Update: Filmed by Mike Paterson for Canongate Books, we now have the video of Philip Pullman’s closing comments from his talk at the Oxford Literary Festival.
Here’s an example of the high-calibre content that we populate our in-app news feeds with; in this case the feed for Philip Pullman’s latest novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which is now available on the App Store.
Philip Pullman took to the stage of the Sheldonian Theatre yesterday (Sunday 28th March) to discuss The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in public for the first time. He was interviewed by Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times.
Pullman began by describing a childhood suffused with biblical stories – his grandfather was a clergyman – in which the figure of Jesus had loomed large. The genesis of the book came when he was approached to contribute to the Canongate Myths series in 2002/3 by publisher Jamie Byng, and then when Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams asked him if Jesus would appear in the author’s fiction. Pullman promised that he would ‘deal with him’ in a later book.
He actually had written about Jesus before, in a metaphorical sense, in The Scarecrow and His Servant, though the allegory had not been picked up by the public generally speaking. Asked about the decision to make Jesus and Christ separate characters, and specifically twins, Pullman cited Paul’s documenting of the life of Jesus and how he referred to the historical figure as ‘Jesus’ about 30 times, but as Christ 130+ times. It was this later re-casting of Jesus that inspired Pullman to create a Christ figure who would manipulate the life of his brother: to bring ‘truth into history’.
His research into the life of Jesus was exhaustive. As well as the four gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – which vary wildly in narrative shape though all retain a neutral and uninflected tone – he also read the apocryphal gospels and key works such as George Eliot’s translation of The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined by David Frederich Strauss.
Then the challenge in going about the writing process, which was a relatively speedy 4-5 months (he admitted it took sixteen attempts to get His Dark Materials off the ground), was knowing – as David Mamet put it – ‘where to put the camera’. The character of Christ also developed as one with far more psychological nuance than could be found in the gospels, ‘frightful, embarrassed’ as he is.
Kemp then struck to the heart of the book, and its twin concerns of ‘authorship and authoritarianism’: how stories come about and how institutional bodies can manipulate those stories to their own ends. The central irony and tragedy of the book, in Pullman’s opinion, is that the church is fatally compromised because ‘inevitably human problems occur’ where people seek to elevate themselves above others. Although without the church, Jesus’s life story might be lost. The Christian need for a church is seeded in the tension that exists between prophets and their followers and how those followers cope when a prophecy doesn’t come true.
Despite Christ’s weaknesses, and his manipulation of history under the spell of the mysterious Stranger figure in the book, Pullman admitted that he ‘came to like Christ a great deal, and dislike Jesus in turn’. Pullman’s Jesus can be strident and cold, as much as inspiring. The book exists because there is so much ‘room for speculation’ in the gospels, especially the ‘narrative tact’ of the resurrection.
Some interesting questions came from the audience: why Pullman doesn’t refer to Jesus as the ‘Son of Man’ as Jesus does himself numerous times in the gospels, and whether Jesus or Christ (as he has them) left the greatest legacy. Pullman was quick to praise the enduring meaning of the parables and the beatitudes, particularly the Good Samaritan, a story he feels you never forget once you’ve heard it, although he questioned the ‘truth’ of the gospels, comparing them to the conflicting views of a jury who have all heard the same evidence.
The Q&A also brought out the defiance in him, declaring that ‘I’m as certain as I can be that there is no God’, as he lampooned the Old Testament God: a ‘psychopathic tyrant’ guilty of ‘vainglorious boasting’.
He ended the event by calmly fending off the accusation that the book title was offensive to a Christian believer:
Yes it was a shocking thing to say, and I knew it was a shocking thing to say.
But no one has the right to live without being shocked.
No one has the right to spend their lives without being offended.
Nobody has to read this book.
Nobody has to pick it up.
Nobody has to open it.And if they open it and read it, they don’t have to like it.
And if you read it and dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it.
You can write to me.
You can complain about it.
You can write to the publishers, to the papers,
You can write your own book.
You can do all those things.But there your rights stop.
No one has the right to stop me writing this book.
No one has the right to stop it being published, sold, or bought, or read.
And that’s all I have to say on that subject.
(Thanks to brfuk.blogspot.com for the transcription of the last quote.)
