The only blurb on noted atheist Philip Pullman’s new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is written by Philip Pullman. In huge letters on the back cover, he says of his own work: “Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”
Christ imagines Jesus cleaved into twins. One brother—Jesus—makes human mistakes, getting into mischief and enjoying himself along the way. The other brother—Christ—is a self-righteous, crooked monster who manipulates his brother’s popularity into a religion. The most impressive part of the story is Pullman’s clear affection for Jesus as a fictional character: His Jesus is friendly and charismatic and he loves life, a more believable Messiah than all the stuffy Mel Gibson–esque approximations put together.
The problem is that Christ hews too closely to the familiar biblical story to bring anything new to the discussion. Beyond Pullman’s complaint, which is a literal illustration of perhaps the most unoriginal atheist idea in existence—”Jesus was a great philosopher; it’s just what Christians have done to his word that’s the real shame”—there’s not a whole lot there except for yet another retelling of the four Gospels of the Bible. Pullman doesn’t pack the book with enough imagination to transform it into a fairy tale (even a fraction of the energy he brought to his excellent His Dark Materials trilogy would have been welcome here), he doesn’t include enough detail to give the book a necessary historical weight, and the whole thing is slight enough that it barely feels like a novella. Only in the last part of Pullman’s blurb does he speak the truth: This is a story about stories, and as an entertainment, it sparkles for a moment before dissolving into a vague memory. 