An editorial in the Guardian this morning talked about Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, for which we created the ebook app, calling it the perfect Christmas read and arguing that open-minded Christians will relish Pullman’s take on the nativity story:

In praise of … The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

For moralising monks and parents bankrupted by materialistic children, it is a commonplace at this time of year to bemoan the divorce between the winterval that rules the high street and the real meaning of Christmas. Happily, the book of 2010 provides a gift to reconnect the two. Philip Pullman’s take on the nativity story – which starts with Mary conceiving after an evening visit by an angel who looked “just like one of the young men who spoke to her by the well” – will not appeal to believers of a rigid bent. Nor, for that matter, will his reworking of the entire gospel as a tale of two twins, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the one a fountain of simple virtue, the other set on building a mighty church on the foundation of “improved” truth. But open-minded Christians will relish it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, hailed a “searching, teasing and ambitious narrative”, which fell short only if measured against the “still more resourceful text” of the gospels he preaches. Pullman retells the great tales of the good book in the pitch-perfect idiom of modern Bible translations, assembling such a persuasive director’s cut from official texts and ancient apocrypha that he had to emblazon “This is a Story” on the back cover to prevent the exercise from getting out of hand. Amid the carols and nativity plays, the human impulse to tell and retell tales is central to the real meaning of Christmas. Regardless of whether Pullman has anything to say about the real Jesus, he has a good deal to say about that.

Here’s the trailer for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:

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 ‘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:

The enhanced edition, with the full text, the unabridged audiobook synchronised to the ebook, read by the author, and exclusive video interviews, is available for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and you can download it here.