The promotional machine is getting warmed up for Philip Pullman’s latest project, and the deliberate efforts at provocation for the sake of publicity are familiar—and tiring. The author of the His Dark Materials trilogy is set to release his latest: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. I can’t imagine the Newsweek report on the book was much changed from the publisher’s press release.
Newsweek recaps the book plot:
According to Pullman's fable, Mary gives birth not to a single son but to twins: Jesus and Christ. Jesus is a firebrand preacher with a revolutionary message but no time for showy miracles. His brother, who serves as his chronicler, is a darker, more introspective figure, ready to provide a distorted version of events that will lay the basis for the Gospels and eventually lead to the foundation of the church. Those looking to find grounds for offense won't be disappointed: the Annunciation in Pullman's story is, in fact, a seduction; the Resurrection is a stunt. To compound the injury, Pullman suggests that in some respects his words may be closer than the Bible's to what Jesus would have actually said.
Though Newsweek doesn’t report it this way, it’s easy to see this as a novelized version of the debate over what we can really learn of the historical Jesus from the New Testament—a debate that has started to spread from the ivory towers to street-level conversations through books like those of Dan Brown and Bart Erhman. The assumptions of liberal scholars is that there is a big difference between the “Jesus of faith” and the “Jesus of history.” It seems that Pullman has decided to put that whole debate into an imaginative novel. Newsweek:
One motive in writing the book is to shake the faith of believers. He hopes to send readers back to the Gospels to compare his story with the originals. "They will see for themselves how contradictory, how inconsistent, and different the narratives are," he says.
As I’ve said before, Pullman is a gifted writer. His way of baiting people for the sake of self-promotion is tiresome, but he tells a good yarn.
His latest yarn is just the latest signal that our culture needs to hear from us a cogent defense of the Bible as an historically-reliable record of what Jesus said and did. In other words, we believe the “Jesus of faith”—the incarnate Son who redeemed fallen humanity—because the “Jesus of history” presented himself in this way.
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