The Life of Jesus Christ

Anne Rice’s second installment in her series Christ the Lord is out.  It covers the period before Jesus’ baptism, when he is dealing with the efforts of his family to get him to marry and settle down, to the miracle at Cana.  Already, the reviews are appearing, for example at the blog site Challies Dot Com, which is critical of some of the book’s theology.  Though the review is closely reasoned, I am reminded of my reaction to similar criticisms of my own novel — “I look forward to reading your Jesus novel to see how you handle the passage.”  Which is not to say that either my story or Anne Rice’s is free from error — or that my pastor’s sermon last Sunday was free from error.  We do the best we can, and in each attempt our vision seems a little clearer.
     What interested me about The Road to Cana was its first-person point of view, Jesus’ own.  She did this is her first Jesus novel, but in Out of Egypt, Jesus in only seven, and it seems not quite so presumptious.  I only occasionally gave Jesus some interior monologue (for example, at the beginning of Chapter 8), and I ended up editing and re-editing those scenes. 
     Anne Rice is good at presenting scenes dramatically — unlike Norman Mailer in his first-person Gospel According to the Son — and has some striking imagery.  For example, when Satan appears to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, he looks just like Jesus himself, only much better dressed.  The novel is thought-provoking and engaging — and not for everyone.

Booklist, the trade journal of the American Library Association, once ran a list of novels based on the life of Jesus.  Many of them are controversial, and almost anyone can find a story to offend them.  In order of publication, the novels were:

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) by Lew Wallace.  The subtitle is a bit misleading: The Gospel story is merely the frame for the story of Ben-Hur’s enslavement, revenge, and eventual redemption.

The Man Who Died (1929) by D.H. Lawrence.  Consistent with the sexual interests of the author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Jesus rises from the dead and has an affair with a priestess of Isus.

The Nazarene: A Novel Based on the Life of Christ (1939) by Sholem Asch.  Described in more detail elsewhere on this site, the book involves the soul of a Roman soldier int he body of a 20th-century Christian scholar.

King Jesus: A Novel (1946) by Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1960) by Nikos Kazantzakis.  Jesus comes down from the cross — something I longed for as a child almost everytime I saw a Jesus movie — and raises a family.

Behold the Man (1966) by Michael Moorcock.  Moorcock is a science fiction writer, and this won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of the year.  In it a 20th-century sceptic travels back in time only to become the center of religious fervour.  He becomes confused with the idiot son of Joseph the Carpenter and ultimately dies on the cross.

Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992) by Gore Vidal.  Discussed elsewhere on this site, the book involves a time-traveling TV news crew and a Jesus who is fat and insane.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1994) by Jose Saramago.  Jesus is seduced by Mary Magdelene.

Gospel of Joseph: A Father’s Story (1994) by Gabriel Meyer.  Supposedly a translation of Joseph’s writings presented with commentary.

Gospel Of Corax (1996) by Paul Park.  Jeshua of Nazareth travels to the Himalayas with a runaway slave named Corax.

The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (1997) by James P. Carse.  The story told from the point of view of a Samaritan woman.

The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel (1997) by Norman Mailer.  Discussed elsewhere on this site, in this book Jesus tells his own story in a musing, undramatic way.

The Gospel According to Gore Vidal is a time-travel story.  A computer hacker is erasing the past, including the Good News.  Timothy, the narrator, is commissioned to record the gospel and bury it lest it be lost to posterity.  NBC, a division of General Electric, has dispatched a news crew to the first century to record the crucifixion.

The author’s displays of cleverness are intermittent, but his offensiveness is not.  Jesus is presented as a fat man with a glandular problem whose voice is so shrill that only dogs are able to hear everything he said.  Paul is a flaming homosexual dominated by greed.  You get the idea.  If Christians were as volatile as Islamic fundamentalists, Vidal would have had to spend the last fifteen years in hiding.

Sholem Asch was the best known Yiddish writer of his day and, thanks to The Nazarene,  the most controverial.  The book was an effort to bring Christians and Jews together by emphasizing their common historical and theological roots.  It was published in 1939, just as Jews were beginning to face organized persecution in Nazi Germany, and his Jewish was not appreciative.

The book was, however, an enormous success commercial, and despite accusations of apostacy, Asch went on to write The Apostle, a novel about St. Paul, and Mary, which portrayed Jesus’ mother as the Jewish “handmaid of the Lord.”

The Nazarene had a complex construction.  In Part I, an anti-Semitic scholar tells an assistant about his prior life as a Roman commander under Pontius Pilate.  Part II is purportedly a translation of a manuscript penned by Judas Iscariot.  In Part III, the assistant imagines a past life of his own as a witness to Jesus’ final days.  It is a thick novel, rich in detail. 

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal sounds like it has to be disrespectful and profane — the definition of blasphemous  — and I doubt even the author would disagree that it is. It begins, “You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me. I was there. I know.” With this, Moore neatly sidesteps the problem faced by any recounter of the gospel narrative: How suspenseful can a story be, when everybody already knows how it ends?

The novel begins in modern-day American and contains Buddhist and Hindu subplots. In recounting the unknown years of Jesus’ life, Moore explains the origin of the Easter bunny and other mysteries.

One MySpace blogger, praising the “rad sense of humor,” promises that the book will make you pee in your pants. She quotes a particularly vulgar passage to make her point. It seems to be the most quoted passage of the  book.

On the plus side, some of Amazon.com’s Christian customers say that the novel gave them a stronger sense of Jesus’ humanity — which, of course is the core of the gospel:  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

In 1998 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jose Saramago, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

His book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ has been described as “irreverent, profound, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provocative and compelling.“  In the novel, Joseph overheard a soldier talking about Herod’s plan to slaughter the infant boys of Bethlehem (rather than learning it from an angel, as in the gospels).  Joseph acted in stealth to save his own son, but did nothing to avert the general carnage.  Guilt plagued him for the remainder of his life, as Saramago works out his astonishment at Joseph’s chosen course of action.

Written in Portugese under the title O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, it is available to English-speakers in translation.

Perhaps few would consider Ben Hur a “Jesus Novel,” despite its title. Yet the gospel story is the frame for the story of Ben Hur’s enslavement, his revenge, and his redemption.  American Timeline has recently posted a brief bio of the author, Lew Wallace.  While best known for this novel, Wallace was also a Union general during the Civil War and later the governor of New Mexico.

Ann Rice of Interview with the Vampire fame has written a book based on Jesus’ Egyptian boyhood. There is nothing on this in the gospels, other than an indication that Joseph fled to Egypt with his family and stayed there until after the death of Herod the Great.  (Matthew 2:13-15)  Rice made it all up, subject to what her research revealed about the time and place. 

A greater constraint, if she was to be faithful to the gospel accounts, was to faithfully render what the Incarnate God would have been like when he was seven years old — or when his human nature was seven.  Two blog reviews are of interest here, one because Ann Rice herself commented on the review, the other because it reviews the book in the context of Christianity’s relationship to the arts.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., has made a niche for himself in writing novels based on Bible stories.  The most ambitious, The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel, has been followed by Paul: A Novel and Jesus: A Novel.  His works are orthodox and reverent, rather than revisionist, but he does make some odd choices in fleshing out his scenes and characters.  For instance, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, makes nails to be used in crucifixions.  (See an excerpt from the Publishers’ Weekly review.)  This reminded me of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ – a very unorthodox work, and for me unedifying – in which Jesus the carpenter supplements his income by making crosses.

That Wangerin’s work doesn’t fall in the same category is evidenced by what people are saying about it, for example in the blog Novel Reviews and CB Reviews.

Norman Mailer’s book is full of the philosophical musings of Yeshua.  Few scenes are presented dramatically or at any length, but I’ll admit I skimmed the novel.  Speaking in the first person, Jesus sets out to put the record straight, critiquing the gospel accounts as he goes.

    In my own story I slipped into Jesus’ mind rarely and briefly, and when I did, I blew it.  Even a page or two at a time is fraught with peril.  To do it for a book-length manuscript is…well, is likely to produce just what Mailer has given us.