the good man jesus and the scoundrel christ by philip pullman

Christ is like a figure in a novel,' Pullman says. 'Christ is this complicated character, and I call him a 'scoundrel' in the title but we soon come to see he not so much of a scoundrel as a confused man. Pullman says his Jesus tracks closely with the Jesus described in the New Testament, but Christ is his own invention. Christ follows his brother, watching from the sidelines and writing down what he does, and then embellishing the truth, even reporting miracles when there were none.

Jesus takes up his father's trade, but early in his life he asserts his independence from his family: He becomes an itinerant preacher, attracting big crowds with his charismatic personality. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel ChristĬhrist, his mother's favorite, is weaker than Jesus both physically and emotionally. Instead, the archbishop asked Pullman, 'Now where did he fit into my. 'He pointed out that although I dealt with organized religion in that novel, His Dark Materials, I hadn't actually mentioned Jesus,' Pullman says. It happened one evening when the two were appearing together to discuss His Dark Materials. The His Dark Materials trilogy made Pullman famous - the first book was made into the special-effects-heavy film The Golden Compass starring Nicole Kidman - and was widely recognized as an attack on religion, so Pullman's inspiration for his new book came from an unlikely source: the archbishop of Canterbury. An atheist, Pullman despised the messages embedded in Lewis' Christian allegory, so he wrote his own trilogy in response, titled His Dark Materials after a line from Milton's Paradise Lost. The author Philip Pullman is one of its best-known detractors. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia is a much loved work of literature - but not universally loved.

The good man jesus and the scoundrel christ by philip pullman