Review:
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman (Canongate, 2010)

Salley Vickers
telegraph.co.za
2 April 2010

Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman was bound to become something of a hornet’s nest. Known for his dislike of organised religion and the unflattering portrait of God in his trilogy His Dark Materials, Pullman has been branded as a latter-day anti-Christ by those who evidently feel that the Christian spirit is best served by threat and unreflective antagonism.

Written at the prompting of one of Pullman’s admirers, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – who asked Pullman during a public debate why having tackled God he had neglected to write about the figure of Jesus - the Pullman version of the Gospel stories is inevitably, well, unchristian. What it is certainly not, however, is anti-Jesus – which is the book’s main point.

 What Pullman has done is to take the Gospel accounts of Jesus and weave them into a story that runs along the lines of the Gospel narratives, but with one radical innovation. (The book is the latest in a series of retellings of myths, published by Canongate.) He splits the character of Jesus of Nazareth into twin brothers, one named Jesus, the other Christ. Jesus is the lusty healthy baby, born at ease with his physical person; Christ is the sickly child whom his mother favours, and it is he who is found lying in the feeding trough by shepherds and then by the astrologers from the East who have come bearing gifts to the promised “Messiah”.
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