The Gospel According to the Novelist: Religious scripture and contemporary fiction 9781780936239, 9781474218658, 9781780935782

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The Gospel According to the Novelist

NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY: Blake. Wordsworth. Religion, Jonathan Roberts Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke Do the Gods Wear Capes? Ben Saunders England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers Forgiveness in Victorian Literature, Richard Hughes Gibson Glyph and the Gramophone, Luke Ferretter John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger Late Walter Benjamin, John Schad The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Samantha Zacher Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colón

FORTHCOMING: Faithful Reading , Mark Knight and Emma Mason The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Adam Miller Jewish Feeling, Richa Dwor Long Story Short, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins Pentecostal Modernism, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard Romantic Enchantment, Gavin Hopps Sufism in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Michael Tomko

The Gospel According to the Novelist Religious scripture and contemporary fiction

MAGDALENA M ĄCZY Ń SKA

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Magdalena Ma˛czyn´ska, 2015 Magdalena Ma˛czyn´ska has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB : 978-1-7809-3623-9 PB: 978-1-3500-2844-9 ePDF: 978-1-7809-3578-2 ePub: 978-1-7809-3775-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 1 Sly evangelists: Historiographic meta-gospels 2 Other voices: Alternative point-of-view gospels 3 Other realities: Science fictional and metamorphic gospels 61 4 Inquisitive scholars: Philological and archaeological gospels 83 Conclusion 107 Notes 111 Works cited Index 145

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Acknowledgments T

his book could not have been written without the generous help of colleagues, friends, and family. My editors, Emma Mason and Mark Knight, guided the development of my manuscript with diligence and insight. A leave from Marymount Manhattan College gave me the time to research and grow my ideas. Joseph Boone and Michael Kaufmann offered much appreciated encouragement in the early stages of the project. David Schoenbrun provided a summer’s refuge and illuminating conversation. The companionship, physical and virtual, of Lori Flores and Sejal Shah lightened the load of writing. Tahneer Oksman’s enthusiastic feedback helped me get through the final stretch. I owe special thanks to my American family. Gladys Clark Farmer’s extraordinary hospitality made possible the completion of the volume. Jared Farmer supported my work in too many ways to mention. This book, and its author, are forever in his debt.

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he novel is an omnivorous genre. It thrives by feeding on other narratives—fictional, journalistic, legal, academic, religious. In a cultural moment marked by the prefix post, novels take particular pleasure in foraging established literary canons. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005) reinvents Homer’s Odyssey ; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) retells Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (1993) reimagines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The list could run for many pages. One effect of the novel’s prodigious appetite, as Mikhail Bakhtin taught us, is the ability to hold multiple, often contradictory, voices in productive tension. Novelistic rewritings of canonical stories use strategies ranging from pastiche to satire to caricature in order to question the ideological underpinnings of their source texts, all the while borrowing their plots, themes, and styles. Rather than destroying literary icons, contemporary iconoclasts appropriate and transform them. Critics interested in the problem of canonicity have been paying attention to recent fiction’s dialogic relationship with its predecessors for several decades. Nevertheless, an important type of writing remains curiously understudied: novels that rework classics of religious traditions. Examples include the Bible in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), the Qur’an in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) in Will Self’s How the Dead Live (2000), the Kabbalah in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002), and so on. Distrustful of grand narratives and wary of absolute textual authority, novelists have found new, iconoclastic uses for traditional religious writings. My study examines one type of literary engagement with scriptural tradition—novels that borrow and transform canonical stories while foregrounding these acts of transformation to explore the parallels between literary and religious narrative-making.

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Like God in negative theology, my project is best defined by what it is not. I am not interested in religion as a literary theme: my study concerns neither novels featuring religious ideas and characters, such as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Gilead (2004); nor narratives that admit the possibility of supernatural intervention (what some critics call spiritual realism ); nor recent postsecular fiction, defined by John McClure as writing that promotes secular progressive values while disrupting “secular constructions of the real” by tracing the return of secular-minded characters to idiosyncratic engagements with religion (3). Neither am I looking at scripture-based narratives that bring to life, rather than problematize, the canonical stories on which they draw, either by providing elaborate historical reconstructions or by recasting canonical plots in contemporary settings (what Theodore Ziolkowski calls fictional transfigurations ). In short, while many of the novels examined in this book feature religious characters, supernatural ontologies and scriptural story lines, these elements alone did not suffice for inclusion in my study. Rather, I am interested in novels that not only draw on scriptural tradition for their themes and stories but also draw attention to the relationship between religious and literary discourses. How are narratives—religious and literary—shaped by the processes of transmission, translation, and interpretation? Is the distinction between “scripture” and “literature” intrinsic to texts or constructed by communities of readers? Do both kinds of writing rely on the same set of narrative devices? If so, might they both be considered a kind of literary text? Who has the power to endow certain writings with “sacred” status, setting them apart from other human-made stories? Such questions inform a body of recent fiction that combines a general postmodernist interest in the narrative-making process with a specific interest in religious textuality. As literary critic John McClure observes, in contemporary novels, “scriptural traditions tend either to be selectively cited, interrogated, and affirmed or to be brought into vertiginous relation to one another, so that larger claims for any one tradition’s universal reach, absolute accuracy, and authority are denied” (5). This denial of authority strips scriptures of their privileged status, yet also guarantees their continued cultural resonance. No longer anchored in stable metaphysical systems,

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sacred texts enter alternative systems of circulation where they are open to continuous creative revision.1 Although contemporary scriptural rewritings borrow from an ecumenical library of texts, I have chosen to concentrate on novels that use a single (albeit quadruple) source: the canonical gospels. My choice reflects the fact that Christian gospels have inspired the largest number of modern scriptural rewritings. I also take guidance from Terry Eagleton’s claim in the preface to Reason, Faith, and Revolution: “It is better to be provincial than presumptuous” (2009: 3). If such an approach limits the scope of my discussion, it improves my focus, allowing for better comparisons between fictions grounded in the same ur-narrative. It also has the advantage of placing contemporary novels within a well-documented tradition of imaginative biographies of Jesus. Finally, while Western literature has long been comfortable with using the myths of other cultures outside of their original religious context, a similar relationship with Christian mythology goes back a mere two centuries. What makes recent gospel renditions particularly interesting is that they belong to a (relatively) new and highly contentious conversation. Contemporary fictional revisions of the gospels share a number of strategies with postmodernist revisions of the literary canon: retelling well-known stories from new points of view; placing familiar characters in unexpected, unorthodox contexts; splicing traditional and nontraditional material; leveling “high” and “low” subjects and styles; experimenting with hybrid genres and alternate ontological structures; and treating serious subject matter with irreverent, carnivalesque humor. Most importantly, both types of rewritings simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct their canonical source texts. Frederic Jameson famously argued that postmodernism “no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts” (96). Contemporary metascriptures participate in Jameson’s textual play while also seeking a meaningful dialogue with the texts they devour. The outcome is an ambivalent but productive relationship between sacred originals, now wholly or partially emptied of their traditional authority, and their novelistic correctives.

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I call this kind of self-conscious, ambivalent rewriting scriptural metafiction. The term builds on Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction —postmodernist writing that offers an account of past events while drawing attention to the constructed nature of its own (and all other) historical accounts. Hutcheon demonstrates that, in rejecting totalizing models of history, the contemporary novel aligns itself with the epistemological insights of Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra: “Theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic meta fiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (1988: 5). Like the self-reflexive novels studied by Hutcheon, scriptural metafiction investigates the process of narrative production. It expresses skepticism about the reliability of the documents on which it draws and examines these documents as linguistic constructs. Most importantly, it draws parallels between the novelist and the evangelist, just as historiographic metafiction compares the roles of the novelist and the historian. Hutcheon crucially modifies Jameson’s analysis of the late capitalist cultural order: while he emphasizes the bracketing away, and eventual effacement, of the past, which disappears, “leaving us with nothing but texts” (18), she argues that historiographic metafiction “offers a sense of the presence of the past, but a past that can be known only from its texts, its traces—be they literary or historical” (1988: 125). 2 Rather than indulging in a Jamesonian “pure and random play of signifiers” (Jameson 96), Hutcheon’s historiographic metafictions grapple with questions of encoding and representation: “The narrativization of past events is not hidden; the events no longer seem to speak for themselves, but are shown to be consciously composed into a narrative, whose constructed—not found—order is imposed upon them, often overtly by the narrating figure” (1989: 66). My study demonstrates a similar meta-awareness in novels that deconstruct scriptural tales while simultaneously constructing their own versions of sacred history. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Salman Rushdie, who wrote the paradigmatic work of historiographic metafiction, Midnight’s Children (1981), is also the author of scriptural metafiction’s most notorious exemplar, The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie’s novels take on canonical origin-narratives of the Indian nation and the Muslim faith in order to

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expose their inherent unreliability and offer in their place his own, no less unreliable, unapologetically fictional revisions.

Gospel and fiction Scriptural metafictions that draw on the Christian gospels follow a long history of literary engagements with biblical stories. Since late antiquity, Christianity’s foundational narrative has been the subject of heroic epics, devotional plays, lyrical poetry, and pious meditations. Novelistic versions of the life of Jesus began in the nineteenth century, inspired by the publication of two seminal volumes: David Strauss’s 1835–6 Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeited (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined ) and Ernest Renan’s 1863 La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus). Strauss’s Leben —not exactly a novel, but rather a narrative analysis of the gospels’ historical and mythical aspects—introduced the general public to modern German biblical scholarship and opened the door for future fictionalizations. Renan’s bestseller offered a humanized, sentimental hero whose intrinsic sweetness and deep connection with nature appealed to a post-Romantic novel-reading public. Strauss’s and Renan’s works, together with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus published in 1864, exposed educated Europeans to a new way of looking at familiar gospel stories—and released a deluge of fictional “Life of Jesus” narratives. In the course of a century, this popular genre transformed modern Europe’s relationship with Christian scriptures. Although in practice most nineteenth-century Jesus novels retained a reverent attitude toward their sources, it was possible for the first time in history to retell Christianity’s foundation story without reference (or deference) to its religious origins.3 Emulating their Enlightenment predecessors, nineteenth-century intellectuals—including Strauss and Renan—strove to uncover the “real” Jesus of history by sweeping away what they saw as supernatural accretions: the Virgin Birth, miraculous healing, the Resurrection.4 (This rationalist legacy endures in many contemporary gospel novels, as we will see.) More radically, a handful of thinkers, notably nineteenth-century German philosopher Bruno Bauer (1841– 2), speculated that the entire Christian story, including the person of Jesus, might be a literary fiction produced by the early Church

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to embody lofty theological ideas. Bauer’s revolutionary postulate signaled the breakdown of the nineteenth-century search for the “Life of Jesus.” At the same time, the idea of the gospels’ fictionality inaugurated new ways of thinking about Christianity’s textual and philosophical legacies, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s devastating critique of religion (including his famous pronouncement of God’s demise) to the “Death of God” theologies developed in the 1960s and latetwentieth-century narrative theologies. In his incendiary The Antichrist (1895), Nietzsche dismissed the gospels as a “crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour ” (107). While he did not deny the historical existence of Jesus, Nietzsche saw the protagonist of the canonical story as a gross distortion by early Christian authors, who “must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda” (96). Comparing the world of the gospels to that of “a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and ‘childish’ idiocy keep a tryst” (96), Nietzsche accused Jesus’s first disciples of intellectual crudeness and the sycophantic tendency to suppress uncomfortable aspects of their master’s persona. He even suggested that, unlike the evangelists, a first-century Dostoyevsky might have done justice to the complexity of Jesus’s character: “I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the décadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of” (97). As the dark patron saint of thinkers who seek to subvert the cultural order of European modernity, Nietzsche continues to exert an inestimable influence. Theologian Timo Eskola identifies a Nietzschean strain in a series of recent Jesus-novels that manipulate their protagonist in order to undermine traditional religious teachings. Eskola argues that the gospel novel today finds itself in “critical and sometimes ironical dialogue with the realised history of the Christian church” (17), and, as such, belongs to a new, post-Christian, metanarrative “based on discontinuity and contradiction” (259). Demoted from the status of divine being to that of a literary character, Jesus becomes a mouthpiece for the novelists’ unorthodox ideas—just as, according to

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Bauer and Nietzsche, the scriptural Nazarene embodied the ideological position of the original evangelists. A more affirmative version of the gospels-as-fiction approach can be found in the writings of William Hamilton, a major proponent of the radical movement known as Death of God theology.5 Faced with the failed quest for the historical Jesus, Hamilton conceded that the gospels could not be read as a factual record: We have been saying for years that the Gospels were never designed to be read as history in the modern sense. But we have rarely gone on to say what they are, apart from uttering such magic words as “gospel” or “kerygma.” What my christological consensus permits us to say is that the Gospels are fictions. We must learn to give up our privileged belief in a privileged position for the canonical. (20) Hamilton went on to identify the figure of the “post-historical Jesus,” whom he defined as “the Jesus we can turn to after we have determined that the historical method (and its cousin, theological interpretation based on that method) has given us everything it is capable of giving” (20). In this view, the tools of literary criticism help unlock fresh scriptural meanings, while contemporary literature becomes a newly valued source of insight into the hero of the gospels. Reading the gospels as man-made narratives is the central gesture of narrative theology, which borrows insights from narratology, anthropology, and Wittgensteinian philosophy of language to reconceptualize Christianity as a context-dependent, community-embedded language game.6 Biblical scholar Hans Frei emphasized the limitations of historical approaches to Christian scriptures, including the nineteenth-century search for the Jesus of history, arguing that the modern obsession with facts occluded the gospels’ more important meaning-making functions. Frei rejected the “apologetically motivated disjunctive alternative” (52) between factual and mythical readings of the gospels, proposing instead a “narrative” reading, which posits that, while the Christian salvation story depends on the concept of Jesus as Messiah, “whether or not he was so in historical fact, or thought of himself as Messiah (i.e.

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whether the story refers or not), or whether the notion of a Messiah is still a meaningful notion, are different questions altogether” (52). Ronald F. Thiemann’s reading of the gospels shows a similar lack of interest in their referential function; instead, he considered gospels to be a special kind of speech act—God’s narrated promise. Thiemann illustrated this approach by examining Matthew as “a consciously constructed narrative in which the author uses various literary devices for theological purposes” (322). While twentieth-century religious thinkers such as Thiemann and Frei used their analyses to offer new insights into scriptural texts, the goals of contemporary novelists are more mundane—and less reverent. Nevertheless, a shared understanding of the gospels as narrative constructs brings together their theological and literary reinterpreters as part of an interdisciplinary shift toward a heightened awareness of the scriptures’ textuality.7 If the gospels can be read as a kind of fiction, can fiction be read as a kind of modern gospel? For authors of scriptural metafiction, the answer is a definite “yes.” In this, contemporary novelists draw on a well-established tradition that goes back to the German Romantics and their British counterparts. From William Blake’s mythopoetic cycles, rooted in a belief in the divinity of the creative act; to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of the “primary imagination” as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (304); to Matthew Arnold’s idea of literature as a moral beacon in a rapidly changing capitalist culture, Romantic and postRomantic writers cultivated a lofty—even metaphysical—vision of literature’s significance. The affirmation of the literary persisted into the twentieth century and beyond. D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 manifesto “The Future of the Novel” imagined the replacement of all scriptures and philosophies by a perfected version of his favored genre. Even today, according to scholar Amy Hungerford (2010), the literary beliefs held by many contemporary American writers may be considered “a species of religious thought,” and their work “a species of religious practice” (xvi). Following the Victorians, authors today continue to see literature as “something like scripture—supernatural, transcendent, imbued with ultimate authority” (105). Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate reach a similar conclusion about recent British fiction. For novelists as different as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Philip

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Pullman, the novel “represents a kind of secular object of devotion: it offers a this-worldly experience of grandeur, consolation, freedom and even redemption” (11). Such quasi-religious attitudes reveal a continuing commitment to literature’s cultural significance—as well as evidence of our secular age’s abiding interest in religion’s transcendent, redemptive message.

The postsecular turn To discuss the distinction between “religious” and “secular” writing is to introduce a problematic dichotomy that many scriptural metafictions seek to dismantle. Current novelistic practice aligns with new developments in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, and political science that offer critical revisions of such widely used but often unexamined categories as “the sacred,” “the profane,” “the religious,” and “the secular,” questioning their historical definitions and oppositional groupings.8 This multidisciplinary endeavor, sometimes labeled as the postsecular turn, provides an important context for recent literature. Like others, I use the term postsecular not to suggest a linear narrative of a secular age replaced by a (neo)religious one; rather, the postsecular moment is one in which we can no longer accept the traditional secularization narrative celebrated in modern Western thought. Sociologists have led the way in reexamining the modern secular myth, arriving at a series of important, sometimes surprising insights: (1) religion and modernity can no longer be conceptualized as a zero-sum game; (2) the secularization story promoted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals fails to account for twenty-first century realities; (3) secularization is a multifaceted, recursive process that does not inevitably spell the end of religious practice (Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 1987; Casanova 1994); (4) religion today needs to be examined within a global, rather than narrowly Eurocentric, framework (Martin 2005; Clarke 2006, 2009). These ongoing theoretical emendations, paired with a wealth of new empirical research into unchurched spiritualities, new religious movements, and the interface of religious and political thought, redefine the disciplinary assumptions of traditional social sciences. In

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the allied field of anthropology, Talal Asad usefully conceptualizes the “secular” and the “religious” not as essentially fixed categories but as context-specific, discursive grammars (2003). Building on the work of Asad and José Casanova, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini’s collection Secularisms (2008) brings together a variety of national and religious perspectives to demonstrate that “the production of the category of religion as we know it today was also part of the production of secularism” (7). Jacobson and Pellegrini argue for the replacement of a single “secularism” with the more accurate plural of their volume’s title. Meanwhile, in the halls of high theory, the proliferation of concepts such as “God without being,” “religion without religion” and “weak religion” speaks to a desire for post-Heideggerian reinventions of traditional theological categories (Marion 1991; Derrida 1992; Rorty and Vattimo 2005). Inspired by the poststructuralist revolution, a vanguard of theologians seek to establish a postmodern theology grounded in a distrust toward universal reason (Ward 1996; Blond 1998; Milbank 1999), or, more radically, a postrealist, post-deathof-God a-theology that moves beyond stable constructions of reality altogether (Caputo 2006; Caputo and Vattimo 2007; Mark C. Taylor 2007). This catalog of intellectual projects is not meant to suggest some kind of cohesive ideological movement. Rather, it manifests the vitality of a conversation that has moved, in a single generation, from the margins to the center of scholarly attention. As Mark Taylor put it in the opening sentence of After God , “You cannot understand the world today if you do not understand religion” (xiii). Despite the recent multidisciplinary reevaluation of the secularist narrative, and despite recent fiction’s fascination with religious textuality, mainstream literary scholars have done little work on either subject. This surprising indifference might be partially attributed to an anxiety of influence caused by the field’s largely unacknowledged methodological and institutional indebtedness to biblical scholarship and ecclesiastical administrative structures.9 Important exceptions do exist. These include postsecular analyses of the novel’s historical relationship with the Bible; examinations of recent fiction’s unexpected reenchantment; discussions of the relationship between biblical narratives and groups marginalized by the guardians of Christian

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orthodoxy; and attempts, by both literary scholars and theologians, to bring together theology and contemporary critical theory.10 The more specific subject of Jesus in modern fiction has been taken up primarily by religious scholars. As a result, thematic and philosophical concerns often take precedence over matters of form and genre.11 A rare exception is Theodore Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972), which, after almost half a century, remains the most comprehensive literary study of gospel-based novels. Ziolkowski identifies and examines the genre of fictional transfigurations: stories in which the lives of modern characters follow the narrative trajectory of the gospels, much like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom repeats the ancient journey of Ulysses.12 Ziolkowski’s work, which ends with a discussion of late-1960s fiction, has been updated in an article by religious scholar Georg Langenhorst (1995). Langenhorst classifies gospel novels published since the 1970s according to point of view—from omniscient historical narratives to single character-narrators to multiple narrative perspectives—and proclaims a “literary renaissance of Jesus, especially of the ‘Jesusnovel’” (85).13 My own project began not with an interest in theology (or even the interface of theology and literature) but with an empirical observation: I noticed a surprising number of recent fictions, more often than not authored by novelists with little or no investment in theological matters, that draw on, reinterpret, or transform religious textual traditions. What is more, many of these fictions flaunt their metatextual engagements in irreverent or playfully serious ways characteristic of postmodernist writing. My study surveys, analyzes, and classifies such self-conscious, revisionary narratives. I also highlight the challenge they pose to conventional ideas about literature and scripture. This is not a book about the “literary Jesus,” but about the creative encounter between ancient gospels and contemporary fiction. The novels discussed in the following chapters vary in narrative form and ideological commitment. Some fit into Timo Eskola’s post-Nietzschean, post-Christian genealogy, while others extend and enrich—rather than subvert—scriptural stories. Some follow a traditional realist formula, while others dismantle the novelistic frame through bold structural and ontological experimentation. What brings

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them together is that they emphasize the constructed, contingent nature of canonical religious writings. This can be accomplished in a number of ways: through the use of overt authorial commentary; through highlighting the figure of the witness-narrator; through orchestrating competing accounts; through manipulating fictional worlds; or through emphasizing the fact that ancient manuscripts are material objects that can be lost, destroyed, or corrupted, as well as mistranslated and misinterpreted. Whatever their strategies, authors of scriptural metafiction reconsider religious tradition in light of recent knowledge about language, canonicity, and historiography, inviting reflection on the knotty processes of making sacred texts—and of making texts sacred. In my first chapter, I look at two paradigmatic scriptural metafictions: José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) and Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). Both novels comment on the historical and artistic processes of narrative production; both draw parallels between the labors of the evangelist and the novelist; and both satirize past and present church institutions, pronouncing them guilty of appropriating and perverting the teachings of their founder. Known for their left-leaning politics and atheism, Saramago and Pullman forcefully denounce the power structures of institutionalized religion while affirming the earthly wisdom of Jesus’s teachings. In this respect, their fictions echo recent recuperations of Christian social ethics by Marxian theoreticians such as Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton. My second chapter discusses fictions in which gospel events are presented from alternative points of view that significantly revise the canonical story. Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984) and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012) assume the voice of the gospels’ silenced women. Nino Ricci’s Testament (2003) and Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel (2012) imitate the canon’s quadruple structure to juxtapose multiple versions of the narrative. Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax (1996) and Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002) imagine the missing years of Jesus’s life from the perspective of fictional childhood companions. All six narratives claim the status of eyewitness accounts—something that, on scholarly consensus, the

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canonical gospels are not—to criticize orthodox ideologies and call attention to the fictionality of their biblical originals. The narratives examined in my third chapter illustrate Brian McHale’s claim that postmodernist fiction is obsessed with questions of ontology. Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1969) and Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992) employ the conventions of science fiction to destabilize scriptural words and novelistic worlds. James P. Carse’s The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (1997) and A. J. Langguth’s Jesus Christs (1968) parallel poststructuralist and reader-response theory in rejecting the idea of stable textual meaning and to reconsider biblical teachings in the context of a decentered, postmetaphysical universe. Both types of ontological interventions destabilize traditional notions about reality and its textual representation, forcing the reader to see ancient scriptural texts in a new—disorienting but also revealing—light. The fourth and final chapter examines two types of novels—I call them philological and archaeological fictions—that highlight the labor of scholars involved in gathering, translating, editing, and interpreting the material record of Jesus’s life. Philological fictions such as Gerd Theissen’s Shadow of the Galilean (1987) depict scholarly narrators who lay bare the process of reconstructing an accurate version of gospel events (while acknowledging the impossibility of perfect accuracy). Archaeological fictions such as Michel Faber’s The Fire Gospel (2008) depict the discovery of a controversial apocryphal scripture and the ensuing process of its translation and dissemination. Finally, Gabriel Meyer’s innovative Gospel of Joseph (1994) combines elements of philological and archeological fiction to reenact the process of archival research. In place of a traditional plot, Meyer offers a portfolio of letters (from the fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries), apocryphal narratives, translations, and court transcripts, which the reader is invited to piece together into a cohesive story. In the pluralist context of our “secular age,” to borrow Charles Taylor’s famous formulation (2007), scriptural and novelistic discourses meet, for the first time, as equals. From an orthodox point of view, this meeting degrades sacred textuality by dragging it down to the level of human creation. Inversely, the encounter can be seen as a creative resurrection of canonical texts that had lost their cultural authority and resonance. As Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate put it in

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The New Atheist Novel (2010): “Perhaps literature—and particularly the novel—has become the primary space in which once deep-rooted, if widely forgotten and deracinated, religious ideas can be revisited, tested and reshaped” (64). Novelistic retellings of scriptures can be read as a kind of new, unorthodox Midrashim—living commentaries on ancient biblical stories—that refresh traditional religious teachings for modern audiences. Gospel-inspired metafictions remind us that the scriptural originals are already inherently intertextual. As Piero Boitani notes in his discussion of literary “re-scriptures,” the Bible (especially the Christian Bible, which reframes Jewish scripture as the “old” testament) engages in extensive acts of reinvention: “Genesis rewrites Genesis, John rewrites Genesis, and the whole of the New Testament rewrites the Old, with the intention of ‘fulfilling’ it” (vii). Scriptural metafiction foregrounds the relationality and openendedness of narratives—religious and secular. It invites readers to resist traditional dichotomies, and counters the rigid hermeneutics of biblical literalists with innovative, thought-provoking versions of familiar sacred tales. Instead of “What would Jesus do?” the question becomes: “What can stories about Jesus do?”

1 Sly evangelists: Historiographic meta-gospels

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he 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.

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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 twentiethcentury 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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meanings clarified, the complexities unravelled for the simple-ofunderstanding” (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

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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 that no one

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can explain how “such careful people, used to traveling and never without a well-stocked pack even on the shortest journey, could have suddenly found themselves without so much as a crust of bread or scrap of meat” (303). In a final shift of position, the narrator sums up the scene with an appeal to the power of facts: “But facts are facts, and the facts say that there were twelve to fifteen thousand, this time including women and children, who had gone without food for hours” (303). Saramago’s narrative play (reminiscent of the irreverent description of Dürer’s etching) weakens both the authority of the original gospel account(s) and of the fictional storyteller, whose excessive protestations and repeated appeals to “fact” are designed to inspire distrust in the reader. In addition to destabilizing the concept of scriptural factuality, Saramago undermines the credibility of the story’s eyewitnesses. New Testament authors make multiple references to the legitimizing power of eyewitness authority.6 In contrast, Saramago’s narrator repeatedly questions eyewitnesses reports. Salome’s account of her encounter with Jesus is compromised by her advanced age: “These were the words the woman thought she heard, and so they are recorded here, at the risk of once more offending verisimilitude, but, then, we can always blame the unreliable testimony of a senile old woman” (183). While some witnesses are simply incompetent, others strategically embellish their tales, like the novel’s itinerant mule drivers who entertain bored travelers with cock-and-bull stories of Herod’s funeral or Jesus’s miracles, “each man embroidering the story according to his fancy” (285). Even Jesus is guilty of narrative manipulation; when speaking to Lazarus, he edits out his relationship with Satan, and he urges Simon to do the same: “Don’t mention that the devil was also there, Jesus quickly warned him, afraid of the difficulty he would have explaining this if it became public knowledge” (334). Saramago makes it clear that eyewitnesses, whether incompetent, over-imaginative, manipulative, or outright deceitful, are always problematic sources. As the novel’s narrator admits: “The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent” (165).7 Saramago and Pullman are similarly obsessed with questions of historical transmission and inscription. In Gospel and Good Man, the

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novelists reveal the problematic status of their source documents— the Christian canon—by insisting that all historical documents are, as Linda Hutcheon put it, “signs within already semiotically constructed contexts, themselves dependent upon institutions (if they are official records) or individuals (if they are eye-witness accounts)” (Hutcheon 1988: 122). Through their blasphemous gospels, both writers expose and mimic the instability of scriptural texts, insisting that sacred history must submit to the same theoretical scrutiny as its secular twin. Saramago and Pullman’s depictions of the history-making process validate the insights of twentieth-century historiographic theory (or “new historiography”) that posits all historical truth as rhetorically constructed, ideologically marked, and inevitably emplotted. In the introduction to his groundbreaking Metahistory (1973), Hayden White defines historical work as “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (ix), and argues that such discourse is based on metahistorical linguistic paradigms: Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of “data,” theoretical concepts for “explaining” these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively “historical” explanation should be. This paradigm functions as the “metahistorical” element in all historical works that are more comprehensive in scope than the monograph or archival report. (ix) In his analysis, White draws extensively on the language of literary theory: the historiographic strategy of “explanation by emplotment” (as opposed to “explanation by formal argument” or by “ideological implication”) can be articulated through “the archetypes of Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire” (x). Likewise, the historian’s choice of “conceptual strategies,” which takes place on a “deep level of consciousness” (what White calls the pre figuration of the historical field), is named after four poetic tropes: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony (x). The work of Hayden White, as well as

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other twentieth-century historiographers such as György Lukács, Louis Mink, Frank Ankersmit, Michel de Certeau, and Dominick LaCapra has transformed the way scholars think about historical narratives, and the relationship between historical and literary narrative production. As Linda Hutcheon notes, the question “To what empirically real object in the past does the language of history refer?” has been replaced by new questions focusing on history’s intertextuality: “To which discursive context could this language belong? To which prior textualizations must we refer?” (Hutcheon 1988: 119).8 Saramago and Pullman participate in this project of historiographic revisionism by exposing the narrative construction of the gospels and questioning their credibility as historical records.

The evangelist as novelist In an authorial statement appended to the paperback edition of The Good Man Jesus, Philip Pullman recounts the questions that inspired his novel: How did the gospel writers know what was said between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness? And, how did they know what words Jesus used during his solitary agony in the garden of Gethsemane? Both scenes struck Pullman as products of literary imagination: “[They] felt very like fiction to me. The first is school debating society knockabout and the second is profound and very moving psychological drama, but if they don’t even pretend to produce any evidence or name any witnesses, I can only regard them as fiction” (258). Pullman imagines gospel authors as authors: creative agents who fill in gaps, construct narrative arches, produce cohesion, and give shape to their story—in short, writers like himself. The projection of modern authorial identity onto a first-century subject is anachronistic but Pullman’s primary goal is not historical reconstruction. Rather, his iconoclasm serves to bolster the central tenet of scriptural metafiction: the evangelist and the novelist are engaged in allied narrative-making projects. Pullman emphatically returns to the theme of authorial power near the end of the novel, as Christ prepares the final draft of his manuscript. The protagonist imagines improvements that might give the story a stronger symbolic structure (“There could be some miraculous sign to

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welcome the birth: a star, an angel”) and greater psychological drama (“If Jesus had known about his execution in advance, and told his disciples that it was going to come about, and gone to meet it willingly, it would give the crucifixion a far more resonant meaning”), as well as enhanced realism, which, as he begins to realize, is not the same as literal truth: “There were a hundred details that could add verisimilitude. He knew, with a pang that blended guilt and pleasure, that he had already made some of them up” (242–3). In embracing the process of composition, Christ finally accepts his identity of imaginative writer: And here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren’t there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story. (244) The moral value of this literary labor is unclear: “The stranger would have called it letting truth into history. Jesus would have called it lying” (244). Nevertheless, at the conclusion of Pullman’s strange Künstlerroman, Christ accepts the role of the creative writer—with all of its guilt and jouissance. Like Pullman, Saramago blurs the boundary between the literary author and the gospel chronicler. Saramago’s narrator-evangelist, who describes himself as being “like God” (199), enjoys flaunting his godlike powers and absolute control over the fictional universe he creates: Just think how little the main characters of this gospel know about one another, Jesus does not know everything about his mother and father, Mary does not know everything about her husband and son, and Joseph, who is dead, knows nothing about anything. Whereas we know everything that has been done, spoken, and thought, whether by them or by others, although we have to act as if we too are in the dark. (167) The narrator also emphasizes his power to intervene in the life of his protagonist: “Since Jesus is clearly the hero of our story, it would

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be easy for us to go up to him and predict his future, tell him what a wonderful life lies ahead, the miracles he will perform to provide food and restore health, even one to conquer death” (200). This assertion underscores the narrator’s superior position in relation to his characters. It also shatters the mimetic illusion, both because the narrator admits his reliance on preexisting accounts of the story, and because, unlike the other evangelists, he draws attention to the narrative conventions (such as sequential chronology) that enable our experience of the story as “real.” Within a single sentence, Saramago’s evangelist both affirms his authorial powers and lays bare his limitations. The narrator’s authority derives from his ontological positioning outside the novel’s events. While the story, like the Christian gospels, takes place in first-century Galilee and Judea, the storyteller’s knowledge spans two millennia, allowing him to comment on ancient events from a modern vantage point. This position leads to comical anachronisms: fishermen’s wives pray to the Holy Mother during a storm; the narrator invokes Voltaire, Freud, and Lacan; the harsh words spoken by Jesus to his mother (“Woman, what have I to do with you?”) are softened by future commentators who insist, “What Jesus really said was, Why bother me with this, or, What has this to do with me, or, Who asked you to interfere, or, Why should we get involved, woman, or, Why can’t you leave this to me, or, Tell me what you want and I’ll see what can be done, or even, You can rely on me to do my best to please you” (291). By projecting modern values onto his firstcentury tale, the narrator parodies ideologically driven misreadings of the gospels and recognizes the dependence of storytellers on cultural frameworks: a limiting condition that neither the canonical authors nor the modern-day evangelist can escape. In addition to questioning the ontological certitude of the original gospel accounts, Saramago takes issue with their nineteenth-century novelistic renditions. (Indeed, the author’s entire oeuvre—a mixture of magic realism, fantasy, dystopia, fable, and metafiction—subverts classical realist conventions.) In The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the narrator’s disdain for realist poetics is apparent both in his storytelling style and his meta-narrative commentary: When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with

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others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens. They argue that this narrative approach best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not, and is not likely to become or supplant, factual reality, there must at least be some similitude, not as in the present narrative, where the reader’s credence has clearly been put to the test. (182–3) This exposition performs several functions: Most obviously, it shatters the “desirable effect of verisimilitude” it references, while mocking “the rules of effective narration.” It also underscores the differences in narrative method between the modern novel and the gospels (whose hero is precisely “an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens”). By juxtaposing scriptural and novelistic storytelling strategies, the narrator ridicules novels that purport to translate biblical material into the idiom of modern realism. To demonstrate the differences between the Bible and the novel, Saramago includes biblical numerology and prophesy in his novelistic narrative—with comical effect: “Four years from now, Jesus will meet God. This unexpected revelation, which is probably premature according to the rules of effective narration referred to above, is intended simply to prepare the reader for some everyday scenes from pastoral life which will add little of substance to the main thread of our story” (188). Conversely, the narrator applies fictional conventions such as psychological depth and descriptive detail to biblical characters, as when he portrays God as a distant, sadistically violent parent, and wonders about the deity’s hair color.9 By laying bare the codes of scriptural and novelistic narration, Saramago never allows us to forget that novels and scriptures are similarly authored narratives, shaped by their respective stylistic and generic constraints.

The novelist as evangelist If the gospel is a kind of literary narrative, can literary narratives claim to be a (new) kind of gospel? Theodore Ziolkowski’s concept

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of “analogues to the Gospels” (233) and Horácio Costa’s “mock gospel” (192) suggest an affinity between the genres of the gospel and the novel beyond their manifest formal and thematic differences. Novelists themselves hint at this correspondence through the use of pastiche, citations, and title choices. Such textual gestures suggest the possibility of reading the contemporary novel as a quasi-gospel: a narrative that offers teachings on ethical, even spiritual, questions, updated for a modern audience. The idea of the novel as an agent of moral edification goes back to the eighteenth century. Nineteenthand early-twentieth-century “Lives of Jesus” were doubly invested in fiction’s moralizing mission because of the gravitas of the scriptural sources they adapted, and because of their commitment to the Arnoldian vision of literature as bearer of cultural values. The contemporary scriptural metafictions of Saramago and Pullman continue this moralistic tradition, even as they replace the solemnity of their antecedents with dark humor and irony. The ethical scheme of Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is signaled in the binary opposition of its title. Like numerous creative writers before him, Pullman denounces powerhungry Christian institutions, represented by the idea of the Christ, while upholding the moral teaching of Jesus. This anti-ecclesiastic position is not surprising coming from Pullman, Honorary Associate of Britain’s National Secular Society and author of His Dark Materials. The main ideological conflict of Pullman’s novel is articulated in the chapter titled “The Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness.” Throughout the scene, Pullman references the biblical story, but casts Christ, rather than Satan, in the role of the tempter. The thrust of Christ’s argument is that his charismatic brother should use his eloquence and miraculous gifts to become a leader. Christ unfolds his blueprint for a future church: Think of the advantages if there were a body of believers, a structure, an organization already in place [. . .] Groups of families worshipping together with a priest in every village and town, an association of local groups under the direction and guidance of a wise elder in the region, the regional leaders all answering to the authority of one supreme director, a kind of regent of God on earth! (42–3)

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Christ’s vision of administrative perfection reveals his lust for power: “I can see the princes of the nations—I can see Caesar himself having to bow down before this body, and offer obeisance to God’s own Kingdom in place here in the world” (43). Jesus, like his gospel counterpart, remains unmoved. He resists the idea of putting on “a sensational show for the credulous” (42), and denies the importance of miracles. Yet it is Christ who has the final word, as he retroactively distorts his brother’s message in the official scriptural record.10 Saramago, an unrepentant communist, likewise points out the discrepancy between Jesus’s teachings, especially his advocacy for the poor and marginalized, and their institutional appropriations. The novelist’s Nobel Prize lecture emphasized his own humble origins and uncompromising commitment to the “brotherhood of the condemned of the earth,” a collective term for the “thousands and thousands of men with dirty and callused hands” deceived by both church and state, subjected to oppressive surveillance, and terminally exhausted after “having lifted year after year, stone-by-stone, the implacable convent walls, the huge palace rooms, the columns and pilasters, the airy belfries, the basilica dome suspended over empty space.” If the tone here seems closer to a sermon than a prize acceptance speech, it is because Saramago was a political moralist whose writings, fictional and journalistic, expose injustice and promote dignity in face of overwhelming oppression. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, inspired by the biblical story of the massacred innocents, fits perfectly into this critical program. The laureate himself explained that his Gospel is not “one more edifying legend of blessed beings and gods, but the story of a few human beings subjected to a power they fight but cannot defeat.” As David Frier (2005) persuasively argues, the novel is primarily concerned with power structures, and only secondarily with matters of religion.11 A like desire to reclaim the gospels’ political dimension informs the work of several prominent contemporary secular thinkers, most notably Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek. Assessing the history of Christianity, Eagleton argues in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins” (55). Adding further nuance to the argument, Žižek asserts in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009), “The problem with the Church

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is that it betrayed original Christianity not by its organization, but by the type of this organization: the apocalyptic community of believers which lives in the emergency state of a ‘permanent revolution’ is changed into an ideological apparatus legitimizing the normal run of things” (283). While disagreeing on the exact nature of the betrayal, Eagleton and Žižek both emphasize the squandered revolutionary potential of the gospel message. Žižek and Eagleton focus on the New Testament’s social morality, evoking the Pauline concept of agape, understood as political rather than private love. For Žižek, the Christian “work of love” means “the hard and arduous work of repeated ‘uncoupling’ in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into” so we can learn to “discern in what was hitherto a disturbing foreign body, tolerated and even moderately supported by us so that we were not too bothered by it, a subject, with its crushed dreams and desires” (2000: 129). Similarly, in his discussion of Christian love, Eagleton emphasizes the importance of recognizing the humanity of the other: “It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another” (2009: 19). The same quotidian gospel of communal love animates the work of Saramago, whose novels grant subjecthood to the destitute, the rejected, and the other. The main characters in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, like those of the canonical gospels, are the working poor: fishermen, shepherds, carpenters, housewives, prostitutes. The novel observes their everyday lives in loving detail, while exposing the root causes of their wretched condition. Robert Cousland points out that Saramago’s Jesus is torn between opposing ideologies: one represented by his mentor Pastor (whose sustainable shepherding practices, rejection of private property, and disregard for the profit motive represent communism), and the other by his divine father (whose desire to expand his dominion regardless of human cost represents capitalism). Having diagnosed the novel’s ideological tensions, Cousland criticizes Saramago for giving readers not an evangelion (or good news ) but a kakaggelion (or bad news ): “Saramago’s Gospel contains no good

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news; it is unabashedly tragic” (60).12 While the novel’s protagonist might indeed be read as a tragic figure, the Gospel also offers a positive message overlooked in Cousland’s criticism: everyday material life can be joyfully affirmed, even sacralized. Such an affirmation is precisely what Eagleton considers to be Christianity’s most important contribution to the field of ethics. Eagleton calls Judeo-Christian morality “nothing if not materialist” (2009b: 292), a system in which “the material world is the sole locus of redemption” (2009b: 293). Similarly, Žižek asserts in The Monstrosity of Christ that “the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit, the site where Spirit achieves its actuality” (60). In Saramago’s novel, the sacralization of mundane existence is symbolized by a black clay bowl filled with luminescent soil that the pregnant Mary receives from the Pastor during the annunciation. Softly glowing soil replaces incandescent halos and rays of heavenly light; in place of aerial and celestial metaphors, Saramago gives us the dirt of the earth. The earthenware dish returns in several key scenes throughout the story, including the novel’s closing image: Jesus suspended on the cross above a “black bowl into which his blood was dripping” (377). By ending the Passion not with Resurrection but with the commonest holy grail, Saramago insists that life itself is the miracle we should revere. Like Saramago (and Pullman), Žižek and Eagleton reject the resurrection. In its place, they offer secular interpretations of the “Kingdom of God” (Eagleton) and the “Holy Spirit” (Žižek)— concepts fundamental to the gospel’s vision of the post-resurrection order. Eagleton defines “Kingdom of God” as “a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment” (2009a: 38). This condition can only be achieved by paying attention to the icon of the crucified Jesus. In Eagleton’s view, the only “authentic image” of the Christian God is “a tortured and executed political criminal, who dies in an act of solidarity with what the Bible calls the anawim, meaning the destitute and dispossessed [. . .] The anawim, in Pauline phrase, are the shit of the earth—the scum and refuse of society who constitute the cornerstone of the new form of human life known as the kingdom of God” (2009a: 23). Placing similar emphasis on fellowship and solidarity, Žižek defines the Holy Spirit as the “radical community of believers” (2010: 181). This new collective is the foundation of Žižek’s

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atheist-theological critique of the capitalist order: “It is not just a matter of private religious convictions. I claim that if we lose this key moment—the moment of realizing the Holy Spirit as a community of believers—we will live in a very sad society, where the only choice will be between vulgar egoist liberalism or the fundamentalism that counterattacks it” (2010: 181). Borrowing vocabulary from Alain Badiou, Žižek argues that true resurrection is to be found in reaching beyond the status quo: “Every truth-Event leads to a kind of ‘resurrection’—through fidelity to it and a labor of love on its behalf, one enters another dimension irreducible to mere service de biens, to the smooth-running affairs in the domain of Being” (2010: 90). For Eagleton and Žižek, the Christian vocabulary of transcendence refers not to otherworldly realities, but to the mundane experience of communal life on earth. In Saramago’s Gospel, the affirmation of the sacred-mundane comes through strongest in the treatment of sexuality. During the unorthodox scene of Jesus’s conception, Joseph’s desire is described as “a shiver going up his spine like a tongue of fire” (12)—a reference to the iconography of the Holy Ghost—and his coupling with Mary as a sacred event: “The holy seed of Joseph poured into the holy womb of Mary, both holy, being the fountain and chalice of life” (13). The religious symbolism of the fountain, the liturgical connotation of the chalice, and the incantational force of the repeated adjective “holy” elevate this ordinary marital act to sacramental status. Saramago reemphasizes the sacred dimension of sexuality in the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, whose passionate love provides the text’s most meaningful human connection. Describing Mary and Jesus’s erotic bond, Saramago invokes the Song of Songs: “And in that moment he understood the true meaning of King Solomon’s words, Your thighs are like jewels, your navel is like a round goblet filled with scented wine” (236). The reference to the biblical poem’s “true meaning” subverts the exegetical traditions (Jewish and Christian) that read the poem as an allegory of divine love. In this, Saramago agrees with Žižek, whose discussion of the Song of Songs in The Puppet and the Dwarf defies traditional allegorical interpretations: “What, however, if the Song of Songs is to be read not as an allegory but, much more literally, as the description of purely sensual erotic play? What if the ‘deeper’ spiritual dimension is already operative in

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the passionate sexual interaction itself?” (123). Saramago’s Jesus illustrates Žižek’s concept of Christ as a singular universal: “Christ is thus not ‘man PLUS God’: what becomes visible in him is simply the divine dimension of man ‘as such’” (Žižek 2001: 90). It is precisely humanity “as such,” with Jesus as its representative, that Saramago affirms in his blasphemous Gospel. The recent alliance between Marxian and Christian thought surprises and disturbs devotees of both ideologies. Terry Eagleton opens his Trouble with Strangers (2009) with a defense of this unlikely (re)union: Some of my friends and readers will be dismayed to see me wasting my time yet again on theology. It is true that religion has proved one of the most noxious institutions of human history; but that squalid tale of oppression and superstition stands under judgment of the version of Christianity advanced in this book. It is a paradox of our times that while it has bred various lethal brands of religious fundamentalism, it has also given birth to a current of radical theology—one which, ironically, represents one of the few surviving enclaves of materialist thought in these politically patchy times, and which is often more revolutionary in its political implications than much secular leftist thought. It may well be a dismal sign of the times that it is to the science of God, of all things, that we must look for such subversive insights. (vi) Contemporary reconsiderations of Christianity’s radicalism vary in range and method. Andrew Collier’s Christianity and Marxism (2001) reconciles Christian and Marxist worldviews on philosophical grounds. A 2002 anthology edited by Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland showcases the long tradition of Christian radical thought, from second-century apologist Justin to queer theologian Thomas Hanks. Several recent volumes by Žižek and a pair of strange ideological bedfellows—theologian John Milbank and philosopher Creston Davis—reclaim traditional theological concepts as tools for political intervention.13 Summing up this latest wave of recuperations, Žižek argues (“precisely as a radical leftist”) that “Christianity is far too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists. We should fight for it. Our

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message should not be, ‘You can have it,’ but ‘No, it’s ours. You are kidnapping it’” (2010: 181).14 Scriptural metafiction belongs to a vibrant and unexpected conversation taking place in a variety of fields from a variety of positions by thinkers as varied as radical orthodox theologian Milbank and militant atheist theorist Žižek.15 The conversation revolves around a set of key questions: Can we find solutions to contemporary problems beyond the limits of secular reason? How can the legacy of Christianity support a critique of our social order? How might such a critique be developed from a materialist position? Each of the two novelists examined here tackled this challenge in his own way: while Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ overtly juxtaposes God’s capitalist greed with Pastor’s communist ethos, Pullman’s critique of the Church in The Good Man Jesus focuses on the manipulative nature of institutional power. Both authors take the ethical dimension of fiction very seriously, in spite of their irreverence toward religious tradition. The work of these world-famous atheists, in contrast to the “new atheist” fiction by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, or Will Self, invites the reader to reevaluate Christianity’s foundational narratives by seriously engaging with their teachings.16 Bringing a postmodern sensibility to the study of the Christian canon, Pullman and Saramago create multimodal biographies of Jesus that move seamlessly between pastiche, satire, history, ethics, historiography, and metafiction, all for the sake of reflecting on the place of scriptural tradition in the contemporary intellectual and creative landscape. Rarely has impiety appeared so respectable.

2 Other voices: Alternative point-of-view gospels

T

he canonical gospels bear the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many believers consider these four men to be the texts’ authors (and even, in the case of Matthew and John, participants in the narrated events). Modern research has shown that the question of scriptural authorship is much more complicated. Gospel texts originated as oral narratives of Jesus’s life and teachings, told and retold by converts for the purposes of proselytizing and maintaining early Christian communities. The four canonical narratives, most probably written between the mid-60s and mid-90s CE, circulated anonymously long before their authorship was attributed to wellrespected figures from the faith’s earlier age (a common practice of the time, which lent symbolic legitimacy to the texts and the churches that read them). In the course of several centuries, the gospel canon as we know it emerged among a group of related factions whose beliefs went on to become the doctrines of Christendom. (Burton Mack describes these factions as “centrist,” while Bart Ehrman uses the term “proto-orthodox.”) The canon was created by “carefully selecting, collating, and arranging anonymous and pseudonymous writings assigned to figures at the beginning of Christian time” in order to “create the impression of a singular, monolinear history of the Christian church” (Mack 7). What this impression conceals is that the composition of the gospels “was a communal process in which stories were told, polished, changed, and rearranged many times in the course of several generations” (Mack 153).

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We cannot establish the identity of the gospels’ authors—even if we continue, for the sake of clarity and tradition, to use the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—but we can examine the theological and rhetorical goals that shape their narratives. This can be accomplished by looking at the texts themselves and by comparing them with other extant accounts. (The latter approach is central to the post-World War II school of “redaction criticism,” which allows insight into gospel texts by examining how their authors edited and modified their sources—most notably, Matthew and Luke’s use of Mark.) The narratives of the canonical evangelists vary in numerous details, as well as in overall emphasis: Mark portrays his protagonist as the (largely unrecognized) Son of God, whose life fulfills the Jewish scriptures; Matthew highlights Jesus’s Jewishness and Messianic status; Luke stresses the universality of Jesus’s mission; John underscores his divinity and miraculous powers. Each writer selects his materials, tone, emphasis, and even sequence of events to craft a distinctive story addressed to a specific audience. While the tales of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John represent four viewpoints on Jesus’s life, they are chiefly narrated in a third-person voice that suggests trustworthiness and impartiality (a convention borrowed from Greco-Roman biographies). Many modern renditions of the gospels employ the novelistic equivalent of this “objective” mode: the third-person omniscient narration of classical realism, which offers the comfort of familiarity as well as the illusion of historical (and doctrinal) accuracy. In contrast, a large group of contemporary Jesus-novels highlight the subjectivity inherent in all narratives by flaunting the positionality of their narrators (or, in the case of limitedpoint-of-view third-person narratives, their focal characters). Such literary gospels openly manipulate their use of perspective in order to question the neutrality of the canonical account and challenge received versions of Jesus’s life and teaching. One type of alternative point-of-view fiction vindicates biblical villains (Milton’s Satan is as an important precursor). The Bible’s first murderer, Cain, appears as the hero in Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man (1992) and José Saramago’s Cain (2009); fictional versions of Judas—a long-maligned figure rehabilitated by the European Romantics—would by themselves fill a small bookcase.1 Another strategy is to give voice to minor, unexpected, or invented

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characters whose experience illuminates new aspects of the familiar tale. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, examined in the previous chapter, combines two approaches by creating a hybrid protagonist who is simultaneously a literary invention (the twin brother of Jesus) and a canonical villain (Judas). Alternative point-of-view fictions recover suppressed voices and fill in narrative gaps. They defamiliarize canonical stories by shocking the reader out of certainties and revealing hidden dimensions of well-known figures. Finally, they open a polemical dialogue with scriptural source material, demonstrating that even the “greatest story ever told” can be retold in surprising ways.2 The use of defamiliarizing perspectives in gospel fiction is not inherently subversive; it can serve sensational or sentimental ends, as seen in biblical bestsellers such as Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) and Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942). Likewise, an interest in alternative perspectives does not necessarily imply attention to metaquestions (such as authorial manipulation or the historical process of canonization). Nevertheless, a group of recent scriptural metafictions combines all three elements—heterodox points-of-view, iconoclasm, and metafictional awareness—to challenge canonical gospel texts and their traditional interpretations. The feminist fictions of Michèle Roberts and Colm Tóibín counter biblical neglect of women’s voices; Paul Park and Christopher Moore highlight the gospels’ syncretism and comic potential; Nino Ricci and Naomi Alderman mimic the quadruple structure of the canonical story to underscore its inherent heteroglossia. All authors reference the process of scriptural composition to highlight what got left behind when the evangelists put ink to parchment: the perspectives of women, the echoes of other religious and mythological systems, and levity. Their novels not only stretch the boundaries of the canon, but also ask questions about the desirability and legitimacy of canon formation. Like all scriptural metafictions, alternative point-of-view narratives question the idea of a singular truth—either through offering variant accounts that contradict the official biblical narrative, or through juxtaposing multiple versions of events within a single volume. Some narrators witness the process of gospel composition and criticize the evangelists for using Jesus’s life for ideological and political

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ends. Others simply acknowledge the unreliability of texts shaped by the process of oral transmission long before their codification. Whatever their strategies, alternative point-of-view gospels denounce appropriations of Jesus’s story by powerful individuals and institutions—and counter that power with their own irreverently slanted truths.

The gospels of Mary Contemporary critics of established canons—literary and biblical— labor to recover the voices that did not make it into Great Works and Sacred Texts. This project of recovery involves rectifying the androcentric bias of Christian scripture (compounded by two millennia of patriarchal exegesis). Feminist readings of the gospels belong to a surprisingly old tradition of gynocentric biblical study: Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993) outlines a genealogy of female scriptural commentary going as far back as the twelfthcentury writings of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–179). According to Lerner, the earliest proto-feminist biblical exegetes focused on the story of Genesis, especially the relationship between Adam and Eve, and on Pauline pronouncements regarding women’s roles in the Church. During the Enlightenment, female criticism began to consider not only the text of the Bible, but also its historical context, authorship, and translation, introducing “doubts as to the accuracy of the translations of certain words and phrases; doubts as to the intent of the translators and doubts as to the authenticity of certain sources, such as some of the letters of St. Paul” (Lerner 159). In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the great American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, a controversial commentary written by a committee of female authors, mainly anonymous amateurs, who denounced scriptural denigration of women and highlighted positive examples of biblical femininity. In its gospel sections, The Woman’s Bible inquires why Jesus should have an earthly mother and a heavenly father, and not an earthly father and heavenly mother (113); criticizes the concept of virgin birth as offensive to the dignity of motherhood (114); and praises Mary Magdalene as the gospels’ “tenderest and most loving character”

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(144). Female biblical scholarship continued to develop under the influence of twentieth-century feminism, becoming a systematic area of study in the early 1970s, and entering the academic mainstream in the 1980s. An emblematic example of contemporary feminist exegesis is the oeuvre of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, theologian and cofounder of The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.3 Fiorenza describes biblical teachings not only as patriarchal but kyriarchal —based on relationships of domination and submission that extend beyond gender. In her book Wisdom Ways (2001), she articulates three points of consensus within the diverse field of feminist biblical studies: first, “the bible is written in androcentric-kyriocentric language and serves patriarchal or, better, kyriarchal interests”; second, it “came into being in patriarchal/kyriarchal societies, cultures, and religions”; and third, it “is still proclaimed and taught today in patriarchal/kyriarchal societies and religions” (9). In response to these conditions, Fiorenza identifies seven hermeneutical moves that constitute what she calls the “dance” of feminist interpretation: (1) a hermeneutics of experience, recovering the silenced experiences of women; (2) a hermeneutics of domination and social location, reflecting on socially defined categories and relations of domination; (3) a hermeneutics of suspicion, investigating the text’s ideological functions; (4) a hermeneutics of critical evaluation, assessing the rhetoric of texts and their interpretations; (5) a hermeneutics of creative imagination, generating utopian visions; (6) a hermeneutics of re-membering and reconstruction, attempting to recover the struggles of the subordinated and marginalized; and (7) a hermeneutics of transformative action for change, seeking to transform relations of domination legitimized by biblical religions (169–89). Fiorenza sees these various hermeneutics not as discrete methodologies but as complementary and simultaneous movements in an ongoing process of liberation. Most projects of contemporary feminist biblical interpretation, including feminist scriptural metafiction, rely on strategies outlined in her comprehensive schema. Literary engagements with biblical women often begin with a hermeneutics of experience. Entering Fiorenza’s “dance” of interpretation, contemporary fiction affirms the perspectives of female characters maligned throughout Christian history: Eve

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(whose role in the story of the Fall served as a rationale for centuries of patriarchal oppression), Mrs. Noah (a stock figure of ridicule in medieval religious plays), Mary Magdalene (a follower of Jesus recast as a repentant prostitute), and many others, named and unnamed. The feminist challenge to canonical material takes a variety of forms and ideological positions. Some recuperative novels are set in the present age and combine realism with allegory and fantasy.4 Others take the reader back in time to provide an alternative view of biblical events in their original historical context.5 The goals of feminist fictions range from atheist denunciations of religious myths (as in the work of Angela Carter) to pious reflections on Christian womanhood (as in the writings of Mary Ellen Ashcroft), but they all seek to contest the scriptural canon’s gender bias. The figure of Mary Magdalene is especially important to the feminist imagination. She is a composite character that encompasses several women found in the gospels: Mary from Magdala (survivor of demonic possession, follower of Jesus, and the first witness to his resurrection); Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus; the unnamed woman who anoints the feet of Jesus and wipes them with her hair; and the woman caught in adultery whom Jesus saves from stoning. As the object of centuries of patriarchal slander, the Magdalene is the perfect focal character for gynocentric reimaginings of the gospels. In contemporary fiction, she is a powerful female disciple, the beloved confidante of Jesus, and—following the apocryphal tradition—the recipient of his most important teachings. She also provides the gospel story’s love interest, and serves to affirm the importance of sexuality.6 Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984), republished in the United States in 2007 as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, adopts the traditional story of Magdalene as repentant prostitute while affirming her importance as lover and disciple. The novel’s opening echoes the prologue to the gospel of Luke. Like the canonical evangelist, Roberts’s protagonist begins by establishing her authority and credentials: Dearly beloved sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ, here begins the book of the testimony of Mary Magdalene. She who writes it does so at the command of the Saviour himself and of Mary his

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blessed mother, for the greater glory of God and for the edification of the disciples who shall come after her. She wishes you to know that everything she sets down here is the truth, as she experienced it and as she remembers it. She has been, and she is, a witness to that truth. (11) Unlike Luke, who claims to possess “perfect understanding of all things from the very first” (Lk. 1.3), Roberts’s narrator does not seek to create a definitive account of events. She is aware that “truth” is shaped by language and its slippage: “With every mark of ink on the page, I obscure what lies behind it. What my language reveals, it also hides” (162). She also understands the gendered nature of her record: “The truth as I, who am not Simon Peter or John or any of the other male disciples, saw it” (70). Instead of seeking authorial monopoly, Mary allows for the possibility of multiple stories: “Our different truths, collected up and written down in books, are for the use and inspiration of the disciples who come after us. That is my belief and my prayer” (70). This notion of parallel truths meets with resistance from the novel’s male disciples, suspicious of the very idea of female revelation. Roberts draws inspiration from the apocryphal Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which focuses on Mary’s encounter with Jesus following the Resurrection. A key scene in the novel follows the Gnostic source text to illustrate the disciples’ resistance to Mary’s message—and to all female teaching. In the novel, Mary Magdalene sees the resurrected Jesus, who imparts to her a new message: “Those who become restored and resurrected through this baptism, [. . .] shall acquire not only the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit who is Sophia but also the name of the Mother who is earth, matter and soul married and indivisible” (111). This message, as Jeanette King points out, can be found not only in the gospel of Mary, but also in those of Philip and Thomas, “all of which seem to share a belief in the need for male and female to be reunited, and in the unique—and possibly sexual—relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene” (King 106). When Mary communicates her vision to the disciples, Peter immediately responds with a familiar patriarchal snub: “Who ever heard such ridiculous teachings? Mary is raving. She has made them up” (112).7 Roberts modifies the original

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apocryphal scene to enhance her feminist message. While in the Gospel of Mary the disciple Levi chastises Peter for his hot temper and defends Mary by pointing out her special relationship with Jesus, in Wild Girl it is another woman, Jesus’s mother, who speaks up for Magdalene and encourages her to become an evangelist in her own right. Countering Peter’s dismissal of female “raving,” Roberts’s narrative posits dream visions as legitimate sources of spiritual knowledge. Mary’s dreams take on the structure of the Bible, moving from creation to apocalypse, to suggest an alternative mythology that reconciles the masculine with the feminine, and Christianity with ancient goddess worship. Mary’s version of Genesis draws directly from Gnostic belief: “So in the beginning there was light, and there was also darkness, the one sister of the other. This chaos and this shape together made the image of a mighty egg, its shell gleaming in the darkness. Both expressed God: masculine and feminine, darkness and light” (78). The feminine part of God (Sophia) comes forth from the egg and gives birth to a son (the Demiurge), who usurps the role of the only deity: “So Sophia named him Ignorance, because he forgot who made him. And his children became the adversaries of the fullness of God and of the full knowledge of God” (79).8 Like the New Testament, Mary Magdalene’s visions end with a dreamsequence featuring the final judgment and a New Jerusalem. This alternative revelation includes the horror of stakes erected to burn books and female flesh, as well as a trial in which men are called to answer for their sins against women. Mary also experiences a mystical journey that includes an older female guide (Salome) and a sexual union with her beloved. Roberts’s syncretic use of Gnostic, canonical, and pre-Christian sources illustrates a desire to forge a new, women-friendly mythology. As she explains in her author’s note: “I wanted to dissect a myth; I found myself at the same time recreating one” (9).9 Feminist gospel novels commonly reference pre-Christian mythologies, especially the figure of the goddess. The protagonists of Marianne Fredriksson’s According to Mary Magdalene (1997), Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012) and Ki Longfellow’s The Secret Magdalene (2005) all invoke female deities as part of a broadened understanding of spirituality. For Roberts, imaginative fiction opens a chance to

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imagine a new, more inclusive, more spiritually satisfying version of the Christian story. Roberts’s Mary Magdalene, like the novelist who created her, is an author and a mythmaker. She wishes to create a gospel for future generations, so that the words Jesus spoke to her “may not be forgotten” (108). In the course of her labors she attracts a community of followers who honor women’s contributions to the Christian cause and oppose the process of exclusion that took place during the early centuries of Christianity, when orthodox (male) scriptures and the factions that championed them defined themselves against what feminist biblical scholar Rosemary Ruether called “deviant communities and interpretations” (Ruether 14). In the novel, Mary’s “deviant” community challenges this exclusionary process and expands the definition of Jesus’s church. Echoing the story of Resurrection, the Magdalene’s manuscript is buried after its composition, only to be uncovered by “the daughter of the daughter of she who wrote it” (181). This description recalls familiar biblical lineages but questions the legitimizing patriarchal gesture of invoking the names of fathers and sons. Here, no proper names are given, and the matrilineal genealogy emphasizes not individuals, but relationships. The final words of the novel affirm the enduring power of female fellowship: “We have uncovered and copied and passed on what she wrote in her book, as we have passed on by word of mouth the stories and songs that came from her. Pray for us. Amen” (181). The emphasis on “stories and songs” reinforces the ideal of a fluid, informal textual legacy, as opposed to the prescriptive exclusivity of the canonical gospels, whose origins in oral tradition have been suppressed by their ecclesiastical stewards. Like Roberts’s Wild Girl, Marianne Fredriksson’s According to Mary Magdalene (1997) emphasizes the need for female alternatives to the emergent canonical story. In the midst of composing a memoir of her life with Jesus, Mary Magdalene is contacted by Simon Peter and Paul, who wish to add her account to their own scriptures. Mary offers her reminiscences, but denounces the men’s acceptance of traditional laws and beliefs pertaining to women. She reminds them that Jesus had many female followers, and that it was women who stayed with him during the crucifixion. She rejects Paul’s misogynistic letters, and upbraids Peter for instructing wives

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to submit to their husbands. The disciples and Mary discuss Jesus’s teachings at length but her interpretations are ultimately deemed too difficult for the common people. As Barnabas puts it: “People need simple rules and promises they can understand” (143). Addressing this perceived need, the men set down their own version of Jesus’s life and teachings, one that the female disciples—Mary, Salome, Susanna, and Lydia—do not recognize. Salome complains about the “great myth making” taking place in the Christian community, including “the resurrection, the angels at the tomb, the mother who was a virgin” and “a star over Bethlehem” (230). In response to the corruption of their teacher’s message, the women establish a Christian commune dedicated to educating female disciples and preserving their heterodox testaments. The tension between male and female versions of the gospel story is also the subject of Colm Tóibín’s novella The Testament of Mary (2012), a long dramatic monologue by Jesus’s mother, portrayed as living out her final years in Ephesus at the mercy of her son’s followers. The disciples, engaged in writing down their master’s life, need Mary’s eyewitness testimony for their record. They pressure her through small daily humiliations, scowl when her testimony doesn’t meet their expectations, and refuse to share their drafts: “I have asked him to read the words aloud to me but he will not. I know that he has written of things that neither he saw nor I saw. I know that he has also given shape to what I lived through and he witnessed” (3). Mary’s own view of her son’s life is far from orthodox: she believes that he was not divine, but a human seduced by false visions of his own importance, and misled by the young men who surround him. Now that the same young men keep the official record, Mary must play a subtle game of diplomacy, keeping civilized relations with her “protectors” while narrating her version of the story.10 The bleak power of Mary’s testament is most apparent in her account of the crucifixion. What the apostles want from her is a pietà: pure maternal pain at the feet of the cross. What Mary provides instead is a scene of emotional confusion, filled with harrowing, irreverent, detail: They want my description of these hours to be simple, they want to know what words I heard, they want to know about my grief

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only if it comes as the word “grief,” or the word “sorrow.” Even though one of them witnessed what I witnessed, he does not want it registered as confusion, with strange memories of the sky darkening and brightening again, or of other voices shouting down the moans and cries and whimpers, and even the silence that came from the figure on the cross. [. . .] They do not want to know how one of the other crosses keeled over regularly and had to be propped up, nor do they want to know about the man who came and fed rabbits to a savage and indignant bird in a cage too small for its wing-span. (62) Instead of painting a picture of noble suffering, Mary’s unorthodox account dwells on her son’s silence, and the shameful fact that Jesus’s supporters, herself included, fled the scene before death came to the crucified. Choosing absolute honesty over uplifting fabrication, Tóibín’s protagonist makes herself vulnerable by revealing hidden details.11 She is aware of the disciples’ desire to “make connections, weave a pattern, a meaning into things” but her experience resists such structuring: “I know how random it was and uncertain” (68).12 Above all, she rejects the theological motivation of the evangelists, who believe that the scriptures will “change the world” and bring their readers eternal life (77). This emphasis on the gospels’ theological underpinnings reflects the insights of modern redaction criticism, which examines the doctrinal biases of the canonical evangelists. The disciples interpret Mary’s rejection of the Christian salvation narrative as a failure of understanding. But her unbelief is an act of defiance, not ignorance. Rather than embracing Christianity, Mary turns to her Jewish god and the Roman deities worshipped by her neighbors. She even visits the temple of Artemis—the other holy Virgin—in search of a female counterpart to the god of her father, husband, and son. Mary’s narrative is another gesture of rebellion. Although private and ephemeral, her monologue carries a sense of importance: “And I am whispering the words, knowing that words matter, and smiling as I say them to the shadows of the gods of this place who linger in the air to watch me and hear me” (81). Like Roberts and Fredriksson, Tóibín creates a protagonist who, acutely aware of the already ossifying patriarchal canon, seeks out alternative

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sources of spiritual life, and stoically tells her story against the rising tides of history and power.

The silent years The Marys of feminist scriptural metafiction claim an intimate knowledge of Jesus as a son and a lover, inaccessible to even the most ardent of the apostles. Close friends who knew him before the beginning of his ministry enjoy another kind of privileged insight into the hero of the gospels; since the Bible mentions no such companions, novelists had to invent them. Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax (1996) and Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002) narrate the life of Jesus from the point of view of young comrades who illuminate the formation of his character and philosophy. Canonical gospel narratives famously omit the period between Jesus’s early adolescence and his adult ministry, a gap known as “the missing years” or “the silent years.”13 Park and Moore reconstruct this formative period, showing how early experiences and studies (including, crucially, the study of other cultures) shaped the future Christ’s beliefs and teachings. By pointing out the hidden sources of Jesus’s wisdom, Park’s Corax and Moore’s Biff uncover the gospels’ indebtedness to contemporary religious and philosophical traditions to debunk the myth of the Christian scriptures’ absolute singularity. The New Testament’s omission of Jesus’s young adulthood reveals a profound difference between the genres of the gospel and the novel. The authors of the canonical narratives did not consider a complete account of their hero’s life necessary to conveying his salvific message. As Ziolkowski put it, “The Gospels, as any comparison with such classical lives as those by Plutarch reveals, are essentially inspirational discourses that aspire to no biographical accuracy or thoroughness, even by the standards of antiquity” (30). To a novel-reading audience, on the other hand, a life story that does not supply an account of the protagonist’s youth is fundamentally deficient. As Stephen Prickett demonstrates, the rise of the novel changed the relationship between the Bible and its readers by replacing traditional medieval typology, which sought to understand

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the scriptures on multiple levels (typological, anagogical, allegorical, and moral), with a more singular, historical and biographical (i.e., novelistic) understanding of characters and events. Older theological readings failed to “convey the human qualities of the biblical narrative” (Prickett 16)—and human qualities are precisely what a novel-reading public is after. If the life of Jesus is to be read as a bildungsroman, the protagonist’s formative years must be accounted for in order to provide a full understanding of the man and his message. One topos favored by writers interested in reconstructing “the silent years” is the educational journey to India or Egypt (or both), during which Jesus acquires the skills and beliefs that later make him a successful teacher and healer.14 Such Orientalist journeys can be found in a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works that present themselves as recovered apocryphal scriptures: La vie inconnue de Jésus by Nicolas Notovitch (1894), in which Jesus travels to India and Persia; Ernst Edler von Planitz’s “The Letter of Benan” (1911), an account of Jesus’s stay in Egypt where he studies the medical arts; and Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1911), which includes visits to India, Tibet, Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, and Egypt.15 The concept of Jesus’s oriental quest found new popularity in the twentieth-century New Age movement, and was promoted by one of its founding fathers, psychic and “prophet” Edgar Cayce. Recent fictional iterations include Stan I. S. Law’s self-published Yeshûa: A Personal Memoir of the Missing Years of Jesus (2006), a narrative inspired by Cayce that depicts Yeshua and his friend Satya Bihari on a journey to Syria, Persia, India, and Egypt; Dolores Pevehouse’s I, the Christ (2000), a philosophical novel that follows Jesus to Egypt, India, Tibet, and Persia; and Ki Longfellow’s The Secret Magdalene (2005), which introduces a feminist twist by having a woman, Mary Magdalene, obtain an education in Alexandria and then share her knowledge with Jesus.16 The Oriental journey is central to Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax, which imagines the young Jeshua traveling to the foothills of the Himalayas with Suryaprabha (a.k.a. Corax), a runaway Roman slave who provides the narrative’s first-person voice. Corax and Jeshua meet in Caesarea and become road companions. During their journey across Asia, the young men encounter religious myths (virgin birth,

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life after death), moral teachings (radical poverty), and rhetorical strategies (the use of parables, maxims, aphorisms) that the reader recognizes as prominent features of the canonical gospels. Park investigates how Christianity appropriated and absorbed elements of other mythological traditions, and strives to reveal those largely unacknowledged borrowings. Jeshua himself takes a sober, anti-supernatural view of religious narratives. He dismisses the myths of Eden and the Deluge as “stories for children and old women” (171). His ecumenical repudiation includes Zarathustrian prophesies, Buddhist hagiographies, and Jewish messianic promises, all of which share similar hopes for miraculous deliverance: “It’s all the same. God will destroy the wicked. A virgin will give birth. A king will come and he will purge mankind [. . .] You think because they all say it, then it must be true. I think it must be lies for the same reason. Stories to frighten fools, as my mother said” (138). Such tales are not only untrue, but can become tools of manipulation and violence. As Jeshua repeats to his myth-loving friend Corax, “There is no word men put into God’s mouth that is not a dangerous lie” (170). While Jeshua questions the truth claims of religious stories, he acknowledges that myth has a place in the structure of human culture. He articulates a nuanced understanding of the “truth” inherent in mythical narratives using examples from the Jewish scriptures: “They say God spoke out of a bush. They say he built the world in seven days. He made men and women out of dirt and put them in a garden . . . No, these stories have a truth but it is not here” (139). Like twentieth-century narrative and radical theologians, Park’s Jeshua insists that the special truth of myth is of a different, nonpropositional order: “Not so men and women can say, ‘This is so’ or ‘That is so,’ ‘This will come’ or ‘That will come.’ No, that is the mark of a liar” (139). Rather, myths are important because they meet the human need for meaning: “These stories are like copper coins. Worthless, yet they serve the needs of men” (139).17 The central irony of the novel lies in the fact that Jeshua’s pronouncements— both concerning the content, and the interpretation of mythological narratives—can be applied with equal relevancy to the as-yetunwritten story of his own life. Like Park’s Gospel, Christopher Moore’s Lamb reveals the syncretic nature of Christian teachings. Narrated by Jesus’s best friend (Levi,

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a.k.a. Biff), this more lighthearted novel covers similar geographical territory, retracing two boys’ quest to locate the three Magi: Balthazar in his Kabul house of magic, Gaspar in a Nepalese monastery, and Melchior in an ascetic’s cave in India.18 During this journey, Joshua (who goes by the nickname Josh) acquires the basic premises of his future teachings, including the idea of compassion and the notion of the “Divine Spark” (277), which he later rebrands as the “Holy Ghost.” The novel’s narrative frame is set in contemporary times: Biff and his beloved Maggie (Mary Magdalene, whose requited but unconsummated passion for Jesus completes the novel’s love triangle) are resurrected and commissioned to record their memories of Josh’s life (stationed at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis under the supervision of watchful angels). Although we never get a glimpse of Maggie’s gospel, its existence suggests that multiple narratives are required to set the record straight. Moore introduces the novel’s metatextual commentary when Biff finds a copy of the Bible in his hotel room. His first comments concern the English translation of the Hebrew scripture, which he finds “flowery” as well as “muddled” (54). Moving on to the gospel of Matthew, Biff immediately questions the identity and knowledgeability of the author: “This Matthew fellow, who is obviously not the Matthew that we knew, seems to have left out quite a little bit. Like everything from the time Joshua was born to the time he was thirty!!! No wonder the angel brought me back to write this book” (87). Mark’s gospel is even less satisfying: “I thought Matthew was bad, skipping right from Joshua’s birth to his baptism, but Mark doesn’t even bother with the birth. It’s as if Joshua springs forth full grown from the head of Zeus” (161). As an eyewitness to the events, Biff points out that the evangelists were clearly not: “Whoever wrote this Gospel obviously got the information at least secondhand, maybe thirdhand” (135). What is worse, the evangelists’ sources appear deeply suspect: “Where did these guys get these stories? ‘I once met a guy in a bar who knew a guy who’s sister’s best friend was at the baptism of Joshua bar Joseph of Nazareth, and here’s the story as best as he could remember it’” (161). With refreshing humor, Biff reiterates familiar points of modern biblical criticism: the gospel writers were not witnesses to the events they describe; the record is full of holes; the accounts are inconsistent.

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Not only does Biff find the canonical stories inaccurate, he also considers them violent and alienating: “But is this the book from which Joshua’s teachings are drawn? I dream of blood, and suffering, and loneliness so empty that an echo can’t survive, and I wake up screaming, soaked in my own sweat, and even after I’m awake the loneliness remains for a while” (196). In contrast, Biff’s reminiscences of the years shared with Joshua and Maggie are filled with tenderness, laughter, and love (of many kinds). Biff presents love and kindness as the essence of Joshua’s message, summing up his best friend’s teachings in one simple commandment: “You should be nice to people, even creeps” (334). The gospel according to Biff combines a call for more love and compassion with a call for more laughter. The narrative’s unexpected levity makes us aware of the solemn, unsmiling, character of most modern interpretations of the Bible. (One notable exception is Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque reading of Jesus’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.) In his afterword to the 2007 special gift edition of Lamb, Moore argues that contemporary religion desperately needs a better sense of humor—an argument welcomed by many believers despite the author’s fear that he would have to “live in a secret studio apartment somewhere with Salman Rushdie” (416). Following Lamb ’s publication, Moore received numerous fan emails from religious readers (including confessions that “the book has helped deepen their faith”), and was even invited to speak at several churches, notwithstanding his self-declared status as “a not particularly devout Buddhist with Christian tendencies” (417). Moore’s unexpected role as teacher of the faithful demonstrates the close relationship between scriptural and literary narratives. (Novelist Fulton Oursler, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949), enjoyed a similar role half a century earlier). As Moore points out, our ideas about Jesus have always been shaped by other people’s imaginative visions: “We make assumptions based on what we have been fed over the years at Christmas pageants and passion plays, but often, although inspired by faith, that material is little more than what you have just read: the product of someone’s imagination” (407).

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The analogy between scriptural and literary tales took physical form in the gift edition of Lamb, a book bound in dark faux leather with embossed gold lettering, gilded page edges, parchment paper, and a red satin ribbon page marker: in short, a perfect imitation of a family bible.19 Lamb ’s quasi-biblical appearance playfully blurs ontological boundaries between the novel and the scriptural original it imitates and supplements. Moore—like Parker—reminds us that texts, including the gospels, do not exist in isolation, but are always in conversation with one another. There is no singular, authoritative, original story, only productive retellings, reproductions, and (mis)representations.

Quadruple truths A curious aspect of the Christian canon is that it affirms not one, but four true gospels. Readers who see the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as parts of a single absolute truth seek to organize this narrative surplus into a unified master-story. Contemporary scriptural metafiction manifests an opposite desire: to amplify the heteroglossia of the original text. Mimicking the quadruple structure of the canonical gospels, Nino Ricci’s Testament (2003) and Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel (2012) offer four parallel versions of Christianity’s origin narrative, focusing on the diverse perspectives of the stories’ central players. Like many recent alternative point-ofview fictions, Testament and The Liars’ Gospel feature sections told from the position of Judas and the two Marys (the Magdalene and the mother). Even more interesting than each individual narration is their juxtaposition, which reveals irreconcilable differences of focus and interpretation, demonstrating that there is no such thing as an objective story of Jesus’s life. For two millennia, readers of the gospel canon attempted to explain, and contain, its astonishing heterogeneity. The desire to prove that all four canonical stories are ultimately part of a single, divinely sanctioned, narrative finds its most important expression in the genre of the harmony. Going back to the second-century Diatessaron of Tatian, harmonizers construct cohesive accounts that incorporate all of the canonical texts, either in the form of a continuous narrative, or,

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starting in the sixteenth century, a four-column table. The harmony flourished in the early modern period, but its popularity continued into the twentieth century and beyond. As Warren Kissinger notes, “The British Museum General Catalog of Printed Books (1937) contains forty-four pages of harmonies, or about 660 entries” and “The National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints contains thirty-one pages of harmonies in English” (xii). Even noncanonical gospels have been fashioned into a harmony by R. Joseph Hoffmann, historian of early Christianity and author of The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions (1996). In 2014, America’s top book retailer, Amazon.com, continues to offer a considerable selection of gospel harmonies, many published after the year 2000. While some authors seek to unify the stories of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, others foreground the gospels’ diversity by telling Jesus’s story through multiple narrators. Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene (1939) includes the perspectives of a Roman, a Jew, and a Christian. Roger Elwood’s The Road to Masada (1994) brings together the points of view of Pontius Pilatus, Procula (Pilatus’s wife), Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and several Roman legionaries. Mary Ellen Ashcroft’s The Magdalene Gospel (1995) is narrated in the words of Jesus’s female followers. A diversity of perspectives does not always create narrative tension: Asch, Elwood, and Aschcroft are careful to orchestrate their characters’ voices into a pleasing polyphony. In contrast, Nino Ricci’s Testament and Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel introduce multiple perspectives without seeking a unified account or a harmonious chorus. Instead, they deliberately refract the story through multiple lenses, and draw attention to the effects of this multiplicity. Ricci’s Testament includes four accounts of Jesus’s life: one by Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas), one by Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), one by Miryam the mother and one by a fictional character, Simon of Gergesa. The stories of the four narrators focus on each author’s individual relationship with Yeshua (Jesus). Yihuda subjects Yeshua’s message to logical scrutiny and laments the love of supernatural narratives common among the apostles and other disciples. His account represents a rationalist interpretation of the gospel story. Miryam of Migdal relays her tale with unwavering faith and adoration; hers is a pietist narrative shot through with love. Miryam, the

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mother, contrasts her son’s message of love and compassion with his unfeeling treatment of his family. Her tale provides an emotional counterpoint to Yihuda’s intellectual polemic. For his part, Simon of Gergesa echoes Yihuda’s rationalism and articulates the novel’s metafictional reflections. In his segment of the novel, Simon considers how accounts of Jesus’s miracles entered public discourse and evolved into a mythology. He points out the human tendency for exaggeration: “For every little thing he did when he was alive some story gets put in its place, and if he’d lanced somebody’s boil it turned out he’d saved a whole town, and if there were fifty in a place who’d followed him, now it was five hundred” (453). Most importantly, Simon denies the resurrection: “Eventually it got told that he’d risen from the dead and walked out of the place, and there were people enough to come along then to say they’d met him on the road afterwards looking as fit as you or me” (453). The passive voice (“eventually it got told,” “some story gets put into place”) points to the collective nature of narrative formation, and the elusiveness of authorship and authority. The novel’s emphasis on the oral origins of scriptural stories reflects the insights of “form criticism” (Formgeschichte ), a twentiethcentury school of biblical studies that held that the evangelists were primarily not authors but editors of oral material. Simon’s attention to the distortions inherent in narrative transmission indicates the unreliability of even eyewitness accounts, while his skepticism provides a final commentary on the preceding four narratives (including his own). 20 In Testament ’s final segment, Simon articulates the subversive message of the novel: “However things get remembered, you can be certain it won’t be how they actually were, since one man will change a bit of this to suit his fancy, and one a bit of that, and another will spice it to make a better story of it” (454). Over time, these processes of redaction, elaboration, and accretion will lead to a complete fictionalization of Jesus’s life: “And by and by the truth of the thing will get clouded, and he’ll be simply a yarn you tell to your children” (454). By reducing the status of the gospels to a “yarn,” Ricci’s fourth narrator implies that the biography of Jesus is already becoming a story among other stories, one node within a network of narratives. In giving Simon the last word, Nino Ricci signals agreement with his skeptical narrator,

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and implicates his own novelistic version of the tale in this ongoing process of creative storytelling. Ricci’s novel was inspired by the Jesus Seminar, an interdisciplinary twentieth-century project dedicated to uncovering the authentic teachings of Jesus.21 In an essay titled “On Writing Testament” published on his website, Ricci discusses the role of the Jesus Seminar in helping him move from a view of the gospels as “impenetrable, God-delivered arcana” to “patchwork texts written by real people in a real time and place, and showing ample evidence of their human composition—in their divergent, often contradictory points of view; in their many gaps and anachronisms and evidences of editorial tinkering” (www.ninoricci.com). Ricci’s novelistic reconstruction shines light on the “real people in a real time and place” who witnessed, told, and retold the story of Jesus Christ. His Testament reveals, rather than conceals, the chorus of human voices behind the canonical reports. Naomi Alderman’s fictional gospel resembles Ricci’s in its quadruple structure and choice of narrators. Like Ricci, Naomi gives us Miryam, mother of Jesus, and Iehuda (Judas); these two accounts of the life and death of Yehoshuah (Jesus) constitute the first half of The Liars’ Gospel (2012). The second half of the novel takes a surprising turn: section three, focusing on the high priest Caiphas, and four, told from the perspective of Bar-Avo (Barabbas), deal with the politics of the Roman occupation of Israel, with Jesus appearing only briefly on the margins of larger geopolitical concerns (echoing Anatole France’s famous 1902 story, “The Procurator of Judaea,” in which a retired Pilate cannot recall the famous prisoner he had sentenced years ago). By zooming out to a point where the personal story of Jesus goes out of focus, Alderman privileges the historical context of gospel events, and censures the Christian appropriation of this Jewish narrative.22 The Liar’s Gospel is a carefully researched historical novel, aiming, as the author writes on her website, to explore the life of Jesus “through the truth about his times” (www.naomialderman.com). This “truth” includes the historical, social, and political circumstances of Jesus’s life, especially the Jewish community in which he worked. While the story’s historical background (“his times”) meets the realist standards of accuracy and objectivism, the life story of the gospels’

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hero is another matter. As the novel’s title suggests, Alderman’s starting point is skepticism: “A man Yehoshuah travelled from place to place, predicting the end of days. But the different recollections of him cannot all be true: someone, perhaps many people, must have lied” (www.naomialderman.com). An objective point of view, let alone a divine one, is impossible. Rather than striving for the effect of omniscience, Alderman embraces partiality—even mendacity—as the ground condition of storytelling. As she put it in her epilogue: “Every story has an author, some teller of lies. Do not imagine that a storyteller is unaware of the effect of every word she chooses. Do not suppose for a moment that an impartial observer exists” (300). The novel’s eyewitnesses, especially Miryam and Iehuda, are precisely such “tellers of lies,” deliberately shaping their accounts to meet the needs of their audiences, as well as their own. Even though Yehoshuah’s mother resists the role of storyteller, she produces a body of stories whose influence extends far beyond her own lifetime. At the beginning of the novel, one of Yehoshuah’s followers begs Miryam for tales of her “blessed son” (24). The bereaved mother is reluctant to comply. Her view of her son’s life is shockingly unsentimental: “There are no stories. He was a baby and then he was a child and then he was a man and then he was killed. That is the story” (24).23 When Miryam finally relents and offers a few personal anecdotes, she does so in a voice that has “the singsong quality of a child’s storyteller” (72), signaling to the reader that the tales (birds singing to her pregnant womb, a blessing from a mysterious stranger) are not to be taken at face value. Reflecting on her fabrications, Yehoshuah’s mother articulates the novel’s central philosophical concern: She thinks of how all the stories she has ever heard must have come to be. There are only three ways: either they were true, or someone was mistaken, or someone lied. She knows the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway. Not in fear, and not in anger, and not even in hope of anything that is to come, but because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it. Even such a simple, foolish thing as this. It brings her son back here, for a moment, back to her side and his small head under her hand and his life again unfolding. It is too good a gift to turn down, this opportunity to return him to life. (72–3)

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Through the act of storytelling, the mother grants her son a kind of resurrection—the only kind she can believe in. When she finally parts with Yehoshuah’s follower, he carries her comforting narratives out into the world: “She has filled him full of stories. Some have a measure of truth to them . . . some are things she hoped had happened, she wished had happened” (74). Miryam understands that the fictional legacy of tales, created for private comfort, will now be disseminated “in Jerusalem and across the nation” (75), and make its way into the official story of her son’s life. While Yehoshuah’s mother spins stories to meet her own emotional needs, his friend and follower Iehuda witnesses and participates in more public acts of fabrication. Iehuda takes us behind the scenes of several canonical gospel episodes to reveal the apostles’ tendency toward embellishment and outright mendacity. When Yehoshuah sends out his most trusted followers to perform miracles in his name, they all return telling stories of triumph. Iehuda, too, reports success (even though he had failed to heal a crippled boy) and strongly suspects that the others were similarly unwilling to admit their failures. In another scene, three of the apostles come back from the mountains claiming to have heard God’s voice and seen Moses and Elijah in a dream. Once again, Iehuda doubts the reliability of the witnesses. Nonetheless, their story soon takes on a life of its own: “He heard in the camp that the three men had been taken up in a fiery chariot to the heavens, where the good Lord had spoken to them and told them Yehoshuah was His promised one” (121–2). The “miracle” quickly becomes a commodity: a man sells “white pebbles which he said had been taken from the holy place where they ascended to heaven,” while women sew these pebbles “into the hem of their clothes to keep off the evil eye” (122). Crude superstition follows unreliable accounts of supernatural events. The irony of Alderman’s narrative lies in the fact that the miracles and visions reported by the apostles (and questioned by Iehuda) appear as unquestionable facts in the canonical gospels.24 After Yehoshuah’s death, Iehuda finds employment as a storyteller in the house of a wealthy gentile, Calidorus. The former apostle’s role is to entertain his benefactor’s dinner guests—and the tale of the hapless messiah becomes a popular favorite. Although pained by this act of narrative betrayal, Iehuda delivers the expected comedy:

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“So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of [the] tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule” (90). Fictionalized, the disciple and his master become parodies of themselves, confirming the anti-Semitic prejudices of the amused audience: “In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah—his friend, the man he loved best in all the world—becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule” (90). Iehuda’s narrative illustrates Alderman’s definition of storytelling as an act of manipulation. As the novelist writes in her epilogue: “Storytellers know that every story is at least partly a lie. Every story could be told in four different ways, or forty or four thousand” (299). Untruth is inherent in the act of narrative-making because “every emphasis and omission is a kind of lie, shaping a moment to make a point” (299). As a result, all writers—and all evangelists—are liars, manipulating their narratives to suit their own needs, and those of their audiences.25 Alternative point-of-view scriptural metafictions develop their ideological polemics by making visible the act of writing. They feature scribes or authors, often in the role of authorial-narrators; they can even adopt the outward appearance of a bible volume. By drawing attention to the affinities between fiction and scripture, metafictional gospels claim the right to produce novel, unorthodox interpretations of the gospel message. Latter-day novelistic evangels privilege modern sensibilities: plurality over singularity, naturalism over the supernatural, humor over seriousness, heterodoxy over orthodoxy, feminism over patriarchy. Roberts’s Wild Girl and Tóibín’s Testament of Mary offer female alternatives to the male-authored salvation narrative. Moore’s Lamb and Parker’s Gospel of Corax illuminate the syncretism and comic potential of Jesus’s teachings. Ricci’s Testament and Alderman’s Liars’ Gospel amplify the canon’s heterogeneity. All novels insist on their right—even moral duty—to modernize the familiar Christian story by retelling it in new, or newly audible, voices. The importance of preserving and cultivating heterodox versions of sacred narratives is perhaps best articulated in Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners, a slim classic of feminist biblical rewriting.

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Winterson imagines a cunning Noah who writes his tale with the help of Bunny Mix, a celebrity romance novelist and inventor of such familiar symbols as the olive branch bearing dove and God’s conciliatory rainbow. Bunny and Noah’s account will become the official version of events unless it can be countered by an intrepid group of girlfriends who decide to brave the deluge in their canoes. The female rebels are goaded on by a demon who explains the danger of giving Noah a monopoly on the story: Unlike the rest of you, I’m not bound by the vagaries of this plot. I can move backwards and forwards and I can tell you that God will flood the world, Noah will float away and unless you lot do your best to stay alive there won’t be anyone left to spread the word about what really happened. It doesn’t even matter if you forget what really happened; if you need to, invent something else. The vital thing is to have an alternative so that people will realize that there’s no such thing as a true story. History and literature down the centuries are depending on you. Are you willing to let that baldie and his mad family rewrite the world without any interruptions? (123–4) Since Noah’s tale is a fiction in the first place, producing counterfictions is an appropriate response to his bid for exclusivity. Scriptural metafictions fulfill precisely such a function, proposing imaginative alternatives that force us to look anew at the biblical story and its telling.

3 Other realities: Science fictional and metamorphic gospels

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ontemporary gospel fiction overwhelmingly follows the conventions of realism—a familiar, thoroughly naturalized mode of modern storytelling that promises not to distract the reader from the pursuit of spiritual edification or the pleasure of reliving beloved scripture stories. Paradoxically, while indebted to the classical realist method, mainstream biblical fiction features supernaturalist ontologies that violate realism’s commitment to scientific positivism. Novelists elide this conundrum by ignoring the ontological complexity of religious scriptures (in what sense are the worlds they represent “real”?) and by subsuming them under the rubric of historical truth.1 Even the scriptural metafictions discussed in the previous chapters of my study rely largely (or wholly) on the aesthetics of realism— although their meta-awareness creates a fissure (or, in the case of Saramago’s Gospel, a rupture) in the surface of the mimetic edifice. This chapter introduces novels that shatter the ontological solidity of realism, either by creating nonrealist worlds (with the help of science-fictional devices), or by questioning the possibility of stable representation (with the help of twentieth-century reader-response and poststructuralist theories). Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1969) and Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992) use the science fiction convention of time-travel

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to destabilize the universes inhabited by their protagonists and, ultimately, their protagonists’ very identities. James P. Carse’s The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (1997) and A. J. Langguth’s Jesus Christs (1968) question the traditional relationship between words and worlds by emphasizing the slippage of language and the importance of audiences in constructing the meanings of texts. Distrustful of the idea that narratives—including Holy Scripture—reliably reflect an equally reliable external reality, Moorcock’s Behold the Man, Vidal’s Live from Golgotha, Carse’s Gospel, and Langguth’s Jesus Christs demonstrate the possibilities (satirical, psychological, philosophical, even theological) of postmodern nonrealist biblical fiction. In his 1987 study Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale offered the now familiar insight that postmodernist art priveleges questions of ontology. McHale argued that in contrast to modernism’s epistemological focus, more recent novels tend to ask questions concerning the fictional worlds they invent: What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated? What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects? (10) Such inquiries inform the innovative gospels of Moorcock, Vidal, Carse, and Langguth, which not only participate in the contemporary interrogation of narrative ontology but, more specifically, apply postmodernist insights and strategies to religious narratives. By destabilizing their own fictional worlds, nonrealist scriptural metafictions foreground and amplify the gospels’ complicated ontological status.

Time-traveling saviors Like religious mythologies, science fiction engages with humanity’s ultimate questions in narrative form. Its depictions of scientific progress probe the limits of human intervention into the order of

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nature (“playing God”); its humanoid doubles (clones, replicants, Cylons) beg the question of the soul; its interstellar travels open the possibility of trans-human perspectives on the universe. Sci-fi novels and films serve as modern repositories of archetypal figures and plot patterns. They feature supernatural powers, superhuman beings (frequently modeled on mythical deities), alternative realities, and interworld crossings.2 The genre’s philosophical inclination and ontological flexibility make it especially hospitable to experiments with religion. Its fluid formal boundaries and capacity for imaginative play have allowed writers as different as Zenna Henderson and Philip K. Dick to create fictional worlds that actualize their idiosyncratic spiritualities.3 The practice of borrowing characters and plot elements from religious scriptures goes back to the beginning of the genre: Jules Verne’s novella “L’Eternel Adam” (1910) depicts the first man of Genesis as the last survivor of a destroyed civilization; H. G. Wells’s The Undying Fire (1919) is modeled on the Book of Job. A programmatic engagement with scriptural tradition shapes the work of Orson Scott Card, whose novels, especially his five-volume Homecoming Saga (1992–5), use narrative patterns, names, and stylistic devices drawn from the Book of Mormon. A more subversive relationship with religious writings informs the oeuvre of James Morrow, whose fictions—especially Only Begotten Daughter (1990) and Bible Stories for Adults (1996)—offer playfully irreverent updates of biblical tales. Countless others have employed biblical motifs in pursuit of metaphysical depth, moral interest, or shock value. Science fiction’s flexible chronotopes grant writers a unique level of creative freedom, liberating them from the constraints of realist space and time. Authors who work with mythical material find this flexibility particularly useful. The popular topos of interplanetary travel introduces super-Earthly perspectives that help defamiliarize familiar scriptural tales. Lee Correy’s Starship through Space (1954) retells the Tower of Babel narrative from the point of view of humans living on Alpha Centauri. The protagonists of Ray Bradbury’s “The Man” (1949) and Philip José Farmer’s Jesus on Mars (1979) encounter savior-figures while visiting other planets. George R. R. Martin’s “The Way of Cross and Dragon” (1979) combines space travel with metafictional reflection: the protagonist, an interstellar inquisitor,

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discovers that all scriptures have been authored by a secret sect called the Liars, whose work aims to soften the unbearable truth about humanity’s entropic existence. Science fiction’s other key topos, time travel, offers even more exciting possibilities for gospel fiction: it grants fictional characters eyewitness access to firstcentury events. For example, a time-traveler attempts to save Jesus from death on the cross in Arthur Porges’s “The Rescuer” (1962), while future time-tourists travel to the scene of the crucifixion in Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (1969) and Garry Kilworth’s “Let’s Go to Golgotha!” (1975). Michael Moorcock’s novella Behold the Man employs the paradox of time travel to explore the relationship between historical reality, religious myth, and human psychology. Moorcock’s protagonist, Karl Glogauer, a neurotic “psychiatrist manqué” (22), finds himself torn between the atheist rationalism of his girlfriend, Monica, and his own thirst for spirituality. A reluctant agnostic, Karl dabbles in Celtic mysticism, Mithraism, the occult (he runs a bookshop dealing in esoteric writings), and the philosophy of Carl Jung, whom Monica dismisses as a “muddled old fool” (60). In spite of his girlfriend’s relentless mockery, the protagonist cannot let go of his fascination with religion. Given the opportunity to testride a time machine, he decides to go back to the days of Jesus, secretly hoping to confirm the truth about the biblical stories he had known since childhood. Arrived in the first century, the protagonist travels to Nazareth only to discover a mentally ill, drooling Jesus cooped up in the home of his unhappy parents. The shock of the discovery prompts the most important decision of Glogauer’s life: to take on the role of the Christian Messiah and thus save the future of Christianity. From this moment on, his life roughly follows the familiar script of the gospels, which he does his best to recreate. He “prophesizes” future events, such as the death of John the Baptist; “heals” a series of psychosomatic illnesses (interventions immediately interpreted as miracles); and preaches sermons and parables based on his memory of New Testament readings. He even experiences a hallucinatory temptation in the wilderness, with the voice of Monica cast in the role of Satan. Ignoring his former lover’s atheistic taunts, Karl embraces his unlikely mission as savior—not of souls but of a scripture.

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The protagonist’s regard for sacred narratives comes across in debates with his girlfriend, as he repeatedly makes the point that religious stories emerge in response to deep human needs: “The idea preceded the actuality of Christ” (50). While Monica dismisses Glogauer’s love of myths as additional proof of his psychological immaturity, he defends myth-making as fundamental to the human experience. Against Monica’s affirmation of an exclusively physical, scientifically verifiable universe, Karl offers the Jungian belief that “the myth can also create the reality” (60), and laments the modern disregard for the life-giving power of sacred stories: “We’re destroying the myths that make the world go round” (60). By assuming the identity of Christ, Karl becomes the embodiment of his convictions; he gives up the “actuality” of his life to uphold the “idea” of the gospels. In Theodore Ziolkowski’s terms, Behold the Man is an (extreme) example of a fictional imitatio Christi —a type of narrative in which a contemporary protagonist emulates the life of Jesus. Indeed, Moorcock inserts Jung’s reflection on the “imitation of Christ” from Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) directly into the novel: “It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would . . . be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified” (61). While Karl Glogauer appears perfectly Christlike—he sacrifices himself for others; he incarnates a divine ideal; he is the word made flesh of John the Evangelist’s prologue—it is unclear whether the protagonist achieves the Jungian goal of a life lived “as truly as Christ lived his.” During his torture by Roman soldiers, Karl experiences a “feeling of satisfaction” (121) that can be interpreted as masochistic pleasure rather than spiritual ecstasy. Given Karl’s history of quasi-sexual incidents involving the religious icon of the cross (childhood games of mock crucifixion; fondling under a crucifix by a pedophile priest; carnal stirrings inspired by silver cross suspended between a girl’s breasts; a life-long fetish for religious jewelry), his willingness to be executed as Jesus may be seen as part of an elaborate psychosexual game. Moorcock’s strategic juxtaposition of psychological and religious discourses perverts the conventional idea of imitatio Christi to illuminate the ways in which religion shapes identity, sexuality, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment.4

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The outcome of the protagonist’s sacrifice remains uncertain. At the finale, Karl begs to be let down from the cross, and dies whispering, “It’s a lie—it’s a lie—it’s a lie” (124). His words echo the despondence of Jesus’s last cry as reported by Mark (and cited by Moorcock): “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (123). The meaning of Karl’s final statement is ambivalent: Is he abjuring his commitment to the sacred story or simply living it out to its bitter end? The novel’s unflinching last paragraph makes it clear that (as in most scriptural metafictions) there will be no redemptive resurrection: “Later, after his body was stolen by the servants of some doctors who believed it might have special properties, there were rumours that he had not died. But the corpse was already rotting in the doctors’ dissecting-rooms and would soon be destroyed” (124). Nevertheless, despite the hero’s impure motivation and unresurrected flesh, the “rumours” of his rising live on, giving birth to the triumphant narrative of Christian salvation. Just like it merges the characters of Karl and Jesus, Moorcock’s novella meshes fictional and scriptural discourses through strategic uses of biblical language. Bible citations appear as epigraphs preceding chapters or sections, and gradually become integral to the main narrative itself. Chapter 2, for example, opens with Matthew’s description of John the Baptist—a character who makes an appearance several pages later. Biblical passages are also used to signal the narrative’s central themes: Chapter 4 begins with the famous prologue to the Gospel of John, in which the evangelist affirms the divine Word (Logos) made incarnate in the person of Jesus. The prologue’s conclusion, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” is repeated twice in the novel (50, 93) pointing to Karl’s unorthodox act of embodiment. As the novel progresses, Moorcock punctuates the narrative with biblical citations without signaling transitions between his text and that of the evangelists (Luke in the Nazareth scenes, Matthew in the Wilderness episode). This counterpoint method erases the boundary between the words of the novel and the gospel, just as Karl gradually assumes the identity of Jesus Christ. While Moorcock employs time travel to examine the relevance of religious myths to the contemporary mind, Gore Vidal takes the science fictional device to its logical extreme in order to destabilize, and, finally, annihilate, all notions of identity and reality. The central premise of Vidal’s Live from Golgotha is that the archival “tapes” containing early

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Christian history (most importantly the canonical gospels) are in the process of being erased by a mysterious Hacker. The novel’s narratorprotagonist, first-century bishop and saint Timothy (Tim), tries to create a new authoritative record and thus save the religion he had dedicated his life to developing. While working on his scripture, Tim gets involved in a twentieth-century media race to produce, with the help of timetravel technology, a live television broadcast of the crucifixion. Soon, the paradoxes begin to pile up, producing a tangled, outrageous narrative in which “truth” is irretrievably lost—or, rather, revealed to never have existed in the first place. To match the scandalousness of the plot, Vidal gives his narrator a queer persona and an ironic voice that undercuts both the seriousness of Tim’s ecclesiastical office and the authority of his account. Readers familiar with postmodernist aesthetics will immediately recognize a number of Vidal’s strategies: the subversive rewriting of canonical texts; the self-conscious relationship with history; an exaggerated, carnivalesque sense of humor; and, most importantly, ontological experimentation. Vidal upends his fictional world using the tools of science fiction, including video projections, and holograms (as well as low-tech dreams and visions), all of which add up to a world of liminalities and surfaces in which the “real” referent is lost altogether. Throughout the narrative, Vidal juxtaposes fictional and historical characters—a practice McHale refers to as an “ontological scandal” (85)—and mocks naive faith in the stability of representation by imagining the Holy Scripture as a set of erasable (and hackable) recordings. Vidal, like other authors of scriptural metafiction, takes up the thorny questions of authorship and reliability. His narrator-protagonist is shown frequently finishing epistles on behalf of the dyslexic, distracted Saint Paul. Tim also reveals that canonical gospel authors have edited out a number of doctrinal and ethnic conflicts within the early Christian community, including tensions between Gentile and Jewish branches of the Church, debates about the divinity of Jesus, and the problem of competing contemporary messiahs.5 Tim’s own “Gospel According to Myself” (12) is likewise far from innocent. As the narrator confesses, his priorities as evangelist haven’t always been beyond reproach: “In looking over what I’ve written about the mission of Saint Paul I find I have left out many important parts of

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the Message in favor of maybe too much colorful details about our lives as people pre-sainthood” (55). Like all evangelists—canonical or noncanonical—Timothy is not a conduit for absolute truth but a writer who shapes and manipulates his composition. Vidal further undermines scriptural authority through a series of science-fictional plot elements. One is the erasure of archival gospel tapes—a choice of medium already quaint in today’s digital world— that highlights scriptural documents’ vulnerability to corruption and obsolescence. Another is time travel. Twentieth-century visitors confront the protagonist with alternative versions of St. Paul’s epistles that include anachronistic references to the Saint’s “activities with Mossad” and his anti-Christian plots in modern Jerusalem (44). These new scriptures, authenticated by modern computer analysis—“always correct, with a four percent margin of error” (44)—destabilize the novel’s already problematic account of early Christian history. Visitors from the future also interfere with Tim’s gospel. The narrator complains that “every time one of them pays me a call, I begin to write odd things that I am certain I do not remember or if I do remember would never have written down” (167). His writing becomes infected with foreign phrases: “Now I must return to the Gospel According to Saint Timothy as told to . . . why did I just write ‘as told to’ when I am telling or, rather, writing the story as I recall it?” (23). He goes as far as bungling the name of his divine subject: “I am now convinced that my gospel, to be dug up in the year 1995 or thereabouts, will be the only account by then of the true message and mission of Chester W. Claypoole—I mean Jesus Christ” (130). This comical slippage demonstrates that neither the gospel writer nor his text is impervious to external influence. Tim soon realizes that even his memory is being altered by the insidious time travelers. He worries that a diary written by his friend Priscilla is not a real document but a suggestion planted in his mind by the twentieth-century scientist Dr. Cutler: “As I contemplate her diary, I have the sense that it never existed. I had never heard of it until the first Dr. Cutler told me about it. Now, as I write of the past, the diary appears for the first time in my memory. My memory—thanks to Dr. Cutler’s suggestion?—has been somehow altered. Or was the diary always a part of the past and I had forgotten all about it” (87). Tim’s mentor, Paul, warns him about memory manipulation using a

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vocabulary that combines traditional religious concepts and modern media: “Memory is easily tampered with not only by the Prince of this World and other demons but by a constant exposure to CNN on television. You are being subtly altered every moment, and as you change, so do I, to the extent that you have invented me” (174). This mise en abîme erases any possibility of stable signification, as the scriptural record alters its recorder, who, in turn, is being altered by forces beyond his control or understanding. As the novel progresses, Vidal takes the idea of transtemporal tampering to ridiculous extremes. Gradually, even the physical texture of first-century “reality” becomes corrupted: Timothy’s pulpit mosaic transforms from a depiction of Jonah and the whale to a portrait of Helen Schucman (a twentieth-century clinical psychologist who claimed to have heard the voice of Jesus); quotations from Schucman’s 1975 book A Course in Miracles crop up in Mark’s gospel, and so on. When the evangelist Mark worries that he might exist solely as Tim’s recollection (“I don’t exist when you leave this room?”), Tim replies frankly, “Afraid not” (152). Material, historical, and psychological realities in Live from Golgotha are reduced to a textualized, context-free, depthless collage: a textbook illustration of Frederick Jameson’s late capitalist order. Vidal’s mash-up of first- and twentieth-century realities allows him to combine his exposé of Christianity’s origins with an extended satire on contemporary culture informed by the theoretical insights of Jameson as well as Guy Debord (1994) and Jean Baudrillard (1983)— thinkers interested in capitalism’s dependence on the processes of reproduction and representation. The novel’s first words, “In the beginning was the nightmare,” reference the opening of John’s gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), replacing the stability of John’s Logos with the indeterminacy of a (bad) dream. This Derridean devaluation sets the tone for the rest of the novel, alerting the reader to the impossibility of establishing a firm foundation for meaning— religious or otherwise. The opening scene goes on to play with the concept of reality and its simulacra: In the beginning there was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.

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I am Timothy, son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek. I am fifteen. I am in the kitchen of my family’s home in Lystra. I am lying stark naked on a wooden table. I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor. (3) Tim is referencing the nightmarish experience of his circumcision (as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, 16.3), and also, literally, the recurring nightmare he continues to experience years after the original mutilation. The blurred boundary between the dream and the traumatic event itself provides a perfect introduction to Vidal’s fictional method of ontological uncertainty. Vidal’s interest in the question of appearances and “reality” is most obviously apparent in the titular live broadcast of the crucifixion at the novel’s climax.6 The show’s supposed authenticity and immediacy are revealed to be the product of extensive mediation, including the use of prerecording, Emmy-worthy editing, spectacular special effects, a staged resurrection, and artful references to Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. The manipulation of the crucifixion footage is not, however, a simple case of the simulacrum replacing the “real.” In the course of preparing the broadcast, the producers discover that the original first-century crucifixion involved not Jesus (who had escaped at the last minute with the help of time-travel technology and now hides in the twentieth century as computer genius Marvin Wasserstein) but Judas. Indeed, it was the hapless—and obese—disciple, not his lean master, that Saint Paul (who never met Jesus in person) saw in his Damascus vision: “Wide as He was tall, Jesus waddled toward me. [. . .] Those luminous eyes hidden somewhere in all that golden fat” (32). An overweight savior figure creates an “image problem” for the production team (204). The historically “true” event is unacceptable from a public relations point of view, since a “slender, bearded, ladylike Jesus has been universally popular for over a millennium” (204), and violating audience expectations in this regard might create serious political problems for the Church. Tim’s final task is to make sure that the “real” Jesus returns to the first century (and the cross) to perform the historically accepted and consumer-ready script.

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By the time the crucifixion broadcast goes live (under the sponsorship of the Japanese media lobby for which, it is revealed, many of the novel’s main players have been working all along), the script has been altered yet again.7 At the climax of the televised Golgotha event, Jesus is taken from the cross by the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, while a voiceover announces: “Thus, as foreseen, and foretold by John the Baptist, Jesus returns to his ancestress, the Goddess of the Sun, the ultimate divinity, Amaterasu. Banzai!” (224). The novel closes with a scrambled excerpt from the “Gospel According to Mark,” followed by a new “Gospel According to Timothy,” which replaces the biblical God with a female Japanese deity—“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of the goddess Amaterasu” (227)—and continues with a Japanese translation of the opening passages of Vida’s own novel. The final page is adorned with “the new logo for Christianity: the cross within the circle of the sun” (225). The novel’s finale dramatizes Baudrillard’s claim that the simulacrum obscures not an underlying reality, but rather its absence. As Baudrillard famously argued in “The Precession of Simulacra”: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (4). Baudrillard’s essay examines the implications of this ontological shift for Western metaphysics, emphasizing Christianity’s traditional dependence on representation: “All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this exchange—God, of course” (10). Once the reality of the ultimate guarantor is undermined, the economy of representation implodes: But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging

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for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. (10–11) The age of simulacra effects a collapse of temporality: “There is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance” (12). Or, as Vidal’s Hacker puts it: “We only know what has come down to us. There may or may not have been an actual Mark [. . .] Or Saint Paul. Or, indeed, Jesus Christ. All we know is what has been written down and remembered but if, through a control of the tapes, we can determine what was written down as of then, then that is the only reality now” (100). In a shocking coup de grâce, the mystery Hacker turns out to be Jesus himself, his erasure project driven by disgust with the Christian story.8 Given the absence of divine Truth, “truth” becomes a pliable, and valuable, commodity. The novel’s synecdoche for consumer media culture (and Vidal’s primary satirical target) are the corporations vying for Golgotha broadcasting rights: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Sony, GE, and Gulf+Eastern. Tim quickly notices that the corporations’ hologram emissaries, whom he calls his “creepy visitors” (33), are driven by the profit motive alone: I am convinced that every last one of them [. . .] is out to secure, on the most favorable terms possible, commercial franchises to our product, which means getting in on the ground floor of this definitely upmarket growth-oriented religion we’ve been constructing on the absolutely true word of the One God in the three sections, each suitable for worship in part or as a whole and absolutely guaranteed (or your money back) to dress up any residence or soul tastefully. (33) As the novel’s temporal frames collapse into one another, contemporary market vocabulary increasingly infiltrates the firstcentury story, demonstrating the absorption of traditional religious narratives by the pervasive logic of capitalism. Tim calls Saint Paul a “marketing genius” (55); Jesus is reinvented as “the first lowinterest-rate monetarist that the Jews had produced since Jesus’s

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ancestor King David, also an easy-money freak” (119); Tim’s gospel receives praise as a highly publishable product: “The revelations about your private life with Paul will humanize the entire story, and give aid and comfort to a generation decimated by AIDS and, of course, nuclear war” (67). The latter appeal to contemporary consumer tastes compounds the novel’s transtemporal antics; it also serves as a metacommentary on the readers of Live from Golgotha, sucking them (us) into the narrative’s ontological vortex. While Vidal’s satirizes market logic, his novel’s complicity with the mechanisms it exposes blunts the edge of his criticism. This paradox is typical of postmodernist satire, as Linda Hutcheon points out in her Politics of Postmodernism: “As a form of ironic representation, parody is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies. This kind of authorized transgression is what makes it a ready vehicle for the political contradictions of postmodernism at large” (1989: 101).9 The “Gospel According to Gore Vidal” enacts the same paradoxical dynamic: it ridicules the shallow spectacle of media-based consumer capitalism while playing its own (for-profit) game of projections and simulations.

Texts under erasure While Moorcock and Vidal experiment with scriptural ontologies for the purposes of psychological analysis and political satire, A. J. Langguth’s Jesus Christs (1968) and James C. Carse’s The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (1997) invite the reader to reconsider traditional religious texts in the context of a decentered, postmetaphysical universe. Langguth and Carse’s novels reflect on the instability of language, insisting that scriptural texts change with each act of reading and interpretation. This metamorphic model, rooted in modern theories from reader-response criticism to poststructuralism, brings to focus the linguistic construction of meaning by individuals and communities.10 In his nonfictional writings, especially The Religious Case Against Belief (2008), Carse argues that the process of codifying religious texts closes off semantic circulation. Carse divides scriptural reading into “literal” and “religious.” The first approach assumes that sacred

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texts, whose meaning is set once and for all, simply “offer up truth and falsehood”; the second suggests that scriptures “urge readers and listeners to an active inquiry into what is true and what is false” (189). This “active inquiry” takes place through the act of interpretation: scriptural documents “must be interpreted. That is, they do not come to life until there is a living response to them” (189). Carse insists on semantic indeterminacy and interpretability as necessary for the continuing vitality of sacred texts. The goal of the interpreter is not to find out what scriptures are “really saying” but “to succeed in taking our place in the discursive contexts surrounding them” (191). Religious writings themselves encourage this approach. According to Carse, their silences and aporias are not a weakness but a source of power: “The potency of a sacred text—the very thing that makes it a sacred text—is the dynamic it creates between the printed word and the white spaces surrounding it, or between the spoken word and the silences that follow. This is why they are texts that demand interpretation” (199). This demand is especially obvious in the case of the Bible, an anthology “full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages” (200). Unfazed by the irrepressible heteroglossia of the Christian scriptures, Carse embraces their “glorious confusion” and “inexhaustible vitality” (118), and celebrates their endless exegetic potential. In the author’s view, all great religions in their “purest forms” are “thoroughly poetic” (104), and their scriptural records should be read and interpreted as such. Carse’s poetics of religion comes to life in his The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. The novel opens with a group of Jesus’s followers preparing to compose the first gospel: “The time has come when we must make a careful record of what happened, a gospel, a history of what he did and said among us. How else will those who never knew him understand? ” (xiii). Having consulted all the surviving male apostles, the evangelists come at last to Jesus’s favorite, an unnamed Samaritan woman (the titular beloved disciple): “Your memory is the most precious of them all. You knew him before the rest of us. He talked with you as with no other ” (xiii). To the men’s surprise, the Samaritan condemns, rather than aids, their undertaking.

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While the evangelists hope for a final, authoritative gospel, the beloved disciple rejects such an ambition, pointing out the impossibility of containing the full meaning of Jesus’s teaching on a scroll. The male disciples, however, insist on proceeding. Joram the scribe is especially anxious to avoid the danger of endlessly proliferating meanings: “If I can’t write a final word,” Joram protested, “There can’t be a gospel.” The old woman took hold of the scroll; it fell open. “There is too much to say to end it here,” she said to the scribe. “But then there will be no conclusion to our writing and speaking with each other about these events,” Joram replied. “There will always be more to say.” “That more,” she said, “that is the gospel.” (xv) The Samaritan tries to explain that the meaning of Jesus’s teachings is not a given; it must be constructed and developed by each of his followers. As Carse argues in The Religious Case Against Belief, “No one is granted the talent or privilege to state it exactly as it is. As a result, we remain necessarily ignorant of the ‘true’ text” (117). The opening scene ends with the beloved disciple throwing the scroll to the wind at the Sea of Galilee in an eloquent nonverbal protest against the closure of meaning. The narrative that follows offers an alternative account (the titular “Gospel of the Beloved Disciple”) that welcomes aporias and instability. Like the canonical gospels, Carse emphasizes Jesus’s use of parables and stories rather than exposition and reasoned argument. Most of these narrative lessons do not originate with their charismatic teller. Prior to his ministry, Jesus listens to tales from rabbis, prophets, miracle workers, and Pharisees, as well as wanderers, beggars, and acquaintances: “Many were the stories he heard in the years of his wandering. Having little to say for himself, he listened in silence to the long accounts of misfortune others were ready to share” (21). Growing out of years of attentive listening, Jesus’s own teaching is a collage of received knowledge rather than the product of a single brilliant (or divine) mind. The novel repeatedly emphasizes the gospels’ indebtedness to oral tradition. As a scholar of religion and literature, Carse is

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particularly interested in religion’s linguistic expression, or what he calls its “exuberant orality ” (2008: 154), whose forms include confessions, testimonies, blessings, prophesies, chants, edicts, laws, fatwas, sermons, recitations, promises, commandments, and summons. “Religion,” Carse argues, “comes to us on an oceanic flood of remarkably multiform linguistic phenomena” (2008: 156). While recorded scriptures constitute an important part of this textual repertoire, the act of inscription reduces, as well as preserving, the richness of oral tradition from which it springs.11 Carse’s Jesus readily acknowledges his debt. Far from claiming a position of authority, he admits that he is being authored by the discourses that surround him: “Stories? The stories come from . . . I don’t know where. And many I don’t understand myself” (46). His beloved disciple confirms that the power of narratives surpasses that of their teller: “Then the stories will be the teacher” (46). This exchange shatters the illusion of individual authorial control. It also calls attention to the inescapable dependence of all storytellers on the linguistic and narrative repertoires of what Stanley Fish calls interpretive communities (1980). The stories appropriated by Jesus will, in turn, be appropriated by others, flowing back into the living reservoir owned by everyone and no one. Carse foregrounds not only the interdependence of narratives, but also their inherent polysemy. As Jesus repeatedly emphasizes, all texts are living constructs, open to interpretation and reinvention. During a debate about the Torah, one of the participants posits God as a divine guarantor of scriptural meaning: “But each word was given Moshe by God. Does it not then have the meaning God gave it?” (92). To this, Jesus responds by arguing that “each word has a meaning not even God could comprehend” (92). No transcendental signified, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s term, can ground or arrest the living chain of signification. Even the god who gives us words, as Jesus remarks on another occasion, “can only be surprised by what we do with them” (63). Although his listeners are troubled by the idea of divergent readings of the Torah, and unwilling to give up the possibility of exegetical consensus (“Are you saying agreement is not possible?”), Jesus confirms his commitment to interpretive indeterminacy: “Whenever we agree on the meaning of torah [. . .] that agreement takes the place of torah” (63).

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Carse’s protagonist applies the same principles to his own teachings. When his followers worry that they might be misrepresenting his message (“How will we know that what we heard is what you have said?”), Jesus asserts: “What is heard is far more important than what is said” (86). This lesson is understood by only two of Jesus’s disciples: the beloved Samaritan and Levi. The beloved compares her master’s words to laughter and dance— dynamic metaphors that counter the idea of fixed, static meaning (48). She understands that the life of her master’s narratives depends on continuous recirculation; once codified and canonized, they will ossify. This is why she resists the gospel-writing project and sabotages the efforts of the male disciples. Levi, in turn, corrects the other disciples’ misconceptions regarding Jesus’s narrativebased teaching style. When Judas expresses exasperation with the master’s tales (“He only gave the meaning of one child’s story by telling another”), Levi replies: “Why should there be but one meaning?” (100). Similarly, when Nathaniel worries that the noise of a gathering storm might have muffled Jesus’s words (“The people haven’t heard what he says”), Levi responds: “If that troubles you [. . .] then you haven’t heard what he says” (108). Like the novel itself, Levi and the Samaritan resist all forms of textual fetishism. Jesus’s teachings cannot be fixed, only temporarily activated in the minds of listeners. This valorizing of active audience participation draws on the insights of theoreticians such as Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss, who reject the concept of the text as a static object, insisting instead on the processes of reception and interpretation as integral to the production of textual meaning. The contemporary novelist can play a vital role in this ongoing reinvention of the gospels. As Carse explains in his preface, “We must of course abandon the claim that we can reach back to the ‘real’ Jesus. That was never possible, even for the earliest evangelists. We must do as they did: let the unique and terrible experience of our own century reflect itself in our writing about another” (ix). In this view, the task of the creative writer closely parallels that of the original evangelists: “Each wrote a gospel grounded in the time of Jesus and their own time. Why should we do less?” (ix). Carse is the first to admit that his version of Jesus is only one of many possible interpretations. As he insists in The Religious Case Against Belief,

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all authors who approach the figure of Jesus do so in the dark: “As time passes, as research and speculation continue, so does our ignorance. Because it is impossible to think that the invention of new Jesuses will cease, or that someone will at last have the definitive concluding word, the sphere of this ignorance is bound to expand” (131). The role of the novelist is not to seek an authoritative “truth,” but to construct an idiosyncratic, singular vision. While Carse’s The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple insists on accepting multiple interpretations of Jesus, A. J. Langguth’s Jesus Christs takes the concept of plurality even further by introducing multiple Jesuses. The premise of the novel is that Jesus returns to Earth many times in many forms: an executioner, a prisoner, a schoolboy, an old man, a beggar, a rich man, and so on. Langguth foregoes a continuous plot in favor of a series of disjointed scenes brought together by associative, rather than linear, logic. Jesus Christs is a literary supernova: the original gospel story explodes into a myriad new fragments, each endowed with its own generative powers. Langguth’s centrifugal narrative is held together by a series of recurring themes, including the theme of creative writing. In some scenes, the four evangelists appear in the role of contemporary authors. Luke is working on a script for a Hollywood Western: “He says they’re the new morality plays” (33). Matthew aspires to record the story of Jesus and his disciples, but is discouraged by a friend who claims that “all of us are too normal to make an interesting book” and that “there’s nothing in our suffering to create sympathy in the reader” (17). This leveling of the gospel author with the modern writer allows Langguth to create an implicit continuity between the evangelists’ narratives and his own. Even Jesus is found indulging in a free-writing session, which yields shockingly violent material: “I would spare no one. I would cut away their rancid sex and the fingers they have used to play those dripping tubes and holes. I would skim open the tops of their heads, trail my fingers through the soups of their brains and throw down the lid again, as workmen cover an open sewer” (79). The ostensible purpose of the exercise is to understand the minds of “some men” who “feel that way” (79), but Jesus has to admit that he finds the composition process strangely exciting.

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In addition to invoking the writerly labors of gospel characters, the novel references the text of the Bible itself as a work in progress. Some of the novel’s most memorable episodes involve either revising familiar biblical parables or devising new ones. John, for example, takes issue with the way Jesus defended an adulterous woman by telling the crowd that he who is without sin should cast the first stone: “I suppose he said something like that. He’s said so much. But I never liked that phrase either. I can’t see why a man should search himself for the license to condemn others. Jesus should have told that man to search others for a reason to forgive himself” (33). The amendment is dismissed by James: “Not only are you rewriting, you’re ruining the style” (33). More often than not, the apostles’ editorial attempts end in defeat. In one section, Jesus lives in a cabin, befriending squirrels and woodchucks, until he meets a horrible end while trying to tame a bear: “His coaxing and affection brought him a slashing blow across one cheek and then, when he turned his head to forgive, the other. The wounds proved fatal” (68). The story resists assimilation into an edifying moral scheme: Luke, the evangelist “labored four or five days before deciding it could not be developed into an instructive parable” (68). Another segment shows Luke failing to provide a modern update of the prodigal son narrative. In one new version, the son “preferred to starve to death rather than humiliate himself by seeking his father’s pardon” (170); in another, he “tried to return home but found that his family had moved to a destination unknown to the neighbors” (171). At the end of the sequence Jesus tears up Luke’s revisions. Such moments of failure highlight the contingencies of the composition process, countering the religious myth of textual infallibility. By introducing a cross-section of biblical references at varying stages of development, Langguth suggests that the scriptural text is simultaneously complete and incomplete, both a historical document and an open narrative available for ongoing reinterpretation. The novelist satirizes exegetical attempts to find the “real” meaning of scriptures, and resists closure by allowing the enigmatic scenes to stand without explanation. The novel’s most sustained metareflection on scriptural texts appears in an episode written in the first-person voice of John the Evangelist. This section amounts to a complete new gospel that

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presents one of Jesus’s incarnations in the form of an official report. The report begins with John’s complaint about the invasive editorial alternations of his previous account: As I have done faithfully since the requirement was first imposed, I now submit this report on the episode recently concluded. My enthusiasm for the task is lessened somewhat by the heavy editing my last report underwent. I am aware that the need for popular acceptance makes some changes essential, but I continue to believe that an accurate recounting of our efforts serves our cause better than the gilding and gelding to which my previous account was subjected. Its subsequent success with the public in no way changes my opinion. (39) Although upset with the changes made to his gospel, John praises the unnamed editors for composing the famous opening: “Certainly the literary competence of the introduction, far beyond my most ambitious efforts, exempts it from further criticism” (40). The report moves on to narrate Jesus’s latest life, rendered in the form of a “mere outline” (54) due to the confiscation of John’s original notes. This act of censorship was likely provoked by the fact that Jesus failed to follow the prescribed script, rejecting improvements to the original story (such as being nicer to his mother), and refusing to be crucified. Trying to salvage the situation, Peter dies on the cross instead, leaving behind a note that explains the absence of a Resurrection: “Urgent business in his father’s kingdom, however, compelled his immediate return and, to his great sorrow, he was forced to postpone indefinitely his reunion with us” (66). The bureaucratic language of Peter’s note (and John’s report) draws attention (yet again) to the institutional contingencies of textual transmission, illustrating the importance of genre in shaping audience expectations. Like Moorcock and Vidal, Carse and Langguth take to task the grand narratives of Christian tradition. Their fictional gospels ask what Christian scriptures might mean to a contemporary audience that has absorbed the lessons of contemporary psychology and postmodernist theory. In reworking John’s concept of the Logos made flesh, Moorcock emphasizes the primacy of ideas over reality; the circular, Borgesian logic of his narrative affords no comforting

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ground or Arche. Vidal replaces Logos with a nightmarish simulacrum. Carse and Langguth insist that the sacred word is best approached through creative deconstruction: against the labors of canon-builders and editors of authoritative editions, their fictions affirm the gospel stories’ endless metamorphoses and endless resurrections. All four authors apply twentieth-century theory to the textual legacy of Christianity, imagining the possibility of sacred writing without stable concepts of language, representation, or self.

4 Inquisitive scholars: Philological and archaeological gospels

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ecent interest in alternative gospel retellings has been fueled by the spectacular modern resurrection of long-lost heterodox Christian writings. Before the 1880s, most apocryphal scriptures were known by name only, and from the polemics of detractors. Then, a series of discoveries, archaeological and archival, brought to light volumes of ancient apocrypha, including a series of noncanonical gospels. By the second half of the twentieth century, when the bulk of the newly found scriptures had been translated and made accessible to the reading public, these “heretical” texts entered mainstream culture, revolutionizing the field of biblical studies as well as the modern literary imagination. Especially significant was the 1945 discovery of thirteen bound codices at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The codices contained several Gnostic gospels, most notably the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. Other influential apocryphal texts include the Gospel of Mary (found in the last decade of the nineteenth century and made available to the general public in the mid-twentieth) and the Gospel of Judas (found in 1978 and published as recently as 2006). The diversity of newly found apocryphal writings has revealed the textual and doctrinal diversity of early Christianity. Just as it became easy to imagine alternative versions of the canonical story, it became impossible to ignore the

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processes of canonization and exclusion that divided the body of ancient Christian writings.1 Contemporary novelists who take up the life story of Jesus have at their disposal a whole new library of gospels, sayings, dialogues, and fragments. To an unprecedented degree, these writers are conscious of the historical vicissitudes that brought us one set of scriptural texts rather than another. As a result, their novels often portray scriptures not as divine records but as historical documents, linguistic constructs, and material objects. Some authors go even further: rather than focusing on the Christ story itself, they shine a spotlight on the scholars (archaeologists, forensic scientists, linguists, philologists, and historians) who find, authenticate, translate, edit, and contextualize sacred texts. These mediating characters remind us that, contrary to the conviction of some believers, religious scriptures do not descend from heaven perfectly formed and conveniently rendered in the language of the reader: rather, they are products of translation, compilation, and transmission, all performed by fallible humans with ideological commitments and political agendas. One subcategory of scriptural metafiction, which I will call philological fiction, foregrounds the importance of scholarly research to the formation and understanding of sacred narratives. Its heroes are learned polyglots who seek to discover the truth about biblical events through meticulous archival study or field research. They might be near-contemporaries of Jesus, as in the case of Robert Graves’s King Jesus (1946) and Henryk Panas’s Gospel of Judas (1973); or they can be modern scholars, as in Gerd Theissen’s Shadow of the Galilean (1987). Another type of novel, which I will call archaeological fiction, examines the process of finding a lost ancient scripture, usually in a politically contentious region, followed by the struggle to translate and disseminate it, often in face of violent opposition. Michel Faber’s The Fire Gospel (2008) is a representative example of this formula. Other noteworthy examples include Peter Van Greenaway’s The Judas Gospel (1972), Morley Callaghan’s A Time for Judas (1984), Wilton Barnhardt’s Gospel: A Novel (1993), Simon Mawer’s Gospel of Judas (2000), and Tucker Malarkey’s Resurrection (2006). Gabriel Meyer’s experimental novel The Gospel of Joseph (1994), discussed at the end of this chapter, merges both fictional types into an ambitious, intertextual web of documents—ancient and contemporary—that

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irrevocably change the lives of the scholars who find, translate, edit, and interpret them. The proliferation of modern philological and archaeological fictions has been influenced not only by the recent discoveries of apocryphal manuscripts but also by the para-literary phenomenon Edgar J. Goodspeed called modern apocrypha —fictional texts that present themselves as recovered ancient scriptures. The long list of these fabrications includes complete gospels (e.g., the composite Gospel of Josephus written on antiqued manuscript flyleaves and “discovered” in 1927) as well as supplementary documents (such as Rev. W. D. Mahan’s “Archko Volume,” and The Confession of Pontius Pilate (1893), purportedly translated by one Beshara Shehadi). Some texts, like La Vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ (The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ ) by Nicolas Notovitch (1894) were subject to considerable controversy at the time of their publication. Others, such as Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1908) remain cult classics to this day. The modern apocrypha genre flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helping shape the novelistic imagination. As Jennifer Stevens points out: The contribution of these “alternative” records of the life of Jesus in the development of New Testament fiction was by no means insignificant. Some of them circulated for several decades, helping to keep alive theories and conjectures long since dismissed by the academic community. In this respect they set up a kind of counter-culture, which swam against the tide of both modern theological thought and traditional Christianity, and which would serve as a catalyst to some of the most significant imaginative reconfigurations of the Scriptures published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. (72) While the fashion for modern apocrypha petered out a century ago, later examples occasionally made an appearance. One example is The Talmud of Immanuel, supposedly written by Judas and “found” in 1963 by Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier and his friend Isa Rashid. Modern apocrypha occupy a liminal zone between fictionalization and forgery. Its authors typically make an effort to explain how they

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obtained and transcribed the documents in question, trying, often with considerable success, to persuade readers of their creations’ antiquity. A survey of the genre reveals a pervasive anxiety to legitimize the origins of the fictional scriptures: Notovitch’s Unknown Life claims to be based on an ancient Pali manuscript read to the author by a Tibetan lama. Mahan’s Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court offers an exhaustive explanation of the document’s modern journey, a story that includes a Vatican official, a German scholar, and an American translator. Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel announces itself as a translation of an eternal holy scripture revealed to the author in a mystical vision. By trying to pass themselves as recovered religious documents, modern apocrypha uphold the traditional distinction between fiction and scripture. In contrast, scriptural metafictions, while clearly marked as “fiction” on publisher’s lists, dust jackets, and bookstore shelves, experiment with the boundary between truth and fabrication. Rather than pretending to be ancient scriptures, such narratives suggest that ancient scriptures may be, on some level, fictional constructs much like the modern novel. By enacting the epistemological drama of archival research and field discovery, philological and archaeological novels demonstrate that the distinction between fact and fiction is never as clear-cut as some would imagine, that all narratives are artificial, and by implication, that the novel itself can claim a legitimate place in the long history of biblical storytelling.

Inquisitive scholars The learned narrators of philological fiction repeat the historical “quest” for the life of Jesus—with a twist. Their scholarly credentials promise thoroughness, impartiality, and rationality. Nevertheless, the fruits of their labors remain imperfect. Graves’s narrator Agabus expresses confidence in his reconstruction, but his constant references to the inaccuracies and errors of others ironically undermine the reader’s trust in his own work. Panas’s narrator-protagonist Onias admits that his particular version of the truth lacks the power to become the official Truth about Jesus’s mission. Theissen’s modern biblical expert (a fictionalized version

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of the author, “Gerd Theissen”) provides insights into the processes of biblical research and interpretation, emphasizing the inevitable positionality of all storytellers, as well as the dependence of historical accounts on narrative devices more commonly associated with the work of fiction. All three learned narrators defamiliarize the familiar canonical account, laying bare its formal strategies and ideological commitments. Robert Graves’s unorthodox and highly controversial King Jesus (1946) can be seen as a precursor of scriptural metafiction: while it openly voices doubts as to the veracity of the official gospel record and foregrounds the process of scholarly reconstruction, it confidently offers its own fictionalized version of events as the best approximation of historical truth. Writing in 89–93 CE, Grave’s narrator, the Greek scholar Agabus the Decapolitan, sets out to trace the life story of the founding father of the “Chrestians.” Agabus is an erudite man with no delusions regarding the historical authority of religious scriptures. In his introduction, he repeatedly points out the problem of unreliable sources, referencing the “mass of petty contradictions in the official account of the life and teachings of Jesus which resulted from the fusion of rival traditions” (11). In Agabus’s view, even the ancient Hebrew scriptures have been “tampered with by priestly editors,” as well as “incorrectly dated and credited to authors who could not possibly have written them” and “so corrupted in the course of time, partly by accident and partly by editing, that even the shrewdest scholars cannot hope to unravel all the tangles and restore the original text” (15–16). Agabus, like German Enlightenment scholars, is especially distrustful of the scriptures’ mythical components. For example, he insists that the birth story of Jesus “must not be read as literally true,” but rather, like Orphic drama, understood through Aristotle’s category of the “philosophically true” (15). Not surprisingly, the gospel according to Agabus differs wildly from the canonical story, featuring a secret marriage between Mary and Herod Antipater (son of Herod the Great) that both strips Jesus of his supernatural status and makes him the legitimate legal heir to the royal Jewish throne. Knowing this version of events will shock the orthodox, Agabus (like his creator, Graves) defends his reconstruction, comparing himself to “an expert in Greek sculpture or pottery” who “can usually restore the lost details of a damaged

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work of art” (15). While minor questions and inaccuracies remain, the narrative as a whole approximates the truth: My own problem of reconstruction is very much more difficult, because history, not myth, is in question. Yet the history of Jesus from his Nativity onwards keeps so close to what may be regarded as a pre-ordained mythical pattern, that I have in many instances been able to presume events which I afterwards proved by historical research have taken place, and this has encouraged me to hope that where my account cannot be substantiated it is not altogether without truth. (15) The narrator is aware of the impossibility of perfect accuracy, but he also retains a historian’s faith in the correctness of his account.2 Agabus’s commitment to the idea of a knowable truth provides a bridge between the nineteenth-century “quest of the historical Jesus” and the crisis of that project apparent in late twentiethcentury historiographic fictions. Published nearly three decades after Graves’s novel, Henryk Panas’s Gospel of Judas (1973) assumes a more skeptical epistemological stance. The scholarly narrator is none other than Judas himself—or, rather, the learned Jew Onias who adopts the infamous name when joining the apostles. His motivation for becoming a disciple of Jesus is twofold: he loves Mary Magdalene, and he wants to overthrow the ruling high priest and return the office to his own kin. In writing his account, Onias/Judas draws on personal experiences as well as an extensive (and costly) library of sources that contain “practically everything that has ever been written about Jesus” (71–2). Assessing his sources, the narrator distinguishes between “well-founded speculation” and “factual material,” with the caveat that “the latter itself may be called into question as being based on fairly circumstantial evidence (to use a legal phrase), but at least it cannot be discarded as pure fabrication” (71). Onias’s own version of the facts is far from orthodox; like Agabus, he rejects the resurrection and other supernatural events, believing that Jesus “performed his miracles without infringing natural laws” (96). He also questions the logic of mainstream gospel stories—for example, the infamous kiss in the garden of Gethsemane. Onias’s

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reasoning goes as follows: If Jesus had entered Jerusalem in triumph only days ago, and proceeded to cause a scene at the temple in front of gathered crowds, did he really need to be identified by his “betrayer”? Or, considering the matter from a more political angle, “Is there any place on earth where the police do not have a complete description of every popular demagogue?” (134). Finally, Onias places Jesus’s work in historical context, describing other wandering rabbis and alleged miracle-makers active at the time of his teacher’s ministry. Onias dismisses popular stories of Jesus’s life as hagiographies created after the Jewish War by Christians who “adapted their recollections to suit their own dreams and the needs of the cult” (73). One example of such adaptation is the invention of the Nativity story to match prophesies concerning the Messiah’s descent from house of David, even though Jesus saw himself as “solely and exclusively a missionary” (74) and never made messianic claims for himself. Another example is the proliferation of miracles: “The incredible stories which his hagiographers are writing down today are purely the products of their fertile imaginations, while the number of miracles is growing at a terrific rate, for every scribe adds something new” (96). Judas is especially critical of the evangelist Matthew, whom he describes as a dilettante attempting (with miserable results) to draw on ancient heroic traditions: “Since he lacked training in the Scriptures as well as a knowledge of history, what emerged was such a heap of absurdities that no subsequent narrator repeated his nonsense, each preferring instead his own fabrications, which were not much better, by the way” (75). In contrast to the mythologizing accounts of the evangelists, Onias/ Judas sees Jesus as a mortal man of great wisdom, and claims to have been chosen by his teacher to carry on his legacy. Judas tries to fulfill this mission by establishing a congregation of “men of intellect” (254), but the group is soon called “the Cainites” and dismissed by the other disciples. The novel’s triple epigraph cites references to the Cainites made by Church fathers between the second and fifth centuries: Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, Theodoret’s A Compendium of Heretical Tales and Epiphanius’s Panarion. All three mention the Gnostic faction as disseminators of the “Gospel of Judas” and as believers that Judas was the chosen disciple who “accomplished the

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mystery of the betrayal (7).” While the Cainite heresy affirms Judas’s special role, it also confirms the canonical narrative of salvation. Panas’s protagonist, in contrast, rejects supernatural explanations of Jesus’s death. He is nevertheless forced to witness their triumph over his own rationalist message: “Unfortunately, truth—to the extent that anything is true—is no driving force. In any case, my truth was not such force” (254).3 Onias/Judas recognizes that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that history preserves only the most powerful among competing stories. While the scholarly narrators of Graves and Panas compose their accounts of Jesus’s life before the establishment of the four canonical gospels, Gerd Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (1987) illustrates the reconstructive work of a twentieth-century biblical scholar. Theissen’s subtitle (Historische Jesusforschung in erzählender Form in the original German) references Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Geschichte der LebenJesu-Forschung ), announcing the novelists’ traditional historicist ambitions. The novel’s most innovative aspect is its metafictional layer. Each chapter is followed by a letter to a fictional colleague, Dr. Kratzinger, that explains Theissen’s authorial choices in light of current biblical research. The first letter, in lieu of a foreword, introduces the novel’s meta-apparatus: “The narrative has been constructed in such a way as to show not only the results of that research but also how it is carried on (1).” Subsequent letters provide historical background, glosses on the use of sources (including Josephus and Tacitus), a brief bibliography of academic literature, and explanations of the narrative strategies employed in the main narrative. In keeping with its quasiacademic character, the volume also includes scholarly footnotes and an appendix listing important historical sources on Jesus.4 The first-century portion of the novel is told in the voice of Andreas, a rich Jewish merchant charged by Pilate with spying on Jesus and his followers. As explained in one of the novel’s metaletters, the protagonist’s field mission provides an analogy for the process of historical discovery: Andreas is a “‘researcher’ following the traces of Jesus—very like someone engaged in historical-critical research ” (83). Andreas also serves as an example of the historian’s inevitable

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positionality. His narrative, far from authoritative or even complete, reflects the subjective nature of all historical accounts: “All history is experienced and shaped by human beings from a limited perspective. To put it another way. There is no such thing as history per se; only history perceived from a perspective” (27). Parallels between historical writing and fictional writing abound throughout the volume. The authorial letters explain to the skeptical Dr. Kratzinger how fictionalization can serve history-making. For example, imaginary conversations between Andreas and Pilate are not a frivolous literary supplement but a useful way of encapsulating Roman-Jewish power struggles: “the subject matter of history is not only individual events but also typical conflicts and structures” (19). Taking liberties with chronology can be appropriate when employed in the service of “narrative exegesis ” (19). Openended dialogue accurately reflects the processes of history-making because it “matches the actual process of scholarly research. For what is historical scholarship, if not an ongoing conversation about the past in which no one has the last word ” (55). Theissen’s metacommentary concerns the composition of modern historical fiction (including his own) as much as the composition of the original source material. Theissen’s historiographical understanding does not discourage him from attempting the “quest of the historical Jesus.” He acknowledges that his sources “come from fallible human beings ” and are thus “incapable of communicating historical truth without falsification” (66). He is also aware that documents concerning the life of Jesus tend to be “tendentious and one-sided,” often more interested in conveying a “religious message than historical information” (66). Nevertheless, he also believes that humans are “equally incapable of reshaping the sources in such a way that historical truth gets completely lost ” (66), giving hope to the historian’s efforts. Like Agabus and Onias before him, Theissen’s fictional counterpart expresses skepticism about the accuracy of historical reconstructions but also affirms their value. The resulting biography of Jesus is not an absolute or even an objective truth dressed in fictional form but a singular, situated narrative, whose fictionality reflects the way all stories remake—and make sense of—the past.

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Intrepid discoverers While the scholarly narrators of philological fiction embark on adventures of the mind and the archive, archaeological novels imagine a different order of adventurers: men and women (not necessarily archaeologists by profession) who travel to a foreign country where they discover, or are entrusted with, a lost ancient manuscript. As a consequence, they find themselves at the center of religious and political conflicts that not only transform but also threaten to destroy their lives. The novels typically include the full text of the newly found scripture, whose unorthodox take on the life of Jesus defamiliarizes and reconfigures the canonical story. Michel Faber’s Fire Gospel (2008) follows this fictional scenario. Faber’s protagonist, Theo, a linguist from the Toronto Institute of Classical Studies, finds nine ancient papyrus scrolls during a professional visit to a looted museum in postwar Mosul, Iraq. In an act of symbolic birth, the scrolls fall out of the cracked belly of a pregnant bas-relief goddess in the wake of an explosion that kills every witness besides Theo. Dismissing ethical doubts concerning the appropriation of the scrolls, the protagonist smuggles his find back to Canada where he translates it into English, attempting to “strike a balance between the no-nonsense directness of the original Aramaic and the sort of weird Elizabethan-Hebrew hybrid that people are used to from the King James” (64). After publishing his translations, the protagonist faces a series of violent responses including vitriolic reviews, an assassination attempt, and a kidnapping from which he barely escapes with his life (while several innocent bystanders lose theirs). The reason for the controversy? A “new” gospel authored by Malchus, a scribe, translator, and follower of Jesus, undermines the official New Testament account with an unorthodox and unpalatable account of the crucifixion. Faber’s novel, like Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was published in the Canongate Myths series, which offers modern reinterpretations of traditional myths. The Fire Gospel references both the Christian gospel narrative and the Greek myth of Prometheus, the latter represented by Theo’s struggle to bring humankind his incendiary gift. When the protagonist is kidnapped

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and bound to a chair by his captors, he compares his plight to that of the mythical hero: “He could hardly have been more uncomfortable if he’d been chained to a rock” (151). When trying to lunge forward to free himself, he envisions himself as “Prometheus unbound” (155). Most importantly, Theo aspires to enlighten humankind and precipitate its spiritual evolution by breaking its addiction to religion. He hopes that Malchus’s gospel will “blow away two thousand years of mumbo-jumbo and light the flame of reason,” leading “millions of spiritual cripples” to “throw away their crutches and take responsibility for themselves” (177–8). The similarities between Theo, Prometheus, and Jesus—all sacrificial figures brutally punished for their ideals—serve to shorten the distance between the allied categories of “religion,” “myth,” and “fiction.” Like the canonical stories it references and transforms, the novel sees itself as a legitimate player in the ongoing game of mythmaking. Faber’s novel introduces its metafictional interests in the epigraph, which cites the Book of Revelation’s solemn injunction against editorial interventions (“For I testify unto every man that bareth the words of the prophesy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book”), followed by a lengthy attribution that emphasizes the historical and linguistic pathways through which John’s words reach the modern English-language reader: John, aka Iohannes, ‘of Patmos,’ i.e. of unknown origin but resident on Patmos at time of writing, circa 95 or 96 AD, or possibly 68 or 69 AD, or possibly some other time, from an unnamed document later known as The Apocalypse, aka Revelation, reprinted in The Bible (1611), translated purportedly by Thomas Ravis, George Abbot, Richard Eedes, Giles Tomson, Sir Henry Savile, John Peryn, Ralph Ravens and John Harmar, but substantially based on The Bible (1526) translated by William Tyndale [uncredited]. This pedantic exposition, especially the list of the text’s “purported” translators, draws attention to the complex processes of dating, attributing, translating, and publishing ancient scriptures, thus indicating that—in spite of John’s prohibition—mediation and transformation accompany any text’s historical journey.5

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While the novel’s epigraph implicitly undermines the notion of scriptural immutability, the protagonist explicitly questions the authority, of the canonical gospels. Theo doubts the credentials of the four evangelists: “Two of those guys definitely never met Jesus, and the other two did, but we can’t be sure if they were really kosher” (56); he points out the texts’ uncertain origins: “The earliest surviving manuscripts were written a long time after the events, by people who must’ve been copying copies of copies. Copies of what? We don’t know. Maybe Matthew and John did write their memoirs. Maybe someone else did, fifty years later” (57). The idea of the Bible’s quasifictional nature (note Theo’s use of the term “memoirs”) suggests an affinity between ancient scriptures and modern literary narratives. Faber enacts this leveling when he borrows the names of biblical books for his chapter headings: the “birth” of the nine scrolls takes place in Genesis; the protagonist’s girlfriend breaks up with him in Exodus; his publishing contract is negotiated in Numbers; reviews of his published translation are cited in Judges. Such irreverent recycling adds humor to the narrative while indicating continuity between scriptural classics and their contemporary reinterpretations.6 At the heart of the novel’s subversive rewriting are the scrolls containing Malchus’s narrative. The protagonist refers to them variously as a memoir, a gospel, “the oldest surviving piece of Christian literature” (38) and finally, The Fifth Gospel (the title of Theo’s published translation). The ancient text combines several genres: part autobiographical account of its author’s life and conversion, part pastoral advice answering inquiries (theological and otherwise) from fellow believers, and part detailed narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion. The writing, garrulous and self-deprecating, shows a carnivalesque obsession with physical detail: “My flesh is yellow, my eyes are yellow, the hairs fall from my head, and my innards make noises when all else is quiet. I scratch my skin like a dog. Praise the Lord!” (25). Malchus’s many ailments are a hindrance to his gospel-writing: “If I were stronger, I might tell a better tale, a tale that flies from beginning to end with the sureness of an arrow. But what I have written I cannot unwrite” (141). By drawing attention to the limitations of his project (and referencing Pilate’s famous words, “What I have written I have written” as reported in the gospel of Jn. 19.22), Malchus hints at all gospels’ imperfect human authorship.

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This comical emphasis on physicality takes a darker turn when applied to Jesus’s final agony: “His arms trembled fearsomely as he strove to pull himself higher, then he slipped down once more, and his innards opened of themselves. His urine fell on my face, and a foul liquid poured down the cross onto my hand” (143). While gruesomely detailed depictions of Jesus’s suffering have been part of the Christian tradition from medieval Silesian paintings to Ignatius Loyola’s spiritual exercises to Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, Malchus’s excremental confession remains shocking to the modern reader. A subtler, but equally devastating, revision alters Jesus’s final words from the canonical “It is finished” (Jn. 19.30) to “Please, somebody, please finish me” (142). Despite the protagonist’s expectation that his Fifth Gospel will undermine Christian belief, his readers overwhelmingly take the book for a work of fiction. Theo is accused of “trying to cash in on the current success of Jesus stories” (90), and praised for his “totally brilliant creation” (120). Amazon.com reviewers call the volume a fabrication and a Muslim forgery. The shopping website indicates that customers who bought The Fifth Gospel also bought Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Michael Baigent’s The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History (78)—volumes that Theo dismisses as “money-grubbing exercises in imaginary scholarship, cack-handed hokum and Mickey Mouse theology” (79).7 Even Theo’s kidnappers, who believe that Malchus’s gospel is authentic (and therefore dangerous), use the notion of fictionality as a weapon, forcing the protagonist to issue a video confession admitting that he had fabricated the whole thing. As one of the kidnappers explains, the video will become the new truth about The Fifth Gospel: “‘I know you’ll tell everybody who’ll listen that your confession was a fake,’ he said. ‘But it won’t matter. The story is out there. Once a story is out there, you can never take it back. That’s the way it is’” (196). This matter-of-fact statement performs metafictional double duty: first, it culminates The Fire Gospel ’s interplay between fact and fiction; second, it reminds us that narratives—true or false—have lives of their own, and the power to become real if people believe them. Theo fails in his mission as a modern-day Prometheus in part because of his opponents’ willingness to use direct physical aggression. Violent responses to recovered scriptures are a staple

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of contemporary archaeological fiction, indicating the anxiety of established power structures and religious interests in face of potentially revolutionary reconfigurations of the canon. Peter Van Greenaway’s The Judas Gospel (1972), which begins with a British scholar’s discovery of a manuscript hidden in a cave between the ancient Israelite towns of Qumran and Masada, ends with a series of elaborate assassinations perpetrated by a James Bondian agent of the Vatican, Giovanni della Paresi, a.k.a. “the Dominican.” A more subtle form of suppression appears in Morley Callaghan’s A Time For Judas (1983), in which an Italian professor of Middle Eastern archaeology, charged with authenticating a first-century Greek manuscript (a vindication of Judas written by his friend Philo of Crete, scribe at Pilate’s court), caves in to Vatican pressures to pronounce the document false even though he is convinced of its authenticity.8 The protagonist of Tucker Malarkey’s Resurrection (2006), a novel based on the 1945 Nag Hammadi discovery, finds herself hounded by representatives of the Catholic Church after her archaeologist father makes an “unexpected find” (5) in Egypt. The hiding of the Nag Hammadi scrolls sixteen centuries before their modern rediscovery is the subject of The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus (2008) by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, which depicts the annihilation of newly designated “heretical” gospels and their custodians in the aftermath of the fourth-century Council of Nicea. The suppression of heterodox scriptures in archaeological fiction is both an echo of historical realities and a crowd-pleasing plot choice. (The popularity of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003) indicates the extent of readerly desire for conspiracy and sensationalism.) Imagining apocryphal texts subversive enough to merit violent opposition also gives novelists an opportunity to undermine canonical writings under the guise of fictional apocryphal authors. A popular target of criticism is the hierarchical power structure of Christian churches. The Judas character in Greenaway’s The Judas Gospel, portrayed not as an apostle but a member of an allied anti-establishment faction, is appalled by the servitude of Jesus’s followers and their custom of calling their leader “Master.” In contrast, Judas’s band lives by the principles of perfect democracy, designating no leaders or followers. In this version of the story—as in many contemporary fictional gospels—it is the servile Peter who betrays Jesus and distorts his

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teachings by establishing a power-hungry church that worships Christ as a divine being. Another popular target of novelistic censure is patriarchy. The protagonist of Malarkey’s Resurrection, Emma Bastian, discovers that her murdered father, a renowned archaeologist and avid student of apocryphal scriptures, had become a passionate feminist. Professor Bastian’s interest in countering patriarchal oppression is evident in his fascination with the gospels of Mary Magdalene and Thomas, his ecumenical collection of goddess images, and his notes concerning the degradation of biblical women: “Anointing priestess becomes unnamed sinner; disciple becomes repentant whore. Women marginalized in New Testament. Women erased” (133). Bastian laments the suppression of strong female figures in the official gospel story, and commits himself to encoding newly found apocryphal scriptures. His comments on the significance of heterodox gospels could be taken straight out of the writings of Elaine Pagels or Bart Ehrman: “Imagine a Christianity that has been lost to us, a Christianity that celebrated the wisdom of all sacred texts, all religions, that valued women, and that believed God existed in all of us” (31). Not surprisingly, both Ehrman and Pagels are included in Malarkey’s acknowledgments. Authors of scriptural metafiction, like their scholarly predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tend to question reports of miracles, especially bodily resurrection. Greenaway’s Judas denies Jesus’s return from the dead; instead, he expresses the hope that his own manuscript, written in exile and hidden from his pursuers, will be “resurrected” by a future reader (23). (This is a hope against hope, as the usual fate of heterodox writings is to be “purged, distorted, torn to pieces to fit” (18), but Judas’s wish is realized.) Some archaeological fictions (Greenaway’s Judas Gospel, Mawer’s A Time for Judas, Gears’s Betrayal ) go as far as furnishing proof of Jesus’s final demise in the form of his dead, unresurrected body. Others, like Faber’s Fire Gospel, imagine a metaphorical return. The novel’s fictional evangelist, Malchus, hears the voice of Jesus in his head during the crucifixion, revealing a vision of community akin to Slavoj Žižek’s atheist reinterpretation of the Kingdom of God: “O what am I composed? I am composed of all who believe in me. Together, we are both perfect and mighty” (144).

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Archaeological fiction’s incendiary apocryphal scriptures often provoke violent attacks against their discoverers—and against the offending scrolls themselves. An interesting variation on this motif can be found in Simon Mawer’s Gospel of Judas (2000). The scripture, written in the Koine dialect of Greek, is burned in a mysterious explosion, surviving only in a handful of traces: an incomplete computer file, a few photos, and the final sheet of the original manuscript. The protagonist, ex-priest Leo Newman, gives the remaining page to his artist girlfriend, Magda, who incorporates it into a collage featuring an icon of the Madonna: I watched her work. I watched the quick, deft strokes, the way in which paint became object, the sure balance of abstract lines, the strange colors, the curious fragments pasted into the picture, the faded letters of Koine, that language that was the language of commerce and social interchange and scripture. The language that has had greater impact on the world than any other, painted now into the world of the weeping Madonna and Child. Fragments of newspaper and scripture arranged in delicate harmony around the lady with the drops of acrylic crimson that fall like jewels down her cheeks. (327) Magda’s piece, a creative juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary material, provides an apt metaphor for the transformative work of scriptural metafiction. Within the boundaries of the collage, the ancient manuscript merges with modern-day newsprint and traditional devotional iconography to produce a fresh, multilayered, polysemous image. The Greek gospel fragment is no longer a historical document or the conclusion of an apocryphal scripture but something new altogether: an evocative aesthetic object, a single strand in a rich transhistorical tapestry, and evidence of the possibility of imaginative resurrection.

Elusive archives The concerns of philological and archaeological fiction come together in Gabriel Meyer’s The Gospel of Joseph (1994), a novel featuring

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two scholarly protagonists, an apocryphal gospel, a grand linguistic puzzle, two forgery trials, and a series of mysterious disappearances. The novel’s complex structure merits closer consideration: Meyer creates a fictional echo chamber that demonstrates how texts (scriptural, devotional, academic, legal, personal) reference and shape one another across cultures and centuries. A detailed reading of the narrative provides a useful overview of scriptural metafiction’s formal and ideological preoccupations. The Gospel of Joseph eschews conventional chronology; instead, it presents itself as an archive of documents (“The Joseph Archive”) recovered in the basement of the Leipzig University library after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and introduced to us by a modern-day editor. The story concerns the purported nineteenth-century discovery of the “Alexandrian Epistles,” six fourth-century Coptic letters authored by Joseph, father of Jesus, also known as “the Builder.” The epistles are accompanied by an anthology of auxiliary texts and fragments written and collected in the following centuries by the Josephite monks of Mar Yusuf, Egypt. In addition to these sacred texts, the archive contains the correspondence and notes of two scholars: nineteenth-century philologist and amateur archaeologist Friedrich Schleyer (who claims to have received the manuscripts of the Epistles from the besieged abbot of Mar Yusuf but is accused of having fabricated the documents along with the story of their acquisition) and Constantine Gruber, a mid-twentieth-century Coptologist working on Schleyer’s case under the supervision of the East German Committee on Religion and Atheism. Finally, the collection includes an (incomplete) account of Schleyer’s 1874 journey to Egypt published in the Leipziger Merkur the following year, several documents from Schleyer’s two forgery trials conducted by the Prussian State Court in the late 1870s, and a number of personal notes, drafts, and annotations.9 The novel establishes the illusion of an academic volume with a set of maps: one of Herodian Palestine drawn by Constantine Gruber in 1949, the other of nineteenth-century Egypt drawn from memory by Schleyer’s nephew Alois, a member of the 1874 expedition, in 1910. Following these visual documents is a 1989 preface by the editor of the University of Leipzig Review introducing the entirety of the archive. The modern editor also provides brief introductory notes throughout the volume, explaining the origins, language, context,

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and appearance of the archive’s modern documents, including details as specific as the following: “Yellow legal pad, folded twice, clipped to a rag-paper Religion and Atheism Committee envelope” (192). The older texts are usually introduced by Schleyer or Gruber (or both, when Gruber amends and elucidates the notes of his predecessor). This elaborate scholarly apparatus serves the novel’s central concern: highlighting the work of professional scholars required for modern readers to gain access to, let alone understand or interpret, historical texts. The emphasis on the work of editors and translators continues throughout the volume in editorial prefaces, commentaries, and footnotes (Schleyer locates relevant citations from the Bible; Gruber gives geographical, historical, and theological context), reinforcing the message that there is no such thing as pure, unmediated textuality. The archive’s central document, Joseph’s six epistles, provides a perfect example of readerly dependence on scholarly mediation. The text comes to us as a contemporary English translation of a nineteenth-century German translation (with mid-twentiethcentury emendations) of a fourth-century Coptic text, which is itself a translation of an earlier Greek text. The letters were dictated to a professional scribe, Simon the mute, and may include later interpolations. Gruber describes their language as “a crazy-quilt of styles,” whose origins cannot be definitively established: “We’re not sure where all this stuff comes from or when the document as we now have it was finally stitched together” (56). This heterogeneity is concealed from the modern reader by Schleyer’s and Gruber’s efforts: rather than the original manuscript, we are presented with the “silken translations” of the two philologists (56). Translations are all that remains of the Coptic version of Joseph’s letters—at the time of the volume’s publication the precious codex is missing from the archive. As a consequence, the modern editor cannot settle the question of its (now unverifi able) authenticity. After alluding to a series of modern apocrypha (Ernst Edler von Planitz’s “Letter of Benan,” Catulle Mendès’s “Childhood of Christ,” W. D. Mahan’s “The Archko Volume”), he admits that it is difficult to prove or disprove the legitimacy of Joseph’s letters when “all we have to go by is an unruly stack of translations in a leather suitcase in an old safe” (12). Even the forgery trial undergone by

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Schleyer in the previous century had proven inconclusive. The aura of mystery is further enhanced by the dramatic circumstances of the text’s acquisition (hastily handed over in the middle of the night by the abbot of Mar Yosuf in anticipation of an armed attack on the monastery), as well as the disappearances of their scholarly keepers (Schleyer is rumored to have died alone, in hiding; Gruber is suspected of escaping to Egypt with the precious epistles). In the words of the volume’s final editor, both scholars “have been occulted, leaving behind, in each case, the text of this little wormeaten library and the not insubstantial debris of their dealings with it” (11). The novel never provides conclusive answers to its many mysteries. The disappearance of the Joseph Letters exposes the materiality and fragility of historical documents, which can easily be stolen, lost, or damaged. The first item remaining in the archive is a set of copies of Schleyer’s travel journal, published serially in the Leipziger Merkur. The pages appear to be “in only moderately readable condition due to fire damage to the newspaper’s files during the bombing of Leipzig in the last months of the Second World War” (17). The sole surviving copy of the Merkur breaks off mid-story, forcing the editor to reconstruct events with the help of the transcript of Schleyer’s forgery trial. This emphasis on textual gaps, and the speculative work involved in their reconstruction, becomes even more pronounced when it comes to the archive’s older documents. For example, “The Life of St. Jason of Alexandria” (the addressee of Joseph’s epistles) has been compiled by Gruber from “two separate, but related, fragments appended to the codices (49),” both imperfectly preserved and full of lacunae, necessitating extensive reconstruction and outright guesswork. As Gruber admits himself, a philologist’s labor resembles a detective’s: “Looking at these documents is a lot like a coroner trying to determine the identity of a murder victim from a few scattered body parts” (43). The archive’s ultimate puzzle is found in a collection of sayings titled The Thirty-three Maxims of Joseph the Just, the final item of which appears near incomprehensible: “33. [The text here is badly garbled, the document showing signs of repeated erasures. The only two recognizable words are: ‘Nazoreans (Nazarenes)’ and ‘rivers’ (?)— CG]” (164). Gruber’s efforts to solve the mystery of the last maxim

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with the help of numerical puzzles and probabilities yield the phrase: “THROUGHOUT THE AGES, THE NAZARENES SPEAK ONLY AS UNDERGROUND RIVERS [SPEAK]” (197). While this enigmatic statement may refer to the underground river that periodically comes to surface on the site of the Mar Yusuf monastery, it is also an allusion to the hidden spiritual truths accessible only to the Nazarenes (the family of Jesus and their descendants). A series of visual metaphors for the erasures that obscure our understanding of the past can be found in a fictional sixth-century catalog of geographical sites associated with Joseph’s work as a master builder. The catalog had been compiled by a pilgrim-abbot who, according to Gruber’s cautious introduction, “apparently spoke with some alleged members of Jesus’s family in Nazareth during his visit,” and created the list based on their suggestions (131). One of the described sites is the Spring of Eitam near Bethlehem, whose steps, designed and carved by Joseph, were supposed to have featured words from the Song of Songs: “an enclosed garden, a fountain sealed” (131). By the time the sixth-century abbot visits the site, the words have already worn away. Another inscription, “The upper became the lower,” placed on a wall built by Joseph around the sacred site where Abraham lamented the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, has vanished as the wall sank into the ground (132). These lost inscriptions, the existence of which the abbot reports but does not witness, come to us as a recollection of a trace, a reminder that even stone erodes, and may survive only in unreliable memories past down through generations.10 The pilgrim-abbot’s reliance on the testimony of Joseph’s relatives points to another key concern of Meyer’s novel: the interdependence of written and oral narratives. As Gruber explains in his notes, Coptic monasticism relies on oral tradition: “For one thing, the wisdom of Oriental monasticism was, and is, conveyed not through the apparatus of the Academy—the treatise, the manual, the polemic— but through the staples of popular culture: folk stories and sayings” (97). The Joseph Archive contains several examples of oral genres, including maxims, tales, legends, and songs. Joseph himself is described as a master storyteller in The Pilgrimage of Three Tales, a novella-like narrative attributed to St. Conon, and compiled by a fourteenth-century editor. The Pilgrimage depicts Joseph teaching local lore and folksongs to his son. In one instance, a popular song

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intoned by his father furnishes Jesus with an idea that he will use many years later, when he commands Peter to fetch tax money from the mouth of a fish (as reported in Mt. 17.27): O poor man of Galilee, poor man, do not despair, do not despair, in the mouth of the mother-fish of the Galilee, you will find a gold piece there. (107) Tracing the genealogy of a canonical gospel passage to a piece of folk poetry emphasizes Jesus’s indebtedness to his native culture, and underscores the fluidity of textual material as it travels between oral and written forms. The core of The Pilgrimage is a series of three tales narrated by Joseph to his relatives as they journey to Jerusalem. The Builder uses his narratives to answer philosophical questions and convey spiritual truths. Joseph’s penchant for parables, as well as his emphasis on universal love and his rejection of Jewish exclusionism, anticipates Jesus’s teachings. The final story, “The Tale of the Boy Hidden among Thieves,” concerns a king who sacrifices his son for his people—a clear reference to the Christian narrative of salvation. The tale exists in many versions handed down from generation to generation, and is the subject of much debate and commentary. The fourteenth-century editor of The Pilgrimage explains that his version is a reconstruction, as the manuscript at his disposal could only be deciphered after “long study of the garbled page in question” (123), and in consultation with the community’s oldest monk, who “had committed the tale to memory ” (124). Once again, the novel draws attention to the complex genealogies of stories, highlighting the interplay of the oral and the written, as well as the multiple retellings and rewritings that shape historical narratives before they reach their modern readers. The challenge of deciphering Joseph’s final tale is compounded by the fact that, like his thirty-third maxim, it had been intentionally distorted by the scribe; the manuscript is “filled with deliberate misspellings and the insertion of misleading vowels and letters intended to render difficult, if, not impossible, a precise reconstruction” (123). Such occlusion serves to conceal the text’s message from

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uninitiated audiences—an example of the “secret teaching” tradition that goes back to the gospels themselves.11 The Joseph Archive repeatedly references messages so holy they can only be transmitted orally. One of the archive’s final documents, The Passion of Joseph the Just, asserts, “In the days before his passion, Joshua imparted the ‘secret teaching’—that is, the teaching that can be passed only by word of mouth—to the disciples on the Mount of Olives” (173). The Passion follows suit by withholding the text of Joseph’s final prayer, an omission that Gruber believes to be another example of Josephite secretiveness: “As we have come to expect from the Mar Yusuf documents, the editors do not furnish us with the text of the great prayer. It was probably considered too sacred to be written down or even rendered in a disguised way or through some sort of cryptogram” (183). The implications of the belief in secret teachings are highly iconoclastic: if the most important lessons were the ones not committed to parchment, can we trust the canonical documents to give us spiritual guidance, or even accurately represent the message of Jesus? The Joseph Archive presents readers with a number of challenges: material fragility, problematic authenticity, and deliberate obfuscation. In addition to these textual concerns, Meyer introduces the documents’ thorny political contexts, both at the time of their discovery in the 1870s, and during their academic dissection in the 1950s. When archaeological fictions imagine the recovery of ancient scriptures, the location (Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Crete) and the circumstances often involve violent political conflict. The discoverer, typically a Western male scholar, imagines himself to be above the fray while he pursues goals that have little to do with the concerns and engagements of the local communities. Nevertheless, his very presence as a seeker of ancient texts implicates him in a one-sided colonial (or neocolonial) relationship. Schleyer’s 1874 expedition, although purportedly undertaken at the invitation of the Mar Yusuf monks, represents this type of asymmetrical dynamic. As Max Eastman bluntly put it, “We’re thieves here, we Europeans. The Egyptians are only too well aware of that. They are like a man whose house has been broken into and who’s trying to reason with his assailants” (20). Schleyer appears to understand the locals’ assessment of his role as a European adventurer in Egypt: “‘Adventurer’ is a bad word in these parts, just

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one rung removed from ‘grave robber,’ I’m told” (23). Nevertheless, he proceeds with his mission, seemingly indifferent to the political implications of his intervention.12 A different kind of political dynamic is portrayed in the midtwentieth-century sections of the novel: philologist Constantine Gruber is an employee of the atheistic East German regime, whose interest in the Joseph Archive differs dramatically from his own. Gruber chafes under the government’s pressure to deliver a “propaganda coup” (42) by furnishing a definitive proof against Christianity: “I want it clearly understood that I’m here as a scholar— the only Coptologist East of Berlin, in fact—not as a propagandist for the Ministry for the Triumph of Godlessness” (42). He is incensed by the constant requests to speed up his work, arguing that “real scholarship” requires time (42). He suspects that the project itself may be part of some kind of political game. In this, Gruber is correct. A Stasi file dedicated to “The Gospel of Joseph Project: 1949– 1951” (found after 1989 on a shelf marked “DISPOSE”) reveals that the true purpose of Gruber’s assignment was to test his aptitude at cryptography before offering him a position in Moscow (194). This plot twist highlights the role of audiences in determining the meaning and value of texts: depending on whom you talk to, the same codex functions as a religious treasure, an intellectual puzzle, and a tool of political manipulation. The novel’s many references to Joseph’s Coptic epistles illustrate the same principle: the documents are referred to variously as “the Joseph Letters” by Max Eastman (33), “Exhibit 1” by the prosecutor in Schleyer’s forgery trial (33), “The Alexandrian Epistles” by Schleyer himself (43), and “The Holy Letters” (43) by the monks in whose care they were purportedly found. It remains up to the reader to decide which characterization is the most convincing. The story’s final irony is that, even if Gruber was involved in a fabricated scholarly project designed to test his skills as a decoder, the Archive’s texts transformed the life of their scholarly editor. After escaping Germany, presumably to return the Joseph Epistles to Egypt, he has been spotted, according to rumor, living in the ruins of the Mar Yusuf monastery, perhaps pursuing a spiritual quest of his own. The location of his final resting place remains a mystery, in keeping with the Josephite tradition of unmarked graves that goes back to

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Joseph, whose burial site remains not only unknown, but also, as Gruber explains in his final editorial note, “unknowable” (191). As in the case of other enigmas, the novel refuses to furnish the reader with clear explanations or conclusions regarding the fate of its most precious document. Instead of answers, we are handed a series of reconstructions, reproductions, and commentaries. The Gospel of Joseph offers readers the best pleasures of scriptural metafiction: the subversive thrill of a heterodox gospel, the cerebral challenge of an intertextual labyrinth, and the oblique enchantment of a modern spiritual journey. Like other archaeological fictions, Meyer’s archival drama depicts sacred texts as sites of struggle—semantic, religious, political, and personal; like other philological fictions, the narrative emphasizes the interdependent processes of composition, reconstruction, translation, and exegesis. Through simulacra of scholarly practices, the novel foregrounds the various intermediaries who, despite the denials of biblical literalists, always stand between believers and their scriptures.

Conclusion

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t the conclusion of the fourth and final canonical gospel, John the evangelist offers a magnificent vision of scriptural proliferation: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen” (Jn. 21.25). For modern novelists, this closing verse is an open invitation. In the last two centuries, the gospel story has inspired historical fiction, realist fiction, gothic and adventure romances, philosophical and activist novels, fantasy fiction, science fiction, and experimental narratives that defy clear-cut generic categories. One of the most interesting developments in recent biblical writing is the spectacular rise of serial Christian fiction, whose poster child, the twelve-volume Left Behind series (1995–2007) based on the Book of Revelation, has sold over 65 million copies and launched a lucrative franchise that includes three prequels, juvenile titles, graphic novels, collector’s editions, devotionals, study workbooks, board games, video games, and film adaptations. The series’ core volumes have repeatedly topped US bestseller lists, and have been translated into over thirty languages. Following the unprecedented success of their apocalyptic fictions, coauthors Tim LaHaye (an evangelical minister and political activist) and Jerry B. Jenkins (a professional Christian writer) produced a novelistic quartet based on the canonical gospels: John’s Story (2006), Mark’s Story (2007), Luke’s Story (2009), and Matthew’s Story (2010). All four volumes of The Jesus Chronicles went on to become bestsellers in their own right. Gospel novelizations such as the Jesus Chronicles present themselves as faithful renditions of the scriptures. They promise to flesh out details, bring to life characters, and clarify difficult passages, all the while remaining true to their biblical originals. Many religious readers consider such fiction an enjoyable form of scripture study:

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novels can deliver the pleasure of instruction and inspiration without the pain of negotiating the Bible’s obscure language or enigmatic references. Scholar Amy Frykholm, who conducted in-depth interviews with readers of the Left Behind series, demonstrates that Christian audiences experience the books both as fiction and as “a manifestation of biblical truth” (132). This paradoxical dynamic is the source of the narratives’ special power. When believers allow themselves to “read for fun, for pleasure, getting caught up in characters’ lives and the presentation of images,” the experience subtly alters their relationship with the biblical original: “These images, received through the innocuous means of entertainment, give shape and meaning to the previously obscure text, making it come alive in a way it previously had not” (133). Online customer reviews of LaHaye and Jenkins’s fictions confirm the exegetic function of Christian fiction. Readers repeatedly praise the authors for elucidating the meanings of biblical passages, as if the gospel parables that confounded even Jesus’s apostles, or the poetry of Revelation, could be reduced to a single interpretation delivered in the colloquial prose of a contemporary bestseller. Scriptural metafiction counters the ontological claims of mainstream Christian novels by questioning their twin premises: the unproblematic factuality of the Bible and the representational neutrality of novelistic realism. Rather than portraying canonical texts as truthful historical accounts, easily transposed into the medium of imaginative fiction, authors of metafictional gospels reveal the rhetorical complexity of sacred texts and their literary renditions through ontological experimentation, centrifugal narration, and self-referential disclosure. In the process, the novelists find common ground (as fellow storytellers) with first-century evangelists, claiming the right to narrate one of humanity’s most important tales on their own terms. The writers discussed in my study include atheists, agnostics, believers, and post-believers —the latter described by Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman as “those who might be said to have lost their faith but who continue to work and rework its imagery obsessively, either in the hope of finding a different kind of meaning in it altogether or perhaps simply because they cannot rid themselves of it” (3). Whatever their personal relationship with religion, authors of scriptural metafiction refuse to accept the

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“either-or” language of contemporary culture wars, striving instead to create a new vocabulary for articulating the complicated role of the religious imagination in a (post)secular world. Each in their own way, they feel and respond to the pull of scriptural tradition: rather than revering the Bible as the inerrant word of God or dismissing it as so much mumbo jumbo, they embrace it as a repository of living, metamorphosing stories. In his literary memoir, Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie uses his alter ego to argue that great religious scriptures belong to all of humanity, and that anyone should be able to appropriate and transform them: “We should all be free to take the grand narratives to task, to argue with them, satirize them, and insist that they change to reflect the changing times. We should speak of them reverently, irreverently, passionately, caustically, or however we choose” (360). Rushdie’s own The Satanic Verses combined a reimagining of the Qur’an’s origins with a satire on the Islamist state of Iran. Half a century earlier, Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov used the story of Jesus’s trial in The Master and Margarita (a novel that inspired Rushdie’s work) to satirize Stalinism. Both novelists employed transhistorical plots, metafictional play, carnivalesque humor, and apocryphal references to denounce oppressive political regimes: theistic in Rushdie, atheistic in Bulgakov. Violently silenced by the powers they ridiculed, The Master and Margarita and The Satanic Verses illustrate the subversive potential of the encounter between ancient scriptures and the modern novel. Today’s gospel metafictions continue the tradition of literary dissent, albeit at much lower risk, by criticizing the excesses of contemporary capitalism, the injustices of patriarchal oppression, and the corruption of religious institutions. Most importantly, regardless of other ideological commitments, they resist the fetishization of canonical biblical texts, presenting them as products of human labor, subject to all the attending imperfections and contingencies. This emphasis on the constructed, rather than revealed, nature of the gospels opens the door for audacious reinterpretations that can be surprisingly moralistic, even when shot through with humor. The irreverent levity of scriptural metafiction—from Christopher Moore’s corrective laughter, to José Saramago’s erudite irony, to Gore Vidal’s grotesque antics—playfully uncovers the power structures that shape every act of writing and reading.

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In comparison with the reformist passions of Victorian and early twentieth-century social gospels, this emphasis on textuality might appear rarefied. Indeed, at the end of his 1972 study of modern Jesus-fiction, Theodore Ziolkowski lamented the postmodernist shift “from the flesh-and-blood Jesus of social criticism and psychiatry” to “a bland construct twice-removed from its Gospel source: the scholar-critic’s Jesus” (298). Ziolkowski perceived the literary (and cinematic) gospels of his contemporaries as lacking in moral purpose: “Moral neutralism has replaced any positive theme; and in structure a serious treatment has given way to parody” (227). The fear of “moral neutralism” has proven to be premature. Although far removed from the earnestness of its literary predecessors, scriptural metafiction cultivates a hermeneutical skepticism with far-reaching philosophical and political implications. With or without religion, the gospel according to the novelist compels us to reconsider the value of sacred stories—and that is good news.

Notes Introduction 1 Not surprisingly, the majority of the novels discussed in this volume take an iconoclastic stance toward their sources. While iconoclasm and metafictional awareness are natural companions, they are not inseparable: well-known examples of subversive but nonmetafictional reinterpretations of the Christian gospels include George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916), in which a mature Jesus rejects his youthful philosophy; D. H. Lawrence’s The Escaped Cock (1929), in which Jesus survives crucifixion and goes on to father a child with a priestess of Isis; Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1953)—made famous by Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film adaptation—in which the crucified Jesus entertains (and rejects) a fantasy of personal and sexual fulfillment; and Jim Crace’s Quarantine (1997), in which Jesus does not survive his forty-day sojourn in the desert. 2 Hutcheon also emphasizes the continuing presence of the past in her discussion of postmodern parody: “But this parodic reprise of the past of art is not nostalgic; it is always critical. It is also not ahistorical or de-historicising; it does not wrest past art from its original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle. Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive form both continuity and difference” (1989: 93). 3 For the definitive treatment of nineteenth-century Germanlanguage “Lives of Jesus,” see Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Chapter two of Theodore Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972) offers a discussion of Continental European and American “Lives” and their origins in eighteenth-century German scholarship. A more recent discussion of Jesus in German naturalism can be found in Uwe Kächler’s Die Jesusgestalt in der Erzählprosa des deutschen

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Naturalismus (1993). Daniel Pals’s The Victorian “Lives” of Jesus (1982) and Jennifer Stevens’s The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination (2010) rectify the Continental bias of the field by examining British “Lives.” Popular American Jesus-novels from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century are listed in Allene Stuart Phy’s “Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told” (1985). For useful encyclopedic resources, see Warren S. Kissinger’s The Lives of Jesus (1985), Alice L. Birney’s The Literary Lives of Jesus (1989), and Stefan Cramme’s “Historiche Romane-Jesus” website. 4 Thomas Jefferson’s posthumous work The Jefferson Bible (1902) offers an interesting exercise in Enlightenment reinterpretation: having excised all references to miraculous events and divine interventions, Jefferson presents a secularized Jesus recast as a supreme moral philosopher and reformer. 5 “Death of God” emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a theological response to the crisis of World War II and the flourishing of modern secularist thought, prompting Time magazine to ask “Is God Dead?” on the cover of the April 8, 1966 issue. The movement’s major proponents, next to William Hamilton, included Thomas Altizer, Paul van Buren, and Gabriel Vahanian. For a recent discussion of the original movement and its twenty-first-century reincarnations, see Resurrecting the Death of God (2014), edited by Daniel J. Peterson and Michael G. Zbaraschuk. 6 Narrative theology (or postliberal theology) is a broad interdisciplinary movement, originally developed by Yale Divinity School scholars Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. For examples, see The Promise of Narrative Theology by George W. Stroup (1981), Revelation and Theology (1985) by Ronald F. Thiemann, Theology and Narrative by Hans W. Frei (1993), and the collection Why Narrative? edited by Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (1989). For a critical discussion of the movement, see Theology and Narrative by Michael Goldberg (1982). For an anthology of scholarly essays examining the importance of narrative discourse in a variety of fields (including theology), see Faith and Narrative, edited by Keith Yandell (2001). For insightful commentary by the movement’s principle players, see Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic, edited by John W. Wright (2012). 7 The “Gospels as fiction” approach is akin to but distinct from the more traditional study of “the Bible as literature.” The latter field, inaugurated in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) and developed in the twentieth-century work of Northrop Frye, Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, and Harold Bloom, invites, but does not necessitate, the rethinking of traditional

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theological assumptions. Interesting recent projects emphasizing the literary qualities of the Christian scriptures include the volume Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (1998), edited by Ronald Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins, which reads New Testament and apocryphal Christian writings in the context of ancient fiction; and Jack Miles’s duology God (1995) and Christ (2011), which treats the God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as a literary protagonist. 8 Much like twentieth-century poststructuralism, such revisionary projects are subject to a paradoxical dynamic: when a set of oppositional terms (male/female, white/black, reason/unreason) is deconstructed, the critic is forced to use the very terms she rejects to articulate her rejection. Recent reconsiderations of the secular/religious binary, including my own, are subject to the same limitations. 9 The importance of Anglican institutions to the origins of “English” as an academic field has been persuasively demonstrated by Michael Kaufmann, whose work provides an important, if rare, postsecular genealogy of the discipline. Drawing on the theoretical work of Talal Asad, Kaufmann argues, “If the renewed interest in religion is to move literary studies in genuinely new directions, we must explore the practical implications of various elements of those theories that challenge any simple secularization narrative, and thereby restore a dynamic relationship between the secular and the religious as it meaningfully functions in a variety of discursive contexts” (621). A kindred historicist project can be found in Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption (2007), which examines the relationship between America’s literary and religious heritage from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. 10 For scholarship on the novel’s relationship with the Bible, see Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (2006), edited by Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman; and Norman Vance’s study of Victorian fiction, Bible and Novel (2013). For a pioneering analysis of contemporary postsecular novels, see Partial Faiths (2007) by John McClure. For a collected volume that proclaims to be the “coming out” of the spiritual within literary studies, see Spiritual Identities (2010), edited by Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate. For insights into the fictional recuperation of marginalized perspectives, see Raymond-Jean Frontain’s collection Reclaiming the Sacred (1997); Jeannette King’s Women and the Word (2000); Beth Hawkins Benedix’s collection Subverting the Scriptures (2009); and Katherine Clay Bassard’s Transforming Scriptures (2010). For encounters between theology and literary theory, see T. R. Wright’s Theology and Literature (1988), Graham Ward’s

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Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (1996), and Luke Ferretter’s Towards a Christian Literary Theory (2003). For ongoing interdisciplinary research in the field of literature and religion, see the journals Literature and Theology and Religion and Literature. 11 Examples of theologically minded studies include The Novelist and the Passion Story (1960) by F. W. Dillistone (the dean of Liverpool); A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus (1993) by William Hamilton— who, after acknowledging the crisis of traditional interpretations of the Jesus figure, turns for alternatives to the “poets,” defined loosely as “practically anyone not doing history or theology: poets proper; novelists, best-selling and otherwise, good and bad; imaginative biographers, playwrights, journalists” (73); Karl-Joseph Kuschel’s The Poet as Mirror (1999); Paul Burns’s edited volume Jesus in Twentieth Century Literature, Art, and Movies (2007); and literary scholar Andrew Tate’s Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2008). 12 Ziolkowski divides modern Jesus-fiction into six categories: (1) “liberal lives,” or novelistic biographies of Jesus that humanize, modernize, and psychologize their protagonist, often in alignment with nineteenth-century Church reform movements invested in social justice and the rejection of dogmatism; (2) “fictionalizing bibliographies,” which either take the form of “lives for laymen” (adaptations of the scriptural story into modern idiom) or “modern apocrypha” (texts that purport to be newly discovered gospel texts, often containing imaginative attempts at filling in the silent years of the biblical record with exotic sojourns in India, Tibet, or Egypt); (3) “Jesus redivivus,” or narratives that imagine the reappearance of Jesus in modern times; (4) “imitatio Christi,” whose protagonists consciously strive to achieve their own versions of Christlike perfection; (5) “pseudonyms of Christ,” whose heroes display Christ-like characteristics such as innocence or redemptive suffering; and Ziolkowski’s proper subject; (6) fictional transfigurations. 13 For German-language critical discussions of Jesus-fiction, see Elisabeth Hurth’s Der literarische Jesus (1993) and Wolfgang Kasack’s Christus in der russischen Literatur (1999).

Chapter 1 1 The Christian canon as we know it represents only a small faction of the sacred texts circulated by early followers of Jesus. Today’s “New Testament” wasn’t established until the fourth century—a complete list of the twenty-seven canonical books first appeared

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in the Easter letter of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in 367 CE —and continued to be debated long after. As leading biblical scholar Brevard Childs put it, “To portray the formation of the New Testament canon as a natural growth of universally recognized authoritative writings into a normative apostolic collection fails to deal adequately with the enormous controversies and tensions which lay behind the individual books and their subsequent collection” (13). For discussions of the canon’s contentious formation, as well as the influence of newly discovered apocryphal texts on our understanding of early Christianity’s diversity, see Burton Mack’s Who Wrote the New Testament? (1995); and Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities (2003) and Lost Scriptures (2003). 2 For a discussion of Marxist-Christian dialogues taking place in German-speaking Europe from the 1870s to the 1970s, see James Bentley’s Between Marx and Christ (1982). For an account of Marxism’s historical debt to Christianity, see Alasdair McIntyre’s Marxism and Christianity (1968). 3 Ziolkowski’s chapter on the “Christian Socialist Jesus” lists novels such as Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (1888); Christ, the Socialist by Archibald McCowan (1894); The True History of Joshua Davidson by Elizabeth Lynn Linton (1872); A Singular Life by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1894); Nazarín by Benito Péres Galdós (1895); Der Fremde (The Stranger ) by Hans von Kahlenberg, pseudonym of Helene Kessler (1901); Il Santo (The Saint ) by Antonio Fogazzaro (1905); and When He Shall Appear by Harold Kampf (1953). None of these fictions deal directly with biblical times and events; instead, they offer contemporary figures who either grapple with the idea of a socialist Jesus (understood in the social reformist, not the political, sense), or reenact his life in the context of modern society. 4 Barbusse’s Jesus also contains several metafictional moments that make it a precursor of modern scriptural metafiction. The protagonist begins by dismissing the work of the canonical evangelists: “There was a man called Matthew, and there was one called John, who saw him, it is said, and spoke of him. There were Luke and Mark also, who heard of him, it is said, through the mouth of Simon Peter, and spoke of him. There were others who spoke of him after having seen him, or without having seen him. The words remain, but the things are uncertain” (17). Later, Jesus recounts an apocalyptic vision in which a man (referred to as a thief) places a book in the Temple: “For this book has just been written. An army of scribes and priests have concocted it to their own taste. They have gathered the legends and stray proverbs of the Jews, and have tamed them by writing them down, and have

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added, and loaded, and overloaded, and all to further their own policies” (186). The volume is the foundation of the future power of the Christian church: “This book will become the Book of the Law. They will say that it existed since the beginning of time and has fallen from heaven. God himself has placed it upon the altar. And they will maltreat and kill those who turn their faces away from the dazzling letters which spell the word, ‘Revelation’” (186). 5 In the Acts of Thomas, Jesus calls Thomas his “brother” (Ehrman 2003b: 126), and is himself described as having “the appearance of Judas Thomas” (126). Similarly, in the Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus addresses Thomas as “brother” (237) and tells him: “It is said that you are my twin and true friend” (Meyer 2007: 239). The Coptic text known as the Gospel According to Thomas claims to have been written by Didymos Judas Thomas, whose name means “the twin” in both Greek (Didymos) and Hebrew (Thomas). 6 For example, in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke writes, “And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem” (Acts 10.39). In one of his Epistles, Peter writes: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1.16). 7 This is a constant concern in Saramago’s oeuvre. Helena Kaufman points out that the novelist’s early work already demonstrates an interest in “historiographic reflection,” and “ontological questions about the status of truth, verisimility, fiction, and history” (449). Saramago’s memoir Small Memories (2006) returns obsessively to the question of memory’s limited reliability. 8 For a more recent discussion of postmodern novelistic engagement with historical discourses, see Amy J. Elias’s concept of metahistorical romance in Sublime Desire (2001). 9 For an interesting discussion of the iconography of Jesus in nineteenth-century fiction and painting, see Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, “The Color of His Hair” (2009) and The Real and the Sacred (2014). 10 A similar tendency can be found in the work of contemporary German-language writers such as Karin Struck and Ingeborg Drewitz, who, as Karl-Joseph Kuschel points out, emphasize Jesus’s role as “heretic,” “outsider,” and “archetype of unadapted, rebellious, provocative humanity,” while rejecting the Christ of church dogma (234–5). 11 Frier points out a continuity between Saramago’s preoccupation with the mechanisms of power in The Gospel and his 1993 play In Nomine Dei (which concerns the bloody conflict between

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Catholics and Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Münster) as well as his 1982 novel Baltasar and Blimunda, whose tyrannical king D. João V resembles Saramago’s novelized Herod, and, by extension, his ultimate tyrant: God (Frier 370). Characters in the Gospel who resist the tyrannical systems that oppress them (Mary Magdalene, Pastor, and Jesus) find their equivalents in other fictional figures such as Raimundo Silva in The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), or Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão in Baltasar and Blimunda (Frier 376). 12 Cousland also criticizes Saramago for creating a protagonist who bears “scant resemblance” to the biblical Jesus; consequently Cousland concludes that, “as a kind of serious Vita Jesu, Saramago’s Gospel is largely unsuccessful” (69)—a strikingly different assessment from that of Harold Bloom, who called Saramago’s novel “imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four canonical gospels” (2001: 155). 13 Žižek, Milbank, and Davis’s collection Theology and the Political (2005) brings together scholars from theology, philosophy, religious studies, cultural theory, literature, and social studies (with an introduction by the archbishop of Canterbury), and offers a variety of perspectives on theology’s continuing relevance to the analysis of the contemporary social order. Another volume, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (2009), a debate between Milbank and Žižek moderated by Davis, seeks to demonstrate that Christianity “uniquely proffers an emancipatory exit beyond the deadlock of capitalism and its supplement, liberalism” (21). A follow-up book, Paul’s New Moment (2010), reasserts the emancipatory potential of theological language: “We think there is a discipline or field of study that does possess the resources to mount an uncompromising stance against capitalism and its supplement, neoliberalism. That discipline is theology” (1). 14 Žižek expressed a similar sentiment ten years earlier in Fragile Absolute (2000): “Yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms— the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks” (2). Another variation on the affinity between Christian and Marxist thought appears in The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003): “My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience” (6).

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15 The contemporary collaboration between theology and Marxism is hardly untroubled. On the one hand, Milbank rejects the idea of an atheist “social gospel,” even if he speaks against the entrenched ideology of neoliberalism. On the other hand, atheist Žižek maintains that “a truly logical materialism accepts the basic insight of religion, its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one; what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, ‘higher,’ suprasensible reality.” Rather, “‘God’ (the divine) is a name for that which in man is not human, for the inhuman core that sustains being-human” (2009: 240). 16 For a discussion of “new atheism,” see Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate’s The New Atheist Novel (2010). For an argument in favor of biblical literacy among contemporary atheist thinkers, see The Secular Bible (2005) by Jacques Berlinerblau.

Chapter 2 1 Rather than a thief and traitor, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictions portray Judas as a victim of deceit, a passionate Jewish nationalist, or a trusted disciple who collaborates with Jesus—a Gnostic notion also found in the apocryphal Gospel of Judas. (In contrast, Peter, metonymically associated with the emergent institutionalized church, often finds himself cast as the gospels’ true villain.) Perhaps the most radical apology appears in Jorge Louis Borges’s masterful story “Three Versions of Judas” (1944). The protagonist, Swedish scholar Nils Runeberg, reinterprets the figure of Judas in three stages: first, as the only apostle who understands Jesus’s mission (and aids it with his self-sacrificing act of betrayal); then as the ultimate ascetic who goes as far as renouncing honor, goodness, and eternal happiness; and, finally, as God’s incarnation on Earth. Other notable examples of Judasinspired fiction include Aaron Dwight Baldwin’s The Gospel of Judas Iscariot (1902), G. A. Page’s Diary of Judas Iscariot (1912), Ernest Sutherland Bates’s The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot (1929), Igal Mossinsohn’s Judas (1963), Max Savelle’s The Gospel of Judas Iscariot (1967), Frank Yerby’s Judas, My Brother (1968), Peter Van Greenaway’s The Judas Gospel (1972), Henryk Panas’s The Gospel According to Judas (1973), Charles Schafer’s The Sanhedrin Papers (1973), Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stearn’s I, Judas (1977), Morley Callaghan’s A Time for Judas (1983), Pierre Bourgeade’s Memoires de Judas (1985), Cecil Lewis’s The Gospel According to Judas (1989), Michael Dickinson’s The Lost

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Testament of Judas Iscariot (1994), Daniel Easterman’s The Judas Testament (1994), D. S. Lliteras’s Judas the Gentile (1999), C. K. Stead’s My Name Was Judas (2006), Jeffrey Archer’s The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot (2007), and Bob Mayer’s I, Judas (2012). For a discussion of recent Judas-novels, see Hugh S. Pyper, “Modern Gospels of Judas.” For an account of twentiethcentury fictions narrated by contemporary Judas-like figures, see chapter seven of Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2 Biblical figures used as focal characters in modern gospel fiction include Pontius Pilate in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967), Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Pilatus (1952), and James R. Mills’s The Gospel According to Pontius Pilate (1977), revised and reissued as Memoirs of Pontius Pilate (2001); Pilate’s wife in Gertrud von le Fort’s The Wife of Pilate (1955); Mary Magdalene in Frank G. Slaughter’s The Galileans (1953), Luise Rinser’s Mirjam (1983), Mary Ellen Ashcroft’s The Magdalene Gospel (1995), Regina Berlinghof’s Mirjam (1997), Thom Lemmons’s Daughter of Jerusalem (1999), Marianne Fredriksson’s According to Mary Magdalene (1997), and Ki Longfellow’s The Secret Magdalene (2005); Peter in Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Big Fisherman (1948); Paul in Taylor Caldwell’s Great Lion of God (1970); Barabbas in Marie Corelli’s Barabbas (1893), Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas (1950), and Grace Johnson’s The Rebel (1996); Thomas in Steven Fortney’s The Thomas Jesus (2000); Nicodemus in Jan Dobraczyn´ski’s The Letters of Nicodemus (1951); Joseph of Arimathea in George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916); Simon of Cyrene in Johan Christian’s The Miracle of the Sacred Scroll (1997) and Sigmund Brouwer’s The Weeping Chamber (1998); and the two crucified thieves in D. S. Lliteras’s The Thieves of Golgotha (1998). Fictional characters serving the same function include: Judah Ben-Hur (an enslaved Jewish nobleman) in Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880); Marcellus and Demetrius (a Roman and his Greek slave) in Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942); Gaius and Marcus (a Roman centurion and his friend) in LeGette Blythe’s Bold Galilean (1948); Jonas (a Pharisee’s servant) in Frank G. Slaughter’s The Crown and the Cross (1959); a Jewish shopkeeper in Charles R. Swindoll’s Suddenly One Morning (1998); Tamar (a young girl) in Murray Watts’s The Miracle Maker (2000); and David ben Joseph (a merchant) in Gerald N. Lund’s The Kingdom and the Crown trilogy (2000–2006). The list even includes nonhuman subjects: a subgenre of biblical fiction for young readers retells the story of the Nativity from the (anthropomorphized) perspectives of animals, including a faithful dog, a special donkey, and the birds of Bethlehem. A discussion of novelistic gospel transfigurations written from alternative points of view can be found in the final chapter of Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus.

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3 See Fiorenza’s Bread Not Stone (1984); But She Said (1992); Searching the Scriptures (1993–4); Sharing Her Word (1998); Wisdom Ways (2001); and Changing Horizons (2013). 4 One example of this narrative type is Emma Tennant’s Sisters and Strangers (1990), which traces the life of Eve from blissful cohabitation with Adam to single motherhood and prostitution to work as a successful romance novelist, and, finally, an undervalued scientist. (Not surprisingly, in addition to meddling with the biblical canon, Tennant has produced fictional reworkings of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) Another example is Michèle Roberts’s The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), which imagines a utopian Ark-asLibrary that provides refuge to women writers and their stories (an example of Fiorenza’s hermeneutics of creative imagination). One chapter of Roberts’s intricate narrative retells the biblical myth of the Flood as experienced by Noah’s wife, who rejects the violent logic of her husband’s god. Genesis and the Flood are also evoked in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners (1985). For an in-depth discussion of these and other Bible-inspired novels by women, see Jeanette King’s Women and the Word (2000). 5 Such is the case with Mary Lee Wile’s Ancient Rag e (1995), which narrates the life story of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. Resistant to her cousin Mary’s comforting faith, Elizabeth expresses her anger at the god who gave and took away her beloved son. Mary Ellen Ashcroft’s The Magdalene Gospel (1995) imagines a gathering of women finding comfort in each other’s company on the eve of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, Miriam, Salome, Joanna, Martha, Mary, Susannah, Maria, Lydia, and Rhoda take turns recounting their memories of Jesus and his ministry. 6 For a study of Mary Magdalene in Western art, literature, and history, see Susan Haskins’s Mary Magdalen (1993). 7 Marianne Fredriksson’s According to Mary Magdalene (1997) contains a very similar exchange, also modeled on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. 8 As Timo Eskola points out, the use of Gnostic thought in feminist reworkings of the gospels tends to be selective. While Roberts embraces Gnostic cosmology, she rejects the dualism of body and soul. Roberts shares this reinterpretation with Fredriksson, in whose novel “the sin of ignorance means simply an alienation of soul from the body,” an idea that effects a “complete reversal” of Gnostic teaching (Eskola 72). For a discussion of Gnosis and women, see Elaine Pagels’s classic The Gnostic Gospels (1979).

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9 Roberts’s brand of biblical feminism upholds essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity, in contrast to the more radical poststructuralist approach that calls not for a reevaluation of women’s role in the Bible, but rather the dismantling of traditional definitions of gender altogether. As Esther Fuchs explains, “Poststructuralism does not take the history of women, or their ‘voices’ as antecedent to their textual inscription, or narrative representation, but, rather, it reads the biblical text as a site where woman as category is constructed and produced” (65). A fictional example of this anti-essentialist approach is Angela Carter’s gender-bending The Passion of New Eve (1977). Carter’s distrust of female myths (the goddess, the virgin, the mother), which she calls “consolatory nonsenses” (5), is articulated in the “Polemical Preface” to her The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978). 10 Tóibín’s disillusioned protagonist defies stereotypical ideas of holy femininity found in more traditional biblical fiction, such as Sholem Asch’s Mary (1949), with its lyrical images of Mary as a radiant young virgin, devoted mother, and submissive follower of Jesus. Tóibín avoids these familiar types, offering instead an old, bitter woman unyielding in her refusal to accept her son’s claims to divinity. 11 Appropriately, in the 2013 stage adaptation on Broadway, directed by Deborah Warner, actress Fiona Shaw stripped herself bare by the end of the play. 12 Another subversive feminist retelling of the crucifixion can be found in Dan Jacobson’s Her Story (1987). Writing in the year 2296, the volume’s fictional editor introduces a late twenty-first-century manuscript containing an imaginary narrative by the mother of the thief crucified at Golgotha. The narrator’s relationship with her son parallels the experiences of Mary—from the tenderness of infancy, to the pain of separation, to the agony of witnessing execution and death. 13 The apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Ehrman 2003b) fills in another gap: Jesus’s childhood between the ages of 5 and 12. Thomas’s gospel supplies the well-known episode of the holy child breathing life into clay sparrows. It is also the source of lesser known and more disturbing incidents, such as the young Jesus striking dead a boy who bumped into him, and furthermore blinding his victim’s parents. The Infancy Gospel focuses on Jesus’s precociousness and his miracles, including several resurrections, which serve to demonstrate the exceptional nature of the future Christ. 14 The interest in Christianity’s Oriental (and Hellenistic) sources goes back to the late nineteenth-century History of Religions

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School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ), which emphasized the role of ancient beliefs and rituals in shaping the emergent Christian religion. The rise of comparative mythology studies in the early twentieth century brought about a renewed interest in Christianity’s syncretic character, especially in the analogies between Jesus and pre-Christian gods and heroes. 15 The texts by Notovitch, Von der Planitz, and Dowling belong to the fraudulent genre of modern apocrypha, discussed in chapter four. 16 The opposite of the Oriental quest is found in Winifred Kirkland’s Portrait of a Carpenter (1931), whose Jesus spends his “missing years” pursuing an education and vocation in Nazareth. As Kirkland put it in the first chapter of her work, “The fact that the first and by far the longest period in the recorded life of the most extraordinary man in history passed without occasioning the slightest comment from his contemporaries, suggests that Jesus grew as other men grow, that he came to his amazing self-knowledge and self-security by normal methods of expansion” (5). An equally nonsensationalist Galilean childhood unfolds in Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord (2005). 17 A similarly nonliteralist reading is championed by the protagonist of Stan I. S. Law’s Yeshûa: “I believe that virtually the whole Torah and a great deal more of the ancient, and some not so ancient, writings are given to us in allegory. It is up to each individual to find his own truth in them. If you take them exactly as written, you do not do them justice” (81). In Ki Longfellow’s The Secret Magdalene, Magdalene’s teacher, Philo, applies the same insight to all religious myths: “What is truth? It does not matter whether a story is true or if it is not true. What matters is the eternal truth in the story. The goddess Truth does not come into the world naked; she has too bright a shine, so she clothes herself in symbols, as all gods and goddesses are symbols. It is the height of foolishness to take their stories literally” (101). C. K. Stead’s My Name Was Judas also features a Jesus character who understands the complex ontology of religious teachings, including his own: when Judas questions the veracity of one of his master’s stories, Jesus replies that, for the educated and skeptical Judas, the narrative might be “a parable” while for other disciples, it is “history” (23). The allied terms used in the three novels (“allegory,” “symbol,” “parable”) suggest different types of nonliteral truth-propositions contained in religious narratives. 18 Another unorthodox take on the three Magi can be found in Michel Tournier’s The Four Wise Men (1980). 19 This kind of subversive defamiliarization can be found in several other recent volumes. James Frey’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (2011), which imagines Jesus as a homeless man

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in contemporary New York, comes in a black leather-bound edition, as well as a limited art edition with red ink on parchment paper bound in white leather. The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot (2007), a collaboration between novelists Jeffrey Archer and biblical scholar Francis J. Molloney, is divided into chapters and verses, including verbatim gospel citations and marginal notes that indicate where a given scene might be found in the canonical text. Gilded edges and a satin ribbon complete the effect. While the relationship between novels and their scriptural model range from reverence (Archer) to comedy (Moore) to dark irony (Frye), external markers such as leather and gold underscore the fact that a modern bible is an easily recognizable, if multivalent, cultural object. The faux editions play with this sense of familiarity, allowing readers to project their own value systems and expectations onto the Bible’s literary simulacra. 20 A similar distrust of human stories is apparent in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son (1997), whose narrator-protagonist claims the double advantage of being an eyewitness and a deity. In his gospel, Jesus is quick to point out the inaccuracies and exaggerations of the canonical record: his parents never received gifts from the Magi (18); the miracle of the fish and loaves fed not thousands but five hundred people, with no leftovers (116), and so on. Jesus points out the human tendency toward hyperbole: “While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered” (3). The narrator even includes himself on the register of the fallible: “Exaggeration is the language of the Devil, and no man is free of Satan, not even the Son of God (and certainly not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John)” (117). He also acknowledges that all human texts are written from a specific rhetorical position. Nevertheless, unlike authors of scriptural metafictions, Mailer does not focus on the processes of gospel composition and canonization. 21 Founded in 1985 by Robert W. Funk and his Westar Institute, the highly controversial Jesus Seminar brought together a group of fellows interested in reconstructing the historical life of Jesus by means of archeological, historical, anthropological, and textual analysis. Their findings were compiled in several publications edited by Funk, most importantly The Five Gospels (1993) and The Acts of Jesus (1998). The seminar was also the inspiration for The Thomas Jesus (2000) by Steven Fortney. 22 The Jewish reclamation of Jesus (traditionally a taboo or maligned figure) goes back to the eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) claimed that the teachings and

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actions of Jesus were all in accordance with Jewish law and tradition. Following Mendelssohn, Joseph Salvador (1716–86) and Heinrich Graetz (1817–91) emphasized Jesus’s identity as an observant Jew and member of the Essene movement, while Abraham Geiger (1810–74) demonstrated his ideological alignment with the Pharisees. All three scholars argued that Jesus’s teachings were derived directly from Judaism. Victorian convert to Christianity Alfred Edersheim wrote an influential scholarly treatment of Jesus, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), which combined an in-depth account of first-century Jewish life and customs with strict adherence to Christian orthodoxy. The seminal study Jesus of Nazareth (1922) by Joseph Klausner, a Hebraist and Zionist, likewise placed Jesus within his original historical, geographical, and cultural context, and influenced generations of historical and literary reimaginings. A Jewish Jesus is a familiar figure in twentieth-century novels, including Ivan Naživin’s A Certain Jesus (1930), Aharon Avraham Kabak’s The Narrow Path (1937), Sholem Asch’s Yiddish trilogy The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949); Robert Graves’s King Jesus (1946) and Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953); Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965) and his New Testament translation, The Authentic New Testament (1955), revised as The Original New Testament (1985); Igal Mossinsohn’s Judas (1963), whose protagonist accuses Paul of adapting the story of Jesus, a “zealous Jew” (198), to “the understanding of idolaters” (197); and Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stearn’s I, Judas (1977). A thorough analysis of Jesus’s Jewishness can be found in the scholarly oeuvre of Géza Vermès, especially his Jesus the Jew (1973). Reza Aslan’s nonfiction bestseller Zealot (2013) synthesizes current scholarly knowledge on the life of the historical man Aslan describes as “the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost” (xix). For a history of the Jesus figure in the creation of modern Jewish identity, including extensive discussion of modernist Yiddish literature and art, see Matthew Hoffman’s From Rebel to Rabbi (2007). For an analysis of Jesus’s significance in Jewish writing of the twentieth century (especially Hebrew-language poetry, plays, and short fiction), see Neta Stahl’s Other and Brother (2013). 23 This stark summary resembles Alderman’s own stripped-down account of Jesus’s life in the novel’s epilogue: “Once upon a time there was a man, Yehoshuah, whose name the Romans changed to Jesus, for that sat more easily on their tongues. There may well indeed have been such a man, or several men whose sayings are united under that one name. Tales accreted to him, and theories grew up around and over him” (300).

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24 In his rejection of the myths rapidly accruing around the figure of Yehoshuah, Alderman’s Iehuda resembles Ricci’s rationalist Yihuda, as well as the protagonist of C. K. Stead’s My Name Was Judas. Stead’s Judas repeatedly laments the distortion of events he had witnessed, especially the false addition of miraculous occurrences: “Long ago I thought the Jesus story ended with my friend’s death on the cross, but it seems not. As the years go by, and as evangelists of the cult pass through, it becomes clear that the story flourishes like Arabian whispers, changing and growing over time and distance. Divinity proved by ‘miracles,’ and a promise of eternal life at the cost, merely, of ‘belief’—these are irresistible terms in a world full of poverty, misery, pain and death” (238). 25 The Liar’s Gospel closes with a brief epilogue in which Alderman discusses the rise of the Christian canon vis-à-vis anti-Semitism. When “Mark and then Matthew and then Luke the compiler and then John the theologian came to tell their stories,” they naturally tended to “exonerate the Romans, who ruled the empire they lived in, and to blame the Jews, whose wickedness had clearly caused the destruction of their holy city” (299–300). Their narratives perpetuated “a tale of how miraculous one man had been and how evil those who rejected him were [. . .] bringing good news for some and bad for others” (301). Alderman’s novel attempts to rectify this bias by developing the story’s contexts and reclaiming the Jewishness of its protagonist. The epilogue’s final sentence, “And all the sorrow that came after followed from this” (300), offers a chilling reminder of the role the canonical gospels had played in Christian Europe’s anti-Semitic history.

Chapter 3 1 The realist mode of approaching the Bible differs considerably from premodern typological interpretations, whose pluralist nuance gave way to historicist and psychological readings as the novel gained ascendancy. For a discussion of the influence of the rise of the novel on biblical readership, see Stephen Prickett, “From Novel to Bible” (2006). 2 James McGrath’s Religion and Science Fiction (2011), a collected volume that registers the increasing interest in the intersection of religion and science fiction in scholarly and popular debates of the last two decades, includes essays on topics as varied as female savior figures in postapocalyptic futures; sci-fi re-envisionings of classical mythology; the use of Christian theology in sci-fi

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depictions of good and evil; and the appearance of theological concepts in sci-fi films. For analyses of superheroes and their divine attributes, see Our Gods Wear Spandex (2007) by Christopher Knowles, and Do the Gods Wear Capes? (2011) by Ben Saunders. 3 In her “People stories,” Henderson, a pioneer of religious science fiction and one of the first female sci-fi writers to publish under her own name, offers young adult readers a consoling vision of a highly evolved, extraterrestrial spiritual community (the “People”) that welcomes the odd and the ill-adjusted, sharing its gifts of healing, telepathy, and prophetic insight. Religious and mystical references abound in the oeuvre of Philip K. Dick, from his classic science fiction works such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Ubik (1969), Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), and Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976, published posthumously in 1985), to his experimental “gnostic” trilogy: VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Informed by Dick’s study of Gnostic traditions and scriptures, VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) blurs the distinction between science fiction and theological speculation. The protagonist’s journal echoes Philip K. Dick’s own record of his visionary experiences and metaphysical musings, produced from 1974 to 1982 and published in 2011 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. In The Divine Invasion, Dick offers an unorthodox retelling of the incarnation narrative. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer recounts bishop Archer’s work on a new set of apocryphal scriptures, the Zadokite Documents, which contain the source material for the Q gospel (the speculated source for the synoptic gospels). 4 Writings on the psychological dimension of religion constitute a century-long tradition that includes the writings of Carl Jung as well as the pioneering work of William James, whose influential Edinburgh lectures became available to the general public as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Another interesting literary take on the interface of religion, psychology, and time-travel is Barry N. Malzberg’s Cross of Fire (1982), whose protagonist undergoes a treatment in the course of which he takes on the identity of Jesus. The therapeutic process goes awry when the patient refuses to acknowledge the fictitious nature of his adoptive identity, and loses touch with his present-day reality. 5 The problem of scriptural records is introduced in Vidal’s 1954 Messiah, which narrates the origin of Cavism, a new religion founded by John Cave and codified by Eugene Luther. As Cavism supplants Christianity, internal disputes lead to Luther’s exile and the erasure of his name from the religion’s official documents. In his final days, Eugene reveals the extent to which the now accepted scriptures pervert the message of the religion’s founder.

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6 The idea of a journalistic report from Golgotha recurs in several Jesus-novels. Jim Bishop’s The Day Christ Died (1957) offers an hour-by-hour reportage of Jesus’s final day. Stuart Jackman’s The Davidson Affair (1966) presents the events of the crucifixion and resurrection as part of a TV special (including interviews with Pontius Pilate, the high priest, Mary Magdalene, and several disciples) created by an intrepid investigative journalist. In Grayson Warren Brown’s Jesusgate (1997), a young crime reporter from New York City investigates the trial and execution of Jesus. 7 Vidal references the widespread Japanophobia engendered by the global success of Japanese corporations in the 1980s. 8 Baudrillard’s critique of traditional Christian metaphysics is shared by contemporary postmodernist theologians who reject the God of ontotheology in favor of nonlogocentric constructions of Christianity. For examples of postmodern theological thought, see Radical Orthodoxy (1999), edited by John Milbank et al., and the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (2001), edited by Graham Ward. 9 See also Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody (1985). 10 For nonfictional examples of biblical exegeses inspired by postmodernist theory, see Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives (1992) by Stephen Moore, and The Postmodern Bible (1995) by the Bible and Culture Collective (whose choice to publish under a group name defies traditional notions of authorial ownership). For journals promoting postmodernist biblical readings, see Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism and Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches. 11 Another novel that celebrates religion’s oral dimension is Romulus Linney’s quirky Jesus Tales (1980), the bulk of which is composed of variations on European folk narratives featuring the wanderings of Jesus and his best friend, Saint Peter. The chapters are narrated by a series of storytellers, including the Basque Country Spaniard, the Basque Country Frenchman, the Tuscan, the Sicilian the Hungarian, the Irishman, and the Texan.

Chapter 4 1 The work of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman popularized academic insights into ancient apocryphal texts and their implications for our understanding of early Christianity. Both scholars emphasize the doctrinal heteroglossia that preceded the triumph of what Ehrman calls “proto-orthodox” Christian factions (and their canon). The victorious groups, as Ehrman argues, “rewrote the history of the

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controversy, making it appear that there had not been much of a conflict at all, claiming that its own views had always been those of the majority of Christians at all times, back to the time of Jesus and his apostles” (2003b: 4). 2 A like trust in the possibility of recovering Jesus’s life can be found in Scholem Asch’s The Nazarene (1939), the first part of a New Testament trilogy dedicated to the lives of Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and Mary. The convoluted plot includes the figure of a twentiethcentury Polish Orientalist scholar and his young Jewish assistant, who believe themselves to be modern reincarnations of two of Jesus’s contemporaries: the former a Roman centurion, the latter a student of the rabbi Nicodemus. The novel offers both men’s accounts of their first-century lives, as well as fragments of a newly discovered gospel authored by Judas Iscariot. 3 A like skepticism is found in Anthony Burgess’s Man of Nazareth (1979), a novel based on the novelist’s highly successful screenplay for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. Burgess’s narrator is a trilingual scribe, Azor, son of Sadoc. Like Agabus and Onias, Azor offers a number of correctives to popular legends (the baby Jesus was not a giant), as well as the canonical gospels (water was not turned to wine at the Cana wedding; the groom at the wedding was Jesus himself). Azor is also aware of the power structures that produce and sustain official historical accounts: “Soon, I doubt not, there will be as it were official versions of Jesus and his life and his good news, made authoritative by men who claim authority, and enforced with every detail upon the faithful” (354). 4 The use of a scholarly apparatus was a common feature in nineteenth-century fictionalizing accounts of the life of Jesus, which combined novelistic interest with academic authority. Examples include Edwin A. Abbott’s Philochristus (1878) and Joseph Jacobs’s As Others Saw Him (1895), which include lengthy expositions and scholarly footnotes. The difference between Theissen’s Shadow and its Victorian predecessors is that the twentieth-century narrative is a full-fledged novel that bares its academic device, rather than a scholarly work thinly disguised as fiction. 5 The choice of the Book of Revelation also hints at the millenarianism of contemporary American evangelical Christians, who take John of Patmos’s text as a blueprint for US foreign policy in the Middle East. Faber, a Dutch-born, Australian-educated Scottish citizen, disapproves of contemporary US geopolitics and famously refused entry of his The Crimson Petal and the White (2001) for the Booker Prize to avoid association with UK support for the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

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6 A similar strategic use of biblical titles can be found in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), whose queer protagonist subverts the evangelical Protestant teachings of her childhood, and A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll (1951), which follows a modern Canadian Jew seeking his lost uncle in postWorld War II Israel. 7 Ironically, reviewers of Faber’s novel often cite the The Da Vinci Code as a reference point. Ian Sansom in The Guardian calls The Fire Gospel “ basically The Da Vinci Code with gags—and bile.” 8 Regretting his cowardice, the professor shows the manuscript to a friend before it is destroyed. The friend, in turn, recreates Philo’s text from memory for the novel’s narrator. This elaborate structure of imperfect reconstructions (Philo himself recollects, rather than takes down, Judas’s confession) points to the multiple levels of mediation involved in historical transmission. 9 The Gospel of Joseph belongs to the subgenre of transhistorical philological fiction best exemplified by A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). Meyer’s novel also recalls the real-life case of professor Morton Smith and his 1958 discovery (or fabrication) of fragments from the “Secret Gospel of Mark” (a lost text cited in a letter by the first-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch). For a succinct discussion of the Smith discovery and the controversy that followed, see chapter four of Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities. 10 The elusiveness of memory is an important theme throughout Meyer’s novel. In Schleyer’s letter to his nephew, the scholar remembers a chant heard during the night he acquired the Joseph epistles: “I still recall with such pleasure the singing of the monks as they prayed at the foot of the altar that night. In my many hours of solitude here, I’ve even tried to write it down: the hymn they sang that night. But I find even that eludes me. It is only the quality, an echo of the atmosphere of that singing that remains” (101). 11 In one of his footnotes, Schleyer references passages in the canonical scriptures (Mt. 24.3, Mk. 13.5) that depict Jesus conveying special messages to the inner circle of disciples. The idea of a hidden teaching is also central to Gnosticism. 12 The practice of cultural theft continues into the twentieth century and beyond: in the archaeological novels discussed above, the discoverers invariably choose (after only the briefest of deliberations—or none at all) to smuggle scriptural treasures to Europe or America rather than disclosing them to the local authorities. This gesture of ownership clearly reveals a sense of privilege, even duty, as self-appointed guardians of the world’s cultural heritage.

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Index Abbott, Edwin A. 128n. 4 Abbott, George 93 agape 31 Alderman, Naomi 39, 124n. 23, 125nn. 24–5 The Liars’ Gospel 12, 13, 53, 54, 56–9 Alter, Robert 112n. 7 Altizer, Thomas 112n. 5 Amazon.com 54, 95 Amis, Martin 8, 35 anawim 32 Ankersmit, Frank 25 apocrypha 16, 18, 42, 43, 83–4, 96, 97, 100, 115n. 1, 118n. 1, 121n. 13, 126n. 3, 127n. 1 see also Gnosticism; modern apocrypha Archer, Jeffrey 119n. 1, 123n. 19 Arnold, Matthew 8 Asad, Talal 10, 113n. 9 Asch, Sholem 121n. 10, 124n. 22, 128n. 2 The Nazarene 54 Ashcroft, Mary Ellen 42, 119n. 2, 120n. 5 The Magdalene Gospel 54 Aslan, Reza 124n. 22 Atwood, Margaret Penelopiad 1 Badiou, Alain 33 Baigent, Michael The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History 95

Bakhtin, Mikhail 1, 52 Baldwin, Aaron Dwight 118n. 1 Barbusse, Henri 115n. 4 Jesus 17–18 Barnabas 46 Barnhardt, Wilton Gospel: A Novel 84 Barth, Karl 17 Bassard, Katherine Clay 113n. 10 Bates, Ernest Sutherland 118n. 1 Baudrillard, Jean 69, 127n. 8 “The Precession of Simulacra” 71 Bauer, Bruno 5, 6 Benedix, Beth Hawkins 113n. 10 Bentley, James 115n. 2 Berlinerblau, Jacques 118n. 16 Berlinghof, Regina 119n. 2 Bible and Culture Collective 127n. 10 biblical villains 38–9 Bingen, Hildegard von 40 Birney, Alice L. 112n. 3 Bishop, Jim 127n. 6 Black, David 17 Blake, William 8 Bloch, Ernst 17 Bloom, Harold 112n. 7, 117n. 12 Blythe, LeGette 119n. 2 Boitani, Piero 14 Book of Revelation 93, 107, 108, 128n. 5 Book of Thomas the Contender 18 Borges, Jorge Louis 118n. 1 Bourgeade, Pierre 118n. 1

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Bowman, Frank 16 Bradbury, Ray “The Man” 63 Bradley, Arthur 8, 118n. 16 The New Atheist Novel 14 Bradstock, Andrew 34 Brouwer, Sigmund 119n. 2 Brown, Dan The Da Vinci Code 95, 96 Brown, Grayson Warren 127n. 6 Buchez, Joseph 17 Bulgakov, Mikhail 119n. 2 The Master and Margarita 109 Burgess, Anthony 128n. 3 Burns, Paul 114n. 11 Byatt, A. S. 129n. 9 Cabet, Etienne 17 Caldwell, Taylor 118n. 1, 119n. 2, 124n. 22 Callaghan, Morley 118n. 1 A Time for Judas 84, 96 Card, Orson Scott Homecoming Saga 63 Carruthers, Jo 113n. 10 Carse, James P. 80 The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple 13, 62, 73–8 The Religious Case Against Belief 73–5, 77–8 Carter, Angela 42, 120n. 4, 121n. 9 Casanova, José 9, 10 Catholic League 15 Cave, John 126n. 5 Cayce, Edgar 49 Chance, J. Bradley 113n. 7 Childs, Brevard 115n. 1 Christian, Johan 119n. 2 Christian love 31–3 Christian socialism 17–18 Coetzee, J. M. Foe 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 8 Collier, Andrew Christianity and Marxism 34

Constant, Alphonse-Louis 17 Corelli, Marie 119n. 2 Correy, Lee Starship through Space 63 Costa, Horácio 29 Cousland, Robert 31, 117n. 12 Crace, Jim 111n. 1 Cramme, Stefan 112n. 3 Davis, Creston 34, 117n. 13 Death of God theology 6, 7, 112n. 5 Debord, Guy 69 de Certeau, Michel 25 Derrida, Jacques 76 Dick, Philip K. 63, 126n. 3 Dickinson, Michael 118n. 1 Dillistone, F. W. 114n. 11 Dobraczyn’ski, Jan 119n. 2 Douglas, Lloyd C. 119n. 2 The Robe 39 Dowling, Levi H. 122n. 15 The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ 49, 85, 86 Drewitz, Ingeborg 116n. 10 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 119n. 2 Eagleton, Terry 12, 31, 32 Reason, Faith, and Revolution 3, 30 Trouble with Strangers 34 Easterman, Daniel 119n. 1 Eastman, Max 104, 105 Edersheim, Alfred 124n. 22 Eedes, Richard 93 Ehrman, Bart 37, 97, 115n. 1, 116n. 5, 121n. 13, 127n. 1, 129n. 9 Elias, Amy J. 116n. 8 Elwood, Roger The Road to Masada 54 Epiphanius 89 Eskola, Timo 6, 11, 120n. 8 Esquiros, Alphonse 17

INDEX

Faber, Michel 94, 128n. 5, 129n. 7 The Fire Gospel 13, 84, 92–7 Farmer, Philip José Jesus on Mars 63 feminism 40–8, 49, 59–60, 97, 120n. 8, 121n. 9 Ferretter, Luke 114n. 10 Fessenden, Tracy 113n. 9 fictional transfigurations 2, 11, 114n. 12 Fifth Gospel 94, 95 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler Wisdom Ways 41 Fish, Stanley 76 Fogazzaro, Antonio 115n. 3 form criticism 55 Fort, Gertrud von le 119n. 2 Fortney, Steven 119n. 2, 123n. 21 Foucault, Michel 4 France, Anatole “The Procurator of Judaea” 56 Fredriksson, Marianne 47, 119n. 2, 120nn. 7–8 According to Mary Magdalene 44, 45–6 Frei, Hans 7, 8, 112n. 6 Frey, James 122n. 19 Frier, David 30 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 113n. 10 Frye, Northrop 112n. 7 Frykholm, Amy 108 Fuchs, Esther 121n. 9 Funk, Robert W. 123n. 21 Galdós, Benito Péres 115n. 3 Gatrall, Jefferson J. 116n. 9 Gear, Kathleen O’Neal The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus 96 Geiger, Abraham 124n. 22 Gibson, Mel The Passion of the Christ 95 Gnosticism 43, 44, 83, 89–90, 118n. 1, 120n. 8, 126n. 3, 129n. 11

147

goddesses 44, 71, 92, 97, 121n. 9, 122n. 17 Goldberg, Michael 112n. 6 Goodspeed, Edgar J. 85 Graetz, Heinrich 124n. 22 Graves, Robert 86, 124n. 22 King Jesus 84, 87 Greenaway, Peter Van 118n. 1 The Judas Gospel 84, 96, 97 Guttiérez, Gustavo 17 Hamilton, William 7, 112n. 5, 114n. 11 Hanks, Thomas 34 Harmar, John 93 Haskins, Susan 120n. 6 Hauerwas, Stanley 112n. 6 Henderson, Zenna 63, 126n. 3 historiographic metafiction 4 historiographic metagospels 15–20 Hock, Ronald 113n. 7 Hoffman, Matthew 124n. 22 Hoffmann, R. Joseph The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions 54 Holy Spirit 32–3, 43, 51 Hungerford, Amy 8 Hurth, Elisabeth 114n. 13 Hutcheon, Linda 4, 22, 24, 25, 111n. 2, 127n. 9 Politics of Postmodernism 73 iconoclasm 1, 16, 25, 39, 104, 111n. 1 imitatio Christi 65, 114n. 12 Infancy Gospel of Thomas 121n. 13 Irenaeus 89 Iser, Wolfgang 77 Jackman, Stuart 127n. 6 Jacobs, Joseph 128n. 4 Jacobson, Dan 121n. 12

148

INDEX

Jacobson, Howard The Very Model of a Man 38 Jakobsen, Janet R. 10 Secularisms 10 James, William 126n. 4 Jameson, Frederic 3, 4, 69 Jauss, Hans-Robert 77 Jefferson, Thomas 112n. 4 Jesus childhood of 18, 48, 121n. 13, 122n. 16 crucifixion of 19, 21, 26, 32, 45, 46–7, 64, 65, 67, 70–1, 80, 92, 94, 97, 111n. 1, 121n. 12, 127n. 6 miracles of 22–3, 27, 30, 55, 58, 64, 88–9, 97, 121n. 13, 123n. 20 “missing years” of 12, 48–53, 114n. 12, 122n. 16 nativity of 89, 119n. 2 resurrection of 5, 21, 32, 33, 43, 55, 66, 70, 72, 80, 97, 121n. 13, 127n. 6 temptation of 25, 29, 64, 111n. 1 Jesus redivivus 114n. 12 Jesus Seminar 56 John 14, 37, 38, 43, 65, 66, 69, 79–80, 93, 107 John the Baptist 64, 66, 71 John of Patmos 93, 128n. 5 Johnson, Grace 119n. 2 Jones, L. Gregory 112n. 6 Judaism 38, 47, 50, 56, 69–70, 72–3, 87, 123–4n. 22 Judas 39, 53, 54, 56, 70, 77, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89–90, 96, 97, 98, 116n. 5, 118–19n. 1, 122n. 17, 124 Jung, Carl 126n. 4 Modern Man in Search of a Soul 65 Kabak, Aharon Avraham 124n. 22 Kächler, Uwe 111–12n. 3

Kahlenberg, Hans von 115n. 3 Kampf, Harold 115n. 3 Kasack, Wolfgang 114n. 13 Kaufman, Helena 116n. 7 Kaufmann, Michael 113n. 9 Kazantzakis, Nikos 111n. 1 Kermode, Frank 112n. 7 Kilworth, Garry “Let’s Go to Golgotha!” 64 King, Jeannette 43, 113n. 10, 120n. 4 Kirkland, Winifred 122n. 16 Kissinger, Warren S. 54, 112n. 3 Klausner, Joseph 124n. 22 Klein, A. M. 129n. 6 Knight, Mark 108, 113n. 10 Knowles, Christopher 126n. 2 Kuschel, Karl-Joseph 114n. 11, 116n. 10 LaCapra, Dominick 4, 25 Lagerkvist, Pär 119n. 2 LaHaye, Tim 107–8 Lamennais, Félicité 17 Langenhorst, Georg 11 Langguth, A. J. 80 Jesus Christs 13, 62, 73, 78–80 Law, Stan I. S. 122n. 17 Yeshûa: A Personal Memoir of the Missing Years of Jesus 49 Lawrence, D. H. The Escaped Cock 111n. 1 “The Future of the Novel” 8 Left Behind series 107, 108 Lemmons, Thom 119n. 2 Lerner, Gerda The Creation of Feminist Consciousness 40 Lewis, C. S. The Chronicles of Narnia 15 Lewis, Cecil 118n. 1 Lindbeck, George 112n. 6

INDEX

Linney, Romulus 127n. 11 Linton, Elizabeth Lynn 115n. 3 Lliteras, D. S. 119nn. 1–2 Logos 66, 69, 80 Longfellow, Ki 119n. 2, 122n. 17 The Secret Magdalene 44, 49 Lowth, Robert 112n. 7 Lukács, György 25 Luke 19, 38, 42, 43, 66, 78, 79, 115, 116n. 6, 123n. 20, 125n. 25 Lund, Gerald N. 119n. 2 Luther, Eugene 126n. 5 McClure, John 2, 113n. 10 McCowan, Archibald 115n. 3 McEwan, Ian 8, 35 Macfarlane, Helen The Communist Manifesto (English translation) 17 McGrath, James 125n. 2 McHale, Brian 13, 67 Postmodernist Fiction 62 McIntyre, Alasdair 115n. 2 Mack, Burton 37, 115n. 1 Magdalene 19–20, 33, 40, 42–6, 49, 51, 53, 54, 88, 97, 117n. 11, 119n. 2, 120nn. 5, 6, 7, 122n. 17, 127n. 6 Mahan, W. D. “The Archko Volume” 100 The Confession of Pontius Pilate 85 A Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court 85, 86 Mailer, Norman 123n. 20 Malarkey, Tucker Resurrection 84, 96, 97 Malzberg, Barry N. 126n. 4 Martin, George R. R. “The Way of Cross and Dragon” 63 Marxian and Christian thought, alliance between 34

149

Mary 26, 32, 33, 46–8, 53, 87, 121n. 10, 121n. 12 Matthew 8, 22, 37, 38, 51, 66, 78, 89, 94, 123n. 20 Mawer, Simon Gospel of Judas 84, 98 A Time for Judas 97 Mayer, Bob 119n. 1 Meier, Eduard Albert “Billy” 85 Mendelssohn, Moses 123n. 22 Mendès, Catulle “Childhood of Christ” 100 Meyer, Gabriel 116n. 5, 129n. 9 Gospel of Joseph 13, 84, 98–102, 104–6 Milbank, John 34, 35, 117n. 13, 118n. 15, 127n. 8 Miles, Jack 113n. 7 Mills, James R. 119n. 2 Mink, Louis 25 modern apocrypha 49, 85–6, 100, 114n. 12, 122n. 15 Molloney, Francis J. 123n. 19 Moorcock, Michael 73, 80 Behold the Man 13, 61, 62, 64–6 Moore, Christopher 39, 109 Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal 12, 48, 50–3, 59 Moore, George 111n. 1, 119n. 2 Moore, Stephen 127n. 10 Morrow, James Bible Stories for Adults 63 Only Begotten Daughter 63 Mossinsohn, Igal 118n. 1, 124n. 22 Nag Hammadi 83, 96 narrative theology 6, 7, 112n. 6 Naživin, Ivan 124n. 22 new atheism 35, 118n. 16 New Testament 14, 16–19, 22, 23, 31, 43, 44, 48, 70, 93, 94, 95, 103, 107, 113n. 7,

150

INDEX

114–15n. 1, 116nn. 4–6, 128n. 5, 129n. 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Antichrist 6 Notovitch, Nicolas 122n. 15 La vie inconnue de Jésus (The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ ) 49, 85, 86 ontology 3, 11, 13, 20, 27, 53, 61–3, 67, 70, 71, 73, 108, 116n. 7 orality 21–2, 37, 40, 45, 55, 75–6, 102–4, 127n. 11 Oursler, Fulton The Greatest Story Ever Told 52 Page, G. A. 118n. 1 Pagels, Elaine 97, 120n. 8, 127n. 1 Pals, Daniel 112n. 3 Panas, Henryk 86, 118n. 1 Gospel of Judas 84, 88–90 Park, Paul 39, 50 The Gospel of Corax 12, 48–50, 59 parody 27, 59, 73, 110, 111n. 2 patriarchy 40–3, 45, 97, 109 Paul 18, 40, 45, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 119n. 2, 124n. 22, 128n. 2 Pellegrini, Ann 10 Secularisms 10 Perkins, Judith 113n. 7 Peryn, John 93 Peter 21–2, 44, 45, 80, 103, 116n. 6, 118n. 1, 119n. 2, 127n. 11 Peterson, Daniel J. 112n. 5 Pevehouse, Dolores I, the Christ 49 philological fiction 13, 84–6, 92, 98, 106, 129n. 9 Phy, Allene Stuart 112n. 3 Pilate, Pontius 19, 56, 85, 86, 90, 91, 94, 96, 119

Planitz, Ernst Edler von 122n. 15 “The Letter of Benan” 49 “Letter of Benan” 100 Porges, Arthur “The Rescuer” 64 postmodernism 2, 3, 4, 10–12, 13, 16, 35, 62, 67, 73, 80, 110, 111n. 2, 116n. 8, 127nn. 8, 10 postsecularism 2, 9, 13–14, 30–5, 109, 113nn. 8, 9, 10 poststructuralism 10, 13, 61, 73, 113n. 8, 121n. 9, 127n. 10 Prickett, Stephen 48–9, 125n. 1 Pullman, Philip 8–9, 19, 24, 26 The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ 12, 15, 16, 18, 20–2, 25, 29, 35, 39, 92 His Dark Materials trilogy 15, 29 Pyper, Hugh S. 119n. 1 Rashid, Isa 85 Ravens, Ralph 93 Ravis, Thomas 93 realism 11, 26, 27, 42, 63, 108, 125n. 1 classical 38, 61 modern 28 spiritual 2 redaction criticism 22, 38, 47 Renan, Ernest La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus ) 5 Ricci, Nino 39, 125n. 24 “On Writing Testament” 56 Testament 12, 53, 54–6, 59 Rice, Anne 122n. 16 Rinser, Luise 119n. 2 Roberts, Michèle 39, 43–5, 47, 120nn. 4, 8, 121n. 9 The Wild Girl (The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene ) 12, 42, 44, 59 Robinson, Marilynne Gilead 2

INDEX

Rowland, Christopher 34 Ruether, Rosemary 45 Rushdie, Salman 52 Joseph Anton 109 Midnight’s Children 4 The Satanic Verses 1, 4, 109 Salvador, Joseph 124n. 22 Sansom, Ian 129n. 7 Saramago, José 20, 24, 25–30, 33, 34, 109, 116n. 7 116–17n. 11, 117n. 12 Cain 38 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ 12, 15, 16, 19, 22–3, 27–8, 30–3, 35, 61 Saunders, Ben 126n. 2 Savelle, Max 118n. 1 Savile, Henry 93 Schafer, Charles 118n. 1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 5 Schonfield, Hugh J. 124n. 22 Schucman, Helen A Course in Miracles 69 Schweitzer, Albert The Quest of the Historical Jesus 16, 90, 111n. 3 Scorsese, Martin The Last Temptation of Christ (film) 70, 111n. 1 scriptural metafiction 3–5, 9, 14, 16, 21, 35, 86, 97, 106, 108 secularism 9–10, 13, 18, 112n. 5 secularization 9–10, 112n. 5, 113n. 13 Self, Will 35 How the Dead Live 1 sexuality 33–4, 42–4, 65, 78, 111n. 1 Shaw, Fiona 121n. 11 Shehadi, Beshara 85 Silverberg, Robert Up the Line 64 simulacra 69–72 Slaughter, Frank G. 119n. 2

151

Smith, Morton 129n. 9 Smith, Zadie The Autograph Man 1 “socialist Jesus” tradition 16–17, 115n. 3 Stahl, Neta 124n. 22 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady The Women’s Bible 40 Stead, C. K. 119n. 1, 122n. 17, 125n. 24 Stearn, Jess 118n. 1, 124n. 22 Stevens, Jennifer 85 The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 112n. 3 Strauss, David Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeited (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined ) 5–6, 21 Stroup, George W. 112n. 6 Struck, Karin 116n. 10 Swindoll, Charles R. 119n. 2 Tate, Andrew 8, 113n. 10, 114n. 11, 118n. 16 The New Atheist Novel 14 Taylor, Charles 13 Taylor, Mark After God 10 Tennant, Emma 120n. 4 Theissen, Gerd 86, 128n. 4 Shadow of the Galilean 13, 84, 90–1 Theodoret 89 Thiemann, Ronald F. 8, 112n. 6 Thomas, Didymos Judas 116n. 5 Tillich, Paul 17 Tóibín, Colm 39, 47, 121n. 10 The Testament of Mary 12, 44, 46–7, 59 Tomson, Giles 93 Tournier, Michel 122n. 17 Tyndale, William 93 Vahanian, Gabriel 112n. 5 van Buren, Paul 112n. 5

152

INDEX

Vance, Norman 113n. 10 Vermès, Géza 124n. 22 Verne, Jules “L’Eternel Adam” 63 Vidal, Gore 80–1, 109, 126n. 5, 127n. 7 Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal 13, 61, 62, 66–73

Wile, Mary Lee 120n. 5 Winterson, Jeanette 120n. 4, 129n. 6 Boating for Beginners 59–60 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 1 Woodman, Thomas 108, 113n. 10 Wright, John W. 112n. 6 Wright, T. R. 113n. 10

Wallace, Lew 119n. 2 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ 39 Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 115n. 3 Ward, Graham 113n. 10, 127n. 8 Ward, Mrs .Humphry 115n. 3 Warner, Deborah 121n. 11 Watts, Murray 119n. 2 Weitz, Chris The Golden Compass 15 Wells, H. G. The Undying Fire 63 White, Hayden 4 Metahistory 24

Yandell, Keith 112n. 6 Yerby, Frank 118n. 1 Zbaraschuk, Michael G. 112n. 5 Zeffirelli, Franco 128n. 3 Ziolkowski, Theodore 17, 28, 48, 65, 110, 114n. 12, 115n. 3, 119nn. 1–2 Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus 11, 111n. 3 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 30, 33–5, 97, 117nn. 13–14, 118n. 15 The Monstrosity of Christ 30–3 The Puppet and the Dwarf 33