The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

“A supreme storyteller … Pullman has done the story a service by reminding us of its extraordinary power to provoke and disturb.” – Telegraph

“A fierce and beautiful book…Though he wears his scholarship lightly as befits a master storyteller, there is no doubt in my mind that Pullman has a complete grasp of the intricacies of the quest for the historical Jesus.” – Observer

“Pullman – precisely because he is such a good story-teller – has only exacerbated the unbeliever’s difficulty.” – A. N. Wilson, Spectator

This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, of how they lived and of how one of them died. The death of the other is not part of the story.

In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told.

Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories.

About this Enhanced Edition

Available in the UK, USA and in Canada, the provocative new work by acclaimed novelist Philip Pullman has now been tailor-made for all iOS devices. It includes the full ebook, the unabridged audiobook read by the author and synchronised to the text, as well as exclusive video interviews.

This app is now optimised for the iPad. It’s free and available via the “Updates” part of the app store app for anyone who has already downloaded it.

About the author

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, in 1946 and grew up in Zimbabwe and Wales. He worked as a teacher for many years and his first children’s novel, Count Karlstein, came out in 1982. The Ruby in the Smoke, the first of the Sally Lockhart quartet of Victorian thrillers, was published in 1985.

He has won many awards, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year and a CBE. His acclaimed trilogy, His Dark Materials, has been published in thirty-nine languages, and was the subject of a hugely successful adaptation at the National Theatre in 2003-4 and 2004-5. Once Upon a Time in the North was published in April 2008.

Philip Pullman lives in Oxford with his family, where we recorded readings from a number of chapters from the book. Below is Philip Pullman reading from the ‘Jesus in the Garden at Gethsemane’, a pivotal chapter from The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Although this video didn’t make it into the final version of the app, it serves to demonstrate that Pullman reserves his scorn not for individual members of a religion, or even for religions themselves, but rather for those institutions that claim to be doing God’s work. He isn’t afraid to defend his freedom to say such things either, as the closing comments of his Oxford Literary Festival event can attest:

www.philip-pullman.com

The application has been developed in association with Canongate Books.

www.themyths.co.uk