(Original Story Here) There is an interesting piece of New Testament apocrypha called The Acts of Thomas. Thomas, otherwise known as Didymus (from the Greek for twin), otherwise known as Judas, is the twin brother of Jesus.
The text is a Gnostic one, and Gnosticism was the seductive heresy that the evolving early Christian Church worked hard to suppress. Pre-Christian in origin, Gnosticism is a doctrine of dualism that allows for an untainted spirit and a corrupted body. Salvation is through knowledge (gnosis) of this composite self.
Such splitting is attractive to the human mind. We read the world in binaries: black/white, good/evil, body/soul, etc. Following this it is easy to see why the twin motif is so prevalent in world myth — think of Apollo and Artemis, Romulus and Remus, Jacob and Esau. The twin motif is a binary that allows us to look at aspects of the self within the self that are uncomfortable, contradictory or disowned. The twin motif is stretchy enough to include the Jekyll and Hyde problem, where the good self secretly harbours the bad self — the Jungian Shadow that we often deny but that must eventually be met and integrated for psychic wholeness, resolving the dualism of our natures.
Philip Pullman’s retelling of the Gospels splits Jesus and Christ into a pair of hostile twins. The good man Jesus is a leader and a teacher. His brother Christ is the scoundrel motivated by expediency and posterity. While Jesus tells his followers to take no thought for the morrow, Christ is secretly writing down everything that Jesus says, with his eye on the future publishing deal.
As the creator of Lyra, in the fabulous His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman would seem like a writer who wants to realise the female, but in this retelling Mary Magdalene fares no better than mother Mary. She continues her trade as a hooker, loves Jesus but has sex with Christ and, in Pullman’s undramatic Resurrection scene, fails to recognise that the impostor Christ is not his dead brother, Jesus. Pullman’s rewrite dulls mother Mary’s awareness, present in the Gospels, and wipes out the importance of the Magdalene as the only person — male or female — to recognise Jesus after the Resurrection. The central role of women in the Jesus story is as lost on Pullman as it was on the Church fathers.Pullman’s retelling starts with the young Mary married off to the older Joseph. This Mary is conventional, a simple, passive woman who gives birth to twins and doesn’t realise that the baby the angel told her about is the strong and healthy Jesus and not the puny mummy’s boy Christ. Mary manages to muddle the three astrologers into paying homage to the wrong child, in one of those fairytale crib swaps that leaves the rightful prince or princess usurped by an underling or changeling.
By relating the birth, death and Resurrection of Jesus as a case of mistaken identity and muddle, all the symbolic value of the story is destroyed. The Bible is not a literal text; its power is to pull the imagination away towards the unknown, not as a series of empty speculations but as a grapple with knowledge — gnosis — as something more than empirical that must contain the invisible and as yet unprovable; the span of Man as bigger than any of the boxes we make for ourselves, including the box of religion.
At its best, simplest and nearest to truth, religion is an imaginative act — one look at Western art for the past 1,000 years and that is obvious. So much so that Pullman’s His Dark Materials could not have been written without Milton’s Paradise Lost.
So while I can see that Pullman wants us to remember that any religious text is both a palimpsest and revisionary, his own revisionism fails to win me over, not because I am a believer but because the Bible stories are better.
The central plank of the retelling — the splitting of Jesus Christ into Jesus and Christ — does not play with the possibilities of the apocryphal text it uses. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code riffs on the Acts of Thomas story when the twin Thomas known as Judas is so appalled by his betrayal of his brother Jesus that he is crucified in his stead, allowing Jesus to flee to France with Mary Magdalene, where he founds a bloodline. Pullman has Jesus die on the Cross, leaving room for a doubtful and doubting Christ to take his place as the resurrected Messiah.
There is a sinister dark angel figure who coaxes the ineffectual Christ in his substitutions, though by the end of the story Christ no longer believes this figure is an angel — probably he is a member of the Sanhedrin, the MI5 of Judaism.
Pullman’s narrative method is to retell a selection of the Gospel stories and show how they might have been twisted. So the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes, when the food feeds thousands, turns out to be an early act of socialist sharing where everyone gives his neighbour something of what he has.
Fair enough if you need to read the Bible literally. If you read the story symbolically, the power of less has a double message; a reminder to put first things first — “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God ... and all these things shall be added unto you” — and the strange fact so beloved of fairytales that the energy that drives life is not material and cannot be quantified. The Golden Goose keeps laying. The Magic Pudding feeds all.
All of Jesus’s miracles in the Gospels are an affront to literalness — the dead are raised, the blind see — and an invitation towards energy, creativity and the possibility of a different order.
Pullman doesn’t want to understand this, and that may be why he has chosen to use a flat language, which makes me long for the rich and problematic language of the King James Bible, where the words themselves move us away from too much literalness towards an opening in the mind. Pullman’s text is instruction-manual English. It reads like The Good News Bible, but for atheists.
Philip Pullman is a good writer so this must be a choice. Unfortunately it is a choice that leads the reader away from imagination and back into the literalness that Pullman set out to challenge.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman (Canongate, £14.99; Buy this book; 244pp)
