The gospel according to Philip A Contrary review by Laura M. Browning 
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ Philip Pullman Canongate 2010 Buy this book...> I read my first Philip Pullman book when I was 19. It was The Golden Compass, and I read it the summer before spending my junior year of college at Oxford, where the narrative begins to unfold, and so it was easy to fall in love with the story as I imagined the cobbled streets and dreaming spires that awaited me. I’d been studying philosophy at a Jesuit college in New England, already a more liberal experience than the Texas Catholic education I’d received to date. And so Pullman’s prose came at a time when I was learning to think critically and to challenge my faith, and was indeed perhaps partially responsible for toppling it. In The Golden Compass (published in the UK as The Northern Lights, and the first of His Dark Materials trilogy), Pullman veils his criticism of the Christian church and leaves us with an unflattering image of God. It caused him to be labeled as the anti-Christ by many religious groups, and as “blasphemous” by at least one Christian I know, a role I expect Pullman relishes, or at least willingly accepts, as he has cultivated a persona as the atheist counterpart to another great Oxonian writer, C.S. Lewis. For all its criticisms of religion, however, the trilogy doesn’t address the one thing that sets Christianity apart from every other great world religion: Jesus Christ. In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Pullman doesn’t merely address Jesus Christ, he twists and pulls apart the gospels and proposes a reading so subversive that he is sure to earn worse names than “anti-Christ” by those unwilling to challenge their faith. In this retelling, Jesus and Christ are two men, twins, who both work to further the word of God in different ways. Jesus is the public face, the preacher and prophet, and Christ is the clever, far-thinking twin who records Jesus’ words but remains unknown. Pullman’s voice ingeniously captures the simple language of the gospels, and maintains enough of the story that anybody with a passing knowledge of the New Testament will find it both familiar and subversive. Perhaps more remarkable than the splitting of Jesus Christ into two men is the way Pullman explores the possibilities on which the Catholic Church could have been founded. Jesus’ word could not have withstood two millennia if he hadn’t been crucified and resurrected; it’s not only central to the Jesus story, it’s why the Church was created. In Pullman’s retelling, it is Christ who plays the Judas figure and seals Jesus’ fate with a kiss, all the while wondering if an organized church is really the best outcome of Jesus’ death—it would surely further Jesus’ words, but at what price? People who gain power, even in the name of God, often abuse it. An unnamed stranger who guides Christ to betray his brother says to him, “You are the missing part of Jesus. Without you, his death will be no more than one among thousands of other public executions. But with you, the way is opened for that light of truth to strike in on the darkness of history; the blessed rain will fall on the parched earth. Jesus and Christ together will be the miracle. So many holy things will flower from this!” And indeed they have: in two millennia, countless people have done good in the name of Jesus. The motto of my Catholic high school was Serviam, meaning “I will serve,” and my college took to heart the Jesuit motto “men and women for others.” But Pullman’s twinning of Jesus and Christ recalls the duality of the Church, a Church in which many horrible and unholy things have also unfolded (the modern-day pedophilia scandals are but the surface). If Jesus was the idealist and prophet, then Christ is the good-hearted but misguided twin, the one for whom the proverbial path to hell is paved with good intentions. At my college in New England, there was a teacher, a Jesuit priest, who supposedly viewed the Resurrection of Christ as an allegory. I’d like to think this is a book he would have savored, a dangerous and challenging text that upturns all we have been taught about our faith and our church, a risky read but a worthwhile one. The church is, despite history’s best attempts, an infallible institution, and Pullman’s mythology offers just one possible reason why. Laura M. Browning is an associate editor of Contrary. Follow her work at artcanthurtyou.com. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/080212996Xhttp://www.artcanthurtyou.comReviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/080212996Xshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2

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