The Gospel According to the Novelist

Religious Scripture and Contemporary Fiction

Magdalena Maczynska

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780937755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Why have so many prominent literary authors-from Philip Pullman and José Saramago to Michèle Roberts and Colm Tóibím-recently rewritten the canonical story of Jesus Christ? What does that say about our supposedly secular age? In this insightful study, Magdalena Maczynska defines and examines the genre of scriptural metafiction: novels that not only transform religious texts but also draw attention to these transformations. In addition to providing rich examples and close readings, Maczynska positions literary studies within interdisciplinary debates about religion and secularity. Her book demonstrates a surprising turn of events: even as contemporary novelists deconstruct the traditional categories of "secular" and "sacred" writing, they open up new spaces for scripture in contemporary culture.

1

Sly evangelists: Historiographic meta-gospels

The literary careers of José Saramago and Philip Pullman illustrate the scandal of atheist writers who meddle with religious texts. Six years before Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Portuguese government, under Vatican pressure, removed his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the 1992 European Literary Prize shortlist on grounds of religious blasphemy, prompting the author’s self-imposed exile to the Canary Islands. Pullman’s bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), an atheist’s response to C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–6), elicited library and school board bans. Further protests followed the 2007 release of Chris Weitz’s film adaptation of the trilogy’s first volume. The Catholic League responded to Weitz’s The Golden Compass by organizing a boycott campaign and distributing a booklet titled “The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked.” (Following the film’s commercial failure in the United States, New Line Cinema suspended plans to adapt the remaining volumes of the trilogy.) Unfazed, Pullman continued his excoriation of ecclesiastical power structures in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010)—a novel whose title alone inspired furious letters to the author—replacing the fantastic world of His Dark Materials with an imaginative recreation of Jesus’s childhood and ministry.

Both Pullman’s Good Man and Saramago’s Gospel offend by appropriating the most familiar and beloved scriptural characters and stories. These alternative gospels reference nineteenth-century historical “lives of Jesus” but take the genre in the direction of postmodernist “apocryphal or alternative history,” a mode of writing that either “supplements the historical record, claiming to restore what has been lost or suppressed” or “displaces official history altogether” (McHale 90). Instead of reconstructing a plausible biography, Pullman and Saramago question the very possibility of reconstruction. The self-referentiality, programmatic iconoclasm, and seriocomic tone of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ make the two novels instructive exemplars of scriptural metafiction.

From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the phrase “gospel truth” appears to be something of an oxymoron. As early as 1906, Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial The Quest of the Historical Jesus demonstrated that the search for the historical truth about Jesus’s life had been a failure. A series of sensational twentieth-century discoveries of apocryphal texts further undermined scriptural authority by shaking the gospel canon and revealing a doctrinal heteroglossia suppressed in orthodox accounts of Christian history.¹ For the contemporary novelist, this situation presents an opportunity for a radical reexamining of the canonical story and its historical construction. In their alternative gospels, Saramago and Pullman toy with biblical tradition in order to unveil the contingencies of the composition process and lay bare the interconnected relationships of novelist, evangelist, and historian.

Despite undermining orthodox readings of scriptures, contemporary historiographic revisions take the gospels’ moral teachings very seriously. In this, Pullman and Saramago continue a long line of writers who sought to reclaim the New Testament message of social justice in the context of modern socialist thought. Frank Bowman (1967) traced the “socialist Jesus” tradition back to the French Revolution, when “Jesus was forced out on the streets in the new guise of ‘le sans-culotte de Nazareth,’ and the Christian socialist themes appear in pamphlets, theophilanthropic sermons, revolutionary orations” (56). The emergence of a revolutionary Jesus was followed by a more theologically informed “mystic socialism” that advanced a vision of the Kingdom of God realized on earth through the work of community, charity, and redemptive suffering. These utopian ideals were advanced in the work of Félicité Lamennais, Joseph Buchez, Etienne Cabet, Alphonse Esquiros, and Alphonse-Louis Constant, all of whom developed their own version of socially engaged gospels (Bowman 57). The first English-language translator of The Communist Manifesto, Scottish feminist philosopher Helen Macfarlane, continued the “sans-culotte” tradition by referring to Jesus as the “despised Jewish proletarian” and the “Nazarean carpenter’s son,” rejecting “Jesus Christ” because, as Macfarlane’s biographer David Black explains, such royalist terminology “would have been alien to her conception of the early Christians as the forerunners of republican socialist-democracy” (55). In a series of essays written in 1850 for the Chartist weekly The Red Republican (under the pen name Howard Morton), Macfarlane frequently invoked Christian themes and values, as when she proclaimed: “Yes, we are tolerably in earnest, in demanding that the Gospel of Christ shall no longer remain a dead letter; that the noble idea of Fraternity and Equality, first promulgated by the Galilean carpenter, shall at length be realized” (35). In the early decades of the twentieth century, a number of prominent Continental theologians (including Karl Barth and Paul Tillich) continued to seek points of convergence between Marxism and (Protestant) Christianity. After the crisis of World War II, the philosophical dialogue between Marxist and Christian thought was revived by European intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain—most importantly by the atheist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who emphasized Marxism’s messianic promise, eschatological structure, and utopian vision.² Catholic Latin America developed its own Marxian-Christian fusion in the liberation theology of Gustavo Guttiérez (whose work was influenced by Bloch’s) and his successors.

The literary fashion for socialist gospels had its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ziolkowski’s study includes a catalog of Christian socialist narratives that “apply the spirit and principles of the New Testament to social reform” (55).³ A paradigmatic work of modern Christian socialism is Jesus by Henri Barbusse (1927). In his introduction, Barbusse claims that the historical Nazarene “was utilized, body and soul, for other ends than his own” (10). The novelist responds to this act of appropriation not with a “gospel of restitution” or a reconstructed text “without blemish or contradiction,” but with an imaginative recreation addressed to the “restless and tormented spirits of our own age” (11). Barbusse’s novel, narrated in the voice of Jesus himself, dismisses the canonical tradition in favor of a rationalist, humanist interpretation of the Nazarene’s teachings. Barbusse’s Jesus preaches a gospel of immanence and seeking the divine within. He rejects Paul as an “idolater of Dogma” and the inventor of “the great tomb of a new temple reared above the other” (173). In place of religion, the revolutionary messiah affirms a creed of egalitarianism and community: “For there is only one truth, and it belongs to us all” (17). The novel ends with a secular prayer that Jesus may aid those who “still grope towards Gods in the skies” and bless those who are “sowing the pure, wise, and just idea of the Revolution in the great soul of humanity” (235). Barbusse’s secularism, his affirmation of everyday life, and his distrust of ecclesiastical structures anticipate contemporary fictional reinterpretations of the gospels.⁴

The perversion of Jesus’s teachings by religious institutions is the central subject of Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. To make his argument, the novelist splits the character of Jesus Christ into twin brothers: Jesus is a naughty kid who becomes an itinerant philosopher-rabbi and dies on the cross; Christ is a socially awkward, religiously precocious child who takes it upon himself to create a written record of his brother’s teachings that will become—against Jesus’s will—the foundational document of the new Christian church. The idea of Jesus’s twin comes from the apocryphal tradition, including the Acts of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender.⁵ In Pullman, the brothers embody the distinction between Jesus, the man depicted in the gospels, and Christ of the Pauline epistles. In an afterword to the novel’s 2011 edition, Pullman discusses Paul’s preference for Christ over Jesus, and articulates his own view of the distinction: “Jesus was a man, obviously a man and no more than a man, but Christ was a fiction” (259). By splitting the hero of the gospels into two brothers, Pullman juxtaposes the competing “truths” of history and religious ideology—and examines the ways in which the canonical gospels have served as an instrument of the latter.

Like Pullman’s Good Man, Saramago’s Gospel portrays the historical Jesus as an unwitting victim of reinterpretation and reinscription. Saramago signals his preoccupation with inscription in the novel’s double epigraph, which draws attention to questions of textual authenticity and authority. First, Saramago quotes the opening verses of the Gospel According to Luke, a passage that acknowledges previously existing accounts of Jesus’s life and promises the reader a new, complete, and authoritative account. Then the novelist quotes Pontius Pilate’s famous phrase, “What I have written, I have written” (Jn. 19.22), a response to protestations concerning the sign Pilate had placed on Jesus’s cross. Pilate’s statement is an assertion of political and authorial power: Once made public, the sign becomes its own legitimization. Importantly for Saramago, both epigraphs emphasize the authority of the written word as well as the act of claiming authority. By citing these canonical passages, the novelist traces the problematics of language and power back to the original biblical text, debunking the myth of a stable ur-narrative against which the contemporary novelistic account may define itself. Like Pullman, Saramago rejects the idea of divinely guaranteed scriptural origins, instead acknowledging the role of human agency and human-made power structures in the production of the historical and scriptural record.

Saramago follows his twin epigraphs with an unorthodox opening chapter that offers a detailed description of Albrecht Dürer’s 1489 engraving of the crucifixion. Doing so, he playfully mocks our dependence on cultural codes and universalizing assumptions. This is most apparent in his references to Dürer’s depiction of Mary Magdalene, who is initially recognized in the figure of a sensuous young woman: “Anyone viewing this picture who knows the facts of life will swear immediately that this is the woman called Magdalene, for only someone with her disreputable past would have dared to appear at such a solemn occasion wearing a low-cut dress with a close-fitting bodice to emphasize her ample bosom” (2). Here, the narrator slyly suggests a shared cultural knowledge that renders the identification instantaneous and unproblematic. On the next page, however, another potential Magdalene is identified. This time, her hair provides the clue to her identity: The woman’s tresses are fair, and “Mary Magdalene, who, as everyone knows, was as wicked a woman as ever lived, must have been blond if we accept the opinion held, for better or worse, by half of mankind” that blondes “natural or dyed, are the most effective instruments of sin” (4). Soon the narrator retracts both identifications and points to yet another Magdalene: “What confirms her identity is that this third Mary, as she distractedly supports the limp arm of the mother of Jesus, is looking upward, and her enraptured gaze ascends with such power that it appears to elevate her entire being” (4). The chapter’s antics demonstrate the shaky ontological status of Dürer’s image. As the narrator points out, “None of these things is real, what we are contemplating is mere paper and ink, and nothing more” (1). The comment applies equally well to the novel itself, which, like the engraving, is a physical object (“paper and ink”), a cultural artifact and a fictional invention. Highlighting the fundamental unreliability or all representation, Saramago implies that this playful mise en abîme extends all the way back to the original gospels.

The evangelist as historian

Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ illustrates the problematic process of historical record-keeping through its protagonist Christ, who sets out to produce an account of his twin brother’s life and teachings. Christ is not immediately aware of the rhetorical complexities of his position. At first, he sees himself as merely recording what Jesus does and says, taking copious notes and gathering eyewitness reports. He signs each tablet with the phrase “These are the words that Jesus spoke,” so that “no one should think they were his own opinions” (79). He also hires an informant to provide an “accurate report” of Jesus’s deeds. To this informant, Christ represents himself as “just a simple historian” (91), merely interested in recording the momentous events unfolding before his eyes.

This simplistic notion of history is complicated by an enigmatic, unnamed figure (called simply “the stranger”) who commissions Christ’s written record and coaches him in editorial intervention: “Sometimes there is a danger that people might misinterpret the words of a popular speaker. The statements need to be edited, the meanings clarified, the complexities unravelled for the simple-of-understanding” (74). The stranger designates Christ as one of the elect who, unlike the “simple-of-understanding,” know that truth is produced rather than received: “We who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was. I am sure you understand me” (99). The mysterious coach’s final statement directly references the Jesus/Christ duality established by Pullman: “He is the history, and you are the truth” (125). Under his mentor’s influence, Christ the evangelist decides to improve his record, first through subtle edits and minor alterations; then through the invention of entire scenes, and the retroactive insertion of structural patterns; and, finally and most significantly, through the fabrication of the story’s grand finale—the resurrection.

In providing a mundane explanation for the resurrection story (Jesus’s twin impersonates his dead sibling), Pullman follows a literary tradition that goes back to David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–6). Modern gospel-fiction provides plentiful natural explanations of Jesus’s return from the dead: he survived the crucifixion and was secretly nursed back to health by his followers; he was given a drug that simulated death; one of his disciples took his place on the cross; his apostles fell victim to mass hallucination; and so on. Scriptural metafictions almost uniformly reject, or at least elide, their protagonist’s bodily resurrection, often replacing it with alternative spiritual or metaphorical interpretations. In Pullman, this rejection takes the form of straightforward dismissal: the resurrection of Jesus was fabricated by Christ.

Christ’s transition from “simple historian” to fabricator of history begins when Pullman’s evangelist decides to embellish an oral account taken from an informant:

Finally he gathered himself and wrote down what the disciple had told him, up to the point where Peter spoke. Then a thought came to him, and he wrote something new. Knowing how highly Jesus regarded Peter, he wrote that Jesus had praised him for seeing something that only his Father in heaven could have revealed, and that he had gone on to make a pun on Peter’s name, saying that he was the rock on which Jesus would build his church. That church would be so firmly established that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Finally, Christ wrote that Jesus had promised to give Peter the keys of heaven. (103)

Pullman draws an analogy between his Christ and the canonical Matthew, who supplemented the older gospel of Mark with a reference to Peter’s special ecclesiastical powers. Matthew added a passage in which Jesus tells Simon: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Mt. 15.18–19). Pullman’s subtle exercise in redaction criticism (a method of textual scholarship that seeks insight into scriptural texts by juxtaposing earlier and later versions of the same passage) reminds us that Matthew’s verses have been used for centuries as a justification for papal authority. The scene thus reinforces the novel’s main arguments: that power (ecclesiastical, political, ideological) rests on textual foundations, and that to be an author means to engage with power.

While Pullman demonstrates the unreliability of history through a meddling protagonist-scribe, Saramago provides ongoing historiographic reflection through a domineering narrator, who establishes his authority as historian only to subvert it by means of ironic meta-commentary. Linda Hutcheon identifies the “overtly controlling narrator” (1988: 117) as a device typical of historiographic metafiction; Saramago uses this device—here and throughout his fiction—to foreground and demystify the process of history-making. One example is the Gospel’s account of the miracle of loaves and fish. First introduced as unproblematic, the story soon begins to fall apart: “Historians disagree as to why so many different races should have gathered in that place, whose exact location, let it be said in passing, has also been subject of debate” (302). Scholarly doubts notwithstanding, the narrator goes on to proclaim, “What is beyond dispute is that some four to five thousand people came together there, not counting women and children, and that it turned out that they had nothing to eat” (302–3). An event declared “beyond dispute” is promptly undermined by the admission tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  Sly evangelists: Historiographic meta-gospels
• 2  Other voices: Alternative point-of-view gospels
• 3  Other realities: Science fictional and metamorphic gospels
• 4  Inquisitive scholars: Philological and archaeological gospels
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index
• Copyright