Literary Titanic: Philip Pullman and the Already-Written-Book

Philip Pullman, the veritable bastion of fair, balanced literature, has been at it again. This is an older article, but still...I felt it was worthwhile. My comments in red.

In the bestselling His Dark Materials books, author Philip Pullman depicted the church as a corrupt and murderous bureaucracy and God as senile, frail and impotent. How original. And, despite condemnation by the Christian right, Why...yes, we ARE right, aren't we? Pullman has now taken on the Gospels directly. "I'm not afraid of you, mean Gospels! Cm'ere!" (right jab) In his new story, he writes that Jesus had a manipulative twin brother, Christ, who tempted him in the wilderness and betrayed him to the authorities. Ooh. Sibling rivalry and evil twins. Because no one has ever written that before.

Using the four Gospels as its source, the gospels of Dan, Richard, Christopher and that person who wrote "Holy Blood, Holy Grail"... The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which will be published on Wednesday, has the naive young Mary giving birth to twins after a visit by a mysterious stranger claiming to be an angel. *eye roll*

The babies grow up into the physically robust, straight-talking, straightforward Jesus and the bookish, calculating, often morally tortured Christ. Picking on the nerd again, eh? Nothing says "stereotype" like THIS!...

At a climactic point in the story, Jesus condemns the idea of a church, saying it would cause the devil to "rub his hands with glee" and predicting that "from time to time, to distract the people from their miseries … the governors of this church will declare that such-and-such a nation or such-and-such a people is evil and ought to be destroyed … and they'll raise their standard over the smoking ruins of what was once a fair and prosperous land and declare that God's kingdom is so much the larger and more magnificent as a result". Hey, where's the can?...

"He is really speaking for me in that section," said Pullman. He added: "Of course I don't condemn speculative thinking, or organising people to help them do good, or setting up hospitals or giving hospitality to travelling strangers or educating people. But we have seen very recently how some aspects of all this can go wrong. People can abuse power. You don't say!

"The greatest excuse in the world is that 'God told me to do it': hence the Crusades. Since it would've been too dangerous (and his insurance would've been too expensive) to write "hence jihad". Once you are appealing to an authority that can't be checked, you are doing something dangerous." You know, I'm starting to think that Philip doesn't know that Stalin and Lenin were atheists...

Pullman's forthright views on religion have earned him enemies. No, his own ridiculousness did that. He has already received "a few dozen letters" protesting about the new book even before it has reached the bookshops, he said. Two. From his mom. Because no one else cares.

"They are anxious on my behalf," he added. "They don't want me to go to hell. It's kind of them to be concerned but I am going to ignore them." "How's the Ring of Fire, hmm?"

In Pullman's work, Jesus is a charismatic, honest speaker, who believes that the kingdom of God is imminent. Imminent according to God or man?...'cause it's kinda been 2000 years, and, y'know... Christ, on the other hand, has an eye to posterity, to the need for an organised church and to the requirements of history. And this is bad...why? "He knows that human beings, being what they are, need structures, they fall into bureaucracy. He knew that the kingdom never was going to come," said Pullman. But--wait a minute--for a while Pullman's "Jesus" was the author surrogate--and now, what?

In some ways the figure of Christ stands in for the idea of the author – a morally ambiguous character on the sidelines, who records events, and shapes and edits them into narratives. "It is a story about how stories become stories," said Pullman. So "christ" is Pullman's stand in--the one who tempted "Jesus" in the desert? Okay then...

The book contains manipulated versions of familiar episodes from the Gospels, including the Wise and the Foolish Virgins. According to Pullman: "I think my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said. The version in the Gospels is so different from what he said usually." And Philip knows how what Jesus usually said...how? Did he know him?

The story is being published by Edinburgh-based Canongate as part of its Myths series, for which it has invited writers such as Ali Smith, Salley Vickers and Margaret Atwood to rework favourite legends. "Next on their list: the Boy without a Brain." Having known the Gospels as a child, Pullman said that he had decided to "reacquaint myself with how they were. So I read them in the King James Bible, the New English Bible and the New Revised Standard Bible: and very curious documents they are too.

"They are not like novels, or fairytales, or history or biography. Jesus is a strange figure: a man whose family thought he was more than a man. Pullman doesn't know any Greeks or Italians, does he?

"I also read Acts and the Epistles and I was intrigued to see how much more Paul was occupied by Christ than by Jesus. I found this very interesting, and wanted to tell a story emphasising the separate qualities of Jesus and Christ, so I decided to make them into two characters." So Paul was occupied by Philip's stand-in? But--but--wait--brain--imploding!

Here the article (found here) ends somewhat abruptly. I'm glad that Philip Pullman is such an original author...so many new ideas...