written, humane, memorable and resonant story, has contributed not one iota.

Philip Hensher's last novel was The Northern Clemency.