The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

"I love this book. I have lent it to various people who haven’t loved it for various reasons. I found it absolutely gripping. It’s told like a child’s story, written in very simple language. There’s nothing in it that is the least bit difficult to understand. But it is a marvellous fantasy which is that there were twins born to the Virgin Mary and when the shepherds came to the stable it so happened that she was feeding one of the twins but the other one was lying unseen in the manger, so nobody knew that there were these twins, but in fact they grew up together. One of the twins was the Jesus whose story is told in the Gospel, of the revolutionary and humble moralist who wanted to break down the snobbishness and the ritual rubbish that had grown up around the Judaism of his day, but the other twin was extraordinarily ambitious and saw that if Jesus, his twin brother, would keep on performing miracles, then he could gain enormous power and a huge church could be born and the whole world could be covered with the power of this church. I think this is an absolutely brilliant allegory of what’s happened to Christianity and particularly to the Roman Catholic church which became an empire just as this messianic twin thought that it could, whereas the humble Jesus was simply interested in preaching a gospel of loving your neighbour. He was a real true moralist and not a seeker after power. What is so ingenious in Pullman’s telling of this story is that he goes through all the miracles recorded in the gospels, like turning water into wine and he explains how they actually happened, why and how a lot of wine was found at the last minute and then the miracle-mongers, all the people who wanted these miracles to happen, created the legend of a miracle and latched that on to these ordinary events. Well, it’s like a novel. It’s told as a child’s story, but he knows the Gospels extremely well and he takes the central figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the things that he did very seriously. It’s incredibly readable. I sat down and read it in an afternoon and was absolutely delighted by it."

"I’m addressing all these books to the New Atheists. This again shows their failure to understand that they’re too simplistic when they say how appalling religion is. The book is about the struggle between the ideals of a religion and its actuality. The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ are in fact twins: Mary gives birth to twins. Jesus is the good man who believes in the non-institutionalism of religion, who says that my religion is a religion of love, there will be no institutions, no insiders and no outsiders, no money, no authority. His brother is the scoundrel Christ who, to me, is modeled very much on St Paul. He is not a bad man. He is persuaded by a stranger to write down the story of Jesus, his words and actions. And he is persuaded that the only way that such ideals can survive is through an institution. And he’s absolutely right. How would this tiny little cult — when Jesus died he probably had 100 followers — have spread over the world had it not had an institution? So the scoundrel Christ is put in the position of distorting everything that Jesus says, including the fact that he’s resurrected. Christ, in fact, pretends he is Jesus, because they’re twins and he can get away with it. The book ends with Christ lamenting the fact that “without the story there would be no church and without the church, Jesus will be forgotten.” Pullman is very anti organized religion as we know from His Dark Materials books. But he understands this terrible dilemma that a religion is put in — it has great ideals but, in order for them to be spread, they have to be corrupted. That’s what Christ’s/St. Paul’s role is, to create the organization that will carry it on… State power and religious power absolutely go hand in hand. Augustus, as we know from Virgil, certainly would see himself, and portrayed himself in statues, as a demi-God or a God. No state can do without that mantle of religion. Look at Obama. There’s not a United States president who could dare say they were not religious. They need the divine hand of God to say, “Look what a good man this is! And what a powerful man!” It’s so much easier to coerce people without force, to make them want to love you and obey you and admire you because God has said you should. It’s so much better — and cheaper — than doing it by force. Christ is absolutely wonderful. Christ in the book becomes the Devil. He is Judas who kisses Jesus and betrays him, he is the Devil that goes into the wilderness and tempts Jesus. It’s a wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of what happens to religion. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other thing is that Christ rewrites a lot of what happens. He’s not lying — as he would say he is “clarifying.” The feeding of the 5000, as Pullman writes it, is just people who are moved by sudden love and charity to stop being greedy and share their food. The food isn’t miraculously created. The stranger who persuades him to write all this down says to Christ, ‘It’s just that sometimes things are too complicated for ordinary people to understand. So just simplify it. We must be prepared to make history serve the future.’ In a sense, this is the problem for Islam. How much can you interpret the Koran and how much do you just say, “this is the word of God and just accept it as it is.” The modernists say, “Of course you must interpret!” and the traditionalists/fundamentalists say, “No, this is the word of God and we cannot, in any way, interpret it, because that would be to falsify it.” So this book has huge resonances, not just for Christianity, but for what you do with scripture. I think that’s right. I think the way he has modeled it on St. Paul is brilliant. Because St. Paul, to me, is the person who creates Christianity, not Jesus. He is the most brilliant marketer any religion has ever had. And he does that by organization. And theology: he turns Jesus into a divine figure, rather than a human one."