Thorns from a Fig Tree

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

by Philip Pullman

2010, Canongate

I have a long and complicated history with my faith (as I hesitate to call it). I was raised in a very conservatively and observantly religious home, one in which it was taught being good and being devout were interchangeable concepts.

When I was very young, my father and I attended Mass together and my experience of sitting, early in the morning, alone next to my father who sang all of the hymns by heart and with sincerity, was a profoundly moving experience. Sitting in those rickety wooden pews, I felt a sense of community and purpose to my life that, as I got older, seemed more and more a false sense of community. This increasingly hollow sense of purpose revealed itself around my adolescence, a very confusing time in my life in terms of identity. This body that seemed to give me such a sense of belonging gradually revealed its disdain for who I was. It's like the opposite of that Groucho Marx joke - I no longer wanted to be in the club that wouldn't have me as a member.

Rekindling that sense of purpose, of understanding, remained a futile quest until I discovered the arts - specifically, film and literature - whose answers to my questions were infinitely more complicated, less easy on the palate.

In high school, I first read Philip Pullman's first installment of his His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass. The Golden Compass is an intensely exciting, mythology-laden, brilliantly written children's book that deals with, among other things, the dangers of organized religion. After reading its rather condemning portrayal of a Church that slaughters innocent children because of paranoia surrounding the concept of original sin, it came as no surprise that Pullman is an atheist.

In the past few months, I have taught The Golden Compass to my 8th grade class, re-reading it in the process and also read part two of the series, The Subtle Knife. So it was delight that I learned his novel would, instead of tackling organized religion as a subplot straw man, handle the gospels themselves as directly as re-writing them.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ re-envisions the New Testament through the story of Jesus, a prophet of God, and Christ, his twin brother who aspires to greater accomplishments. Written in the style of the gospels themselves, Pullman's novel begins by interpreting the story of Mary's virgin birth and Joseph's trepidation over her claims to faithfulness. When Joseph finally accepts Mary's word and his wife goes into labor, it is revealed that Mary gave birth to twin boys, one of whom was foretold to be the prophet of God.

As Jesus and Christ grow up, Jesus is revealed to be more than a bit rambunctious; he is disdainful of rules, and gleefully flouts authority. Christ proves to be an excellent scholar of scripture and more than once is able to extract his mischievous brother from dangerous situations.

While Christ remains a diligent student, Jesus becomes increasingly wild in his interests and behavior. Eventually, Jesus realizes that he is a prophet and begins preaching to the people of Jerusalem.

Christ tries to convince Jesus to use his powers as a miracle worker to impress and enlarge his following, but Jesus is reluctant and prefers to leave his teachings at wisdom, as opposed to razzle dazzle. Here Christ makes the argument to his brother:

"Jesus, don't be angry with me. Just hear me out. I know you want to do good, I know you want to help people. I know you want to do the will of God. But you must consider the effect you could have - the effect on ordinary people, simple people, ignorant people. They can be led to the good, but they need signs and wonders. They need miracles. Fine words convince the mind, but miracles speak directly to the heart and then to the soul...He'll believe every word you say then on. He'll follow you to the ends of the earth."

Herein Pullman establishes both the central theme and conflict in the novel. The rift between Jesus and his brother grows significantly as Christ attempts to form a church to spread Jesus's gospel. Pullman makes the case that modern Christianity's popularity is largely derived from the miracles performed by Jesus, as opposed to his actual teachings - or at the very least, that without said miracles, the Christian philosophy would not have as wide-ranging an appeal. Miracles spur otherwise lazy thinkers but intrinsically god-fearing people into unconditional worship, whereas philosophy spurs intelligent thinkers to reevaluate their behavior; in other words, miracles can either be believed or not and the centers of the brain that deal in fear (awe, wonder) make one inclined to want to believe in miracles, but philosophy is not a matter of belief or disbelief, it is a matter of thought and consideration, of self-reflection and adjustment.

Christ is unsuccessful in convincing his brother to implement his miraculous power to persuade followers in the worthiness of his message and Jesus continues preaching despite the absence of such miracles. Before long, Christ is approached by a mysterious stranger who asks him to begin recording Jesus's sermons for posterity.

Christ begins by at first faithfully transcribing the subsequent events in his brother's life, detailing his philosophy and his methods of spreading it. Eventually, though, Christ begins to have qualms with Jesus's teachings: Jesus makes incendiary remarks that Christ worries will alienate his future followers, so Christ begins to interpret Jesus's remarks and finesse wording to meet Christ's reinterpretation.

This fudging of details prompts the mysterious stranger to encourage Christ to begin embellishing Jesus's story at his whim.

"There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God."

The distinction between "truth" and "history" here is at the center of Pullman's argument as to the veracity of the Bible.

Increasingly, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ appears to be a novel about the process through which stories endure. Pullman's Christ values the gist of Jesus's gospel: the least offensive, most palatable, most awe-inspiring version of the events and his selection of detail gently cultivates a Jesus whose philosophy is vague enough to appeal to the most common denominator but also buoyed by a wide array of miracles that compel belief.

Christ is greatly conflicted over his task; should he continue to manipulate his brother's teachings to form a strong base upon which to build a church or let his brother's words stand true as they are and thus condemn them to languish without a permanent following?

Pullman's book is written in the style of the gospels themselves: minimalist sentences, terse chapters. It also follows the basic narrative structure of the gospels, with telling deviations, particularly where some of the sermons and miracles are concerned. (For example, in the tale of the loaves and fishes, Jesus simply encourages his followers to share whatever food they have handy to feed the crowd and Christ translates this as the miracle of multiple the loaves and fishes to feed everyone.)

The book was published as part of a series by Canongate examining many of the enduring myths of literature and storytelling, and Pullman's choice is apropos for a number of reasons - Christian mythology is among the absolute most persuasive, enduring and influential in existence, and it also appeals to Pullman's atheistic tendencies in providing him an opportunity to examine the process of myth-making itself as it applies to the veracity of the New Testament.

While Pullman's book has already attracted some controversy, I'm not sure his novel should become the target of devout Christians adamant about the Bible's authenticity; it's no secret that the four gospels disagree on a number of points, and Pullman's conceit of Mary's twin sons is obviously not a claim for an alternate history as much as it is a fictional venue in which to explore the motivations behind the publication of the gospels and to explain the discrepancies that must inevitably exist between them and reality. The most ire-inducing bit of revision in the novel is the suggestion that Jesus does not in fact rise from the dead, but that his brother Christ dutifully perpetrates this hoax to secure his brother's legacy.

Where I suppose a number of Christians might take issue with the book is in Pullman's treatment of organized religion. Pullman's resistance to organized religion is now secret; its thematic presence in The Golden Compass is undeniable. It seems as though Pullman uses "the scoundrel" Christ (who, in the novel, acts as Judas, betraying his brother in order to hasten his assassination, thereby cementing the mythology of Christ) as a figure to clarify his interpretation of the Church: a body that willfully manipulates historical record to attract a following. At one point during the novel, Jesus sermonizes about false prophets:

"There are true prophets and there are false prophets, and this is how you tell the difference: look at the fruits they bear. Do you gather grapes from a thorn bush? Do you look for figs among thistles? Of course not, because a bad tree can't bear good fruit, and a good tree can't bear bad fruit."

Christ thinks that ends (manipulation of historical documents, embellishment of Jesus's god-like powers, adjustment to Jesus's teachings to expand appeal) justifies the means (the establishment of a lasting church through which to proselytize). Pullman clearly disagrees. The novel suggests that the organization of a philosophy necessitates an inability to retain a philosophy's original truth, in other words: institutionalization causes corruption.

He seems to suggest that the modern church with its exclusion-based, divisive teaching and its radical, hatred-fueled adherents resembles the thorn bush his Jesus teaches of. While this view is obviously more than a bit simplistic, it is a largely implied reading of Pullman's theme, bolstered no doubt by my own tenuous relationship to the church that raised and then shunned me.

What is truly moving about the book is its portrayal of a writer in the process of reinventing the world, of discovering new, difficult truths and manipulating them into an understanding of the world. Where Christ manipulates these truths into an easier understanding of the world, Pullman does what I in my adolescence found art could do for me where religion could not: he manipulates the hard truths of life to speak all the louder and more clearly for their difficulty, to be filled with all the more meaning and purpose and beauty for their thorniness.