The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ By Philip Pullman
Book Reviewed by Dominic Emmanuel

NEW DELHI, Apr. 30, 2010, 09:30 Hrs (Dominic Emmanuel):

Philip Pullman is a card carrying atheist and when an atheist takes upon the task of writing on faith related issues it raises legitimate suspicion. And this is the first disconnect that a reader will notice in ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’. Ever since Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ became a runaway success, authors with appetite for making a fast buck haven’t left any opportunity to write fiction on real historical persons or institutions.

‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’, is not only categorized genre of fiction but the back cover of the book has ‘This is a Story’ written on it in large letters. The misleading part of the book is that while it is fiction it is based entirely on the authentic Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, who across 20 centuries has had billions of followers. One is therefore not surprised that Pullman has been receiving hate mails from Christians around the world.

That the book is not based on any historical facts is proved right on page 12 when Pullman employing his imagination lets the mother of Jesus, Mary, have twins - Jesus and Christ. According to Pullman Christ in Greek means ‘messiah’. That is inaccurate. Christ comes from the Greek word ‘Khristos’which means ‘the anointed one’ and is the title given to Jesus- as in Jesus the Christ- and is actually the translation of the Hebrew word ‘messiah’.

Pullman paints Christ as a schemer and manipulator who was entrusted the job of keeping a record of what Jesus spoke and did, including the miracles, by a stranger, introduced by Pullman on Page 57. Till the end of the book, though, he neither assigns the stranger a name nor reveals his identity. Both Christ and the reader are kept in suspense about this stranger.

What Pullman inadvertently reveals to the reader is that the one really manipulating the written, and according to the Christian faith, inspired texts by the four evangelists who had the experience of living with Jesus, is he himself. Pullman projects into the characters of the twin brother ‘Christ’ and ‘the stranger’, his own prejudices against the hierarchical structure of the Church. He makes those working for the poor and the oppressed appear as misled by the crooked designs of Christ and ‘the Stranger’ who wanted to use Jesus’ name for their own purpose.

During the whole course of the book Pullman keeps oscillating between the real texts of the Gospels and his imagination, a technique successfully employed earlier by Dan Brown which, unless the reader is well versed with the scriptures or history, is designed to mislead the unsuspecting readers.

Pullman indicates he is interested in retrieving truth out of history and mentions it often as in page 99, “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”. He keeps reverting to the idea of history and truth. Pullman should have perhaps used ideas from German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamar (who floated the idea of ‘fusion of horizons’), the Frenchman Paul Ricœurand others on hermeneutics if he really was interested in extricating truth from history.

Pullman should have either stuck to writing fiction without using real historical persons as mentioned in the Bible or he should have been faithful to the texts of the Gospels. After all hundreds of thousands of researched books and articles have been written on Jesus Christ and Christianity, often differing from one another but then they stick to one genre.

Apart from inserting his own interpretations of events from the life of Jesus into the narrative, he goes to the ridiculous extent of making Christ the one who betrayed Jesus into the hands of the enemy- a role assigned to Judas in the Gospels.

On the positive side one must admit that Pullman is a good fiction writer. The one part which reads well in the book is the monologue that Pullman imagines Jesus has with God in the Garden before he is arrested and taken for trial.

In these times when the publishing industry hasn’t entirely shaken off the lingering legacy of recession, Penguin has grabbed an opportunity to make money through Pullman’s fiction. This is clear not only from the cover page design but also from the layout, which seems to have been designed only to add extra pages. The actual text could have been easily contained in 150 pages. Well, authors and publishers- and not just the IPL- have a right to make a fast buck even if the means used are what the writer might be criticizing in others.