The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman hopes that his brief retelling of the life of Jesus Christ will encourage people to read, or re-read, the bible. It is not that he is interested in persuading sceptics to believe; more that he wants people to recognise the story’s power while also noting the inconsistencies and implausibility of many of the events documented.

How, for example could the scribes have known what happened in the wilderness. since the supposed son of God was alone at the time and as Pullman observes in the afterword: “Jesus does not tell stories about himself”.

In this short book, part of the Canongate ‘Myths’ series, Pullman imagines Jesus and Christ as two separate beings – “the man Jesus whom the Gospels talked about , and ……Christ, the Messiah, who featured more prominently in the Epistles”.

His point here is not to satirize or attack the biblical story but to speculate on how the original story came to be recorded. He shows how the ‘miracles’ were more likely to be the result of creative embellishment on the part of the writers  than accurate accounts of the actual events.

Christ is the twin whose role is to the make a written record of all that his brother says and does. He is encouraged to do so by a mysterious stranger who may be a fallen angel but also has sinister devilish qualities.

The stranger points out that the ‘truth’ recorded for future generations in this way personalises the events and so becomes more important that any abstract historical account.

Christ is not always an uncritical admirer, questioning for example Jesus’ friendship with tax collectors and prostitutes and his speeches that suggest the sinner who repents is more likely to be ‘saved’ than a virtuous man.

There is a competitiveness between the two and Christ is bitter over the fact that his destiny is to be the diligent observer while Jesus gets all the attention as a passionate man of action. This ultimately leads to an act of betrayal which is why he is labelled as a ‘scoundrel’.

Pullman saves his sharpest criticism not for the kingdom of heaven, or the enigma of God’s son on earth but for the “mighty organisation” of the church.

With church leaders in his sights, he writes: “as soon as men who feel they’re doing God’s will get hold of power….. the devil enters into them”. In one powerful passage, he focuses in thinly veiled terms on the controversy surrounding the ineffectual response of the Catholic church on the issue of pedophilia:

“Any priest who wants to  indulge his secret appetites, his greed, his lust, his cruelty, will find himself like a wolf in a field of lambs where the shepherd is bound and gagged and blinded. No one will even think of questioning the rightness of what this holy man does in private; and his little victims will cry to heaven for pity, and their tears will wet his hands, and he’ll wipe them on his robe and press them together piously and cast his eyes upwards and the people will say what a fine thing it is to have such a holy man as priest, how well he takes care of children”.

It is at these moments that Pullman’s atheistic views come to the fore and he does not try to hide his point of view in his afterword, in which he compares belief in God to bad science: “the immense and complicated structures of Christian theology seem to me like the epicycles of Ptolemiac astronomy – preposterously elaborated methods of explaining away a basic mistake”.

In the story he also mocks it is the intellectualisation of philosophers who might say things like “God’s great absence is the very sign of his presence”.

At the heart of this book is the recognition is that the story of Jesus Christ is a powerful one containing plenty of valuable moral lessons for mankind which are presented in a vivid and accessible way. The one important thing he wants us to remember, however, is that while a charismatic messiah-like figure may have existed, the story of Jesus Christ that we read in the Bible is, like Pullman’s fable, a work of fiction.