League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on June 5, 2010

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

***WARNING: Contains spoilers!***

The first thing to keep in mind when approaching The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is that it was written as part of a series called The Myths. Canongate Books commissioned a number of the best-known authors alive today to retell classic myths in a modern/post-modern perspective. I put this caveat up front because, for those like me whose previous experience with Philip Pullman was through the His Dark Materials Trilogy series (Find this book at Biblio.com), the style of Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ may at first be off-putting. He writes here in the sparse, matter-of-fact style of classic myth-telling, but once the reader is aware of that, the different cadence becomes natural and even beautiful. So at its most basic level, this book is a retelling of the Jesus myth/story as found in the canonical Gospels as well as a few gospels (such as those of “Thomas” and “James”) that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament. Think the style of Tolkien’s Silmarillion as contrasted to The Lord of the Rings (Find this book at Biblio.com).

Of course, treating the story of Jesus as myth is going to result in controversy, to say the least. Pullman has already reported receiving numerous death threats. To those familiar with his Dark Materials books, his very negative take on organized Christianity (and the Roman Catholic Church in particular) should come as no surprise. More about this controversial aspect below.

Myths usually come about to explore something core to the civilization that produces them. Pullman casts his myth to deal with two engines humming in the sub-basement of Western Civilization (one general and one very specific): the Christian Church and the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Again, readers of His Dark Materials will not be surprised that Pullman takes a very dark view of the organized church. In Good Man / Scoundrel, the Christ character is mentored by a shadowy figure known only as “The Stranger,” who is reminiscent of the officials of the Magisterium in Dark Materials. The Stranger seems to be part of an unnamed conspiracy to use the popular Jesus to produce what will become the organized Church. To that end, The Stranger pushes Christ to embellish the historical record of Jesus’ life and teachings he is writing. (Christ would seem to be the elusive Q recorder many scholars posit must lie behind the synoptic gospels.) The Stranger wants to de-emphasize the very “earthy” Jesus, who is mostly concerned with issues of justice and how his followers treat each other, and build up a more ethereal, spiritualized, “heavenly” Jesus Christ, the more better to manipulate the masses into cooperation with the larger aims of the Church.

It is in exploring the question of who exactly Jesus was that Pullman’s myth takes its most startling (and therefore bound-to-produce-outrage) bend on the story as we know it. He has Mary giving birth to twin boys. The older is given the name Jesus and grows up to become the itinerant preacher/teacher who runs afoul of the powers-that-be and ends up getting himself crucified. We are never told the given name of the younger brother (shades of the Man in Black in the TV series LOST!). He is referred to by Mary’s pet name for him: Christ. Christ turns out to be many characters in “real life” who would later be renamed and recast in the finished gospels, among them the Satan of Jesus’ wilderness temptations and Judas the betrayer. At the end of the novel, Pullman hints strongly that Christ in later life took on one more role crucial in Christian history, but that hint will only be picked up by those most familiar with the New Testament.

Pullman uses this twin brother schema to deal with the at times nearly schizophrenic portrayal of Jesus that many modern scholars have found in the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Specifically, while there are tantalizing hints in those gospels that this Jesus must be something more than an ordinary man, exactly what he was is never completely clear. What was his primary message and purpose? To push his followers toward a better, more just and loving, life in this world, or to get them to ignore the suffering of this world in light of a better world to come? Pullman casts Jesus as the preacher of the former and Christ as the re-interpreter of Jesus toward the latter aim.

Certainly many Christian believers will protest that this bifurcation is unnecessary. Why can’t Jesus be concerned with both this world and the next? But readers must remember that Pullman’s novel is first and foremost an exploration of how and why stories/myths/accounts develop toward their canonical form. As he says in a quotation on the back cover, “Parts of [my story:] read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale. I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories” (emphasis added). Even conservative scholars now concede that there is diversity among the canonical gospels primarily because each shapes the story around certain themes and with a certain community of readers in mind. Pullman isn’t so much trying to propose “this is how it might have happened” (as was Hugh Schonfield’s notorious The Passover Plot Find this book at Biblio.com) as he is trying to get us to consider honestly that there is no such thing as uninterpreted history or an unshaped story.

For that reason, my one criticism of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is similar to my main criticism of his His Dark Materials series. In both, Pullman’s writing becomes weakest when he can’t resist getting preachy about his obsession with perceived evils of the Church. His critique works best when he keeps it subtle, as he does in the first book of the Dark Materials trilogy or in early parts of Good Man / Scoundrel. When he feels the need to get “in our face” about it, it becomes annoying and distracting. A good example of this is in his rewriting of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he has Jesus angrily protesting in foresight the present priestly pedophilia scandal of the Roman Catholic Church. It leaves one surprised that he didn’t also have Jesus mention Ted Haggard and Jimmy Swaggart by name in his prayer.

On the other hand, a great strength of the novel is Pullman’s complex portrayal of both of his main characters. I believe that the “good man vs. scoundrel” duality of the title is meant to be ironic. Jesus is not wholly a “good man”–as a child he often gets into mischief that Christ has to bail him out of, and as an adult preacher he is portrayed as undermining family life. Neither is Christ wholly a scoundrel. In common with many postmodern portrayals of Judas, Christ is shown as a man of complex motives. It is difficult to separate at times his lust for fame and reputation with his sincere (if misguided?) desire to see the life and message of his brother result in some greater good that lasts forever.

I won’t give away any more of the plot as Pullman develops it, but suffice it to say that Christ finds himself drawn further and further into the conspiratorial web being cast by The Stranger. Christ ends up being a key player in the great climax of the Jesus narrative. And, in a deliciously subtle exercise in restrained clue-dropping, it turns out that Christ would go on to become yet another highly influential New Testament character.

It is sad that inevitably many Christians will probably view The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ as an anti-Jesus book. It is anything but. It is true that Pullman a la Thomas Jefferson removes the supernatural from the “actual” life of Jesus, substituting naturalistic explanations for most of the miracles (Mary is essentially date raped by a neighbor she believes to be an angel; the feeding of the five thousand turns out to result from Jesus’ shaming his listeners into sharing their food with each other). But he seems to do this mostly to aid his larger purpose of demonstrating how historical accounts can come to be altered by those who believe insertion of their “timeless truths” into an account are justified by the greater good of their agenda.

Moreover, Pullman’s novel serves as an exploration of the postmodern critique of narratives. According to postmodern theory, narratives often exist–whether intentionally or not–as tools of manipulative power over others. When intentional such manipulation can become quite insidious (think of all the evil that has resulted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for example). The Stranger pushes Christ to enhance the stories and sayings he is writing down, teaching him that “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 intentional shaping of a narrative is often justified as “letting truth into history,” but the discerning individual should always ask, “Whose truth, and to what end?”

The strong protests of many against this book and some of Pullman’s previous writings I think points to modern readers’ inability to grasp myth. We have been taught to expect ancient accounts to adhere to journalistic standards of “truth.” But in the ancient world there was not such a clear dividing line between truth and storytelling. In fact, it was assumed that story/myth was a better conveyor of truth than literal, “factual” accounts (witness the parables that dominate Jesus’ teaching in the gospels). At one point in Good Man / Scoundrel Christ is upset by the apparent injustice in one of Jesus’ parables. However, Pullman writes, “Christ knew as he wrote it down that, for all its unfairness, people would remember that story much longer than they’d remember a legal definition.” In the modern world–and in modern theology in particular–we are obsessed with the “legal definition” of things. Pullman’s work serves as a reminder that such definitions can never be containers of the whole truth about anything.

(Here’s another very thoughtful review of this book: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ reviewed by Bibliofreak)

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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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