Book Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

WILLIAM Blake famously said of the poet John Milton that he was "of the Devil's party without knowing it". Philip Pullman, despite the iconoclastic flourish of his reimagining of the most famous story ever told, seems to be of the Deity's party without knowing it.

The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ is a witty elaboration of Nietzsche's aphorism that the last Christian died on the cross. It is not surprising that theologians such as Richard Holloway and Rowan Williams have beamed at this elegant portrayal of the moral genius of the radical Jesus; nor that they chime with Pullman's denunciations of the moribund, misguided Church.

The title, however, is misleading. Although the goodness – the sometimes impossible, challenging goodness – of Jesus is evident, the scoundrel is far more sympathetic than you might expect.

Despite Ronald Knox's caveat for writers that "twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear", the gospel narrative almost begs for its schizophrenia and split personality to be made literal. Rather than "wholly God and wholly Man", Pullman gives us the hale, hearty, human Jesus and his sickly, clever, religious twin brother, nicknamed Christ. In perhaps the novel's most intelligent twist, Christ is the prodigal son's brother, the one who laments "lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends".

As the revolutionary mission of Jesus sweeps Galilee, Christ takes the role of scribe and biographer. In this, he is tempted by an enigmatic stranger, who tells him that "what should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom that what was" and that he is to be the vessel whereby timeless truth erupts into fallible history.

From the outset, Pullman stresses that the charisma and empathy of Jesus leads people to believe he has miraculous powers of healing. Christ, however, really can perform miracles – he turns his brother's clay sparrows into living birds – but he selfishly hoards his gifts. Christ, for all his trimming and compromise, is a cold idealist, while Jesus is an existential optimist.

The novel's emotional centre is similarly doubled. For Jesus, it is the agony in the garden, when he privately confesses that he has never heard the supernatural voice of God and that the divine is "like a grandfather who was loved once, but who has died, and we'll tell stories about you".

For Christ, it is the realisation that he is to be the one that sacrifices, not the one who is sacrificed. He is not even allowed to be a martyr. Perhaps the only false note is the expedient misrecognition of Christ for Jesus after the resurrection, although even here the reworking of the story of Doubting Thomas is handled with deft, subtle gracefulness.

The absolute ire is reserved for the Church. Christ doubles up as Satan for the temptation in the wilderness, where he puts forward his idea of a hierarchical, bureaucratic organisation and is dismissed by his brother. In the Gethsemane sequence, Jesus claims the "devil would rub his hands with glee" at the idea of the Church, and there are a few anachronistic swipes at abuse by priests. But Pullman is in the old and fine tradition of English anti-clerical writing, rather than a militant atheist. This is not the Gospel According to Dawkins.

The depiction of Christ saves this book from being polemic or propaganda. In many ways, he is a metaphor for the Author: the real creator of miracles, the visionary, the one who will inspire "the desire for beauty and music and art". He is the true tragic hero of the story.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, April 11, 2010