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.

To celebrate the runaway success of Philip Pullman’s new novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, we are pleased to announce a limited-time offer for our app, where you buy the app and get the book free!

Our app contains the full ebook, the full audiobook (read by Mr Pullman) and twenty minutes of exclusive video interviews, and is available at the bargain price of £9.99. (The UK print edition is the same price, and the audiobook is £14.99. The videos are not available elsewhere.)

The first 50 people to purchase the iPhone app (and send their Apple sales receipt to pullmanpromo [at] enhanced-editions.com will receive a free hardback copy of the book itself, sent to your home. You can even choose which cover you want – there are two covers to the book, reflecting the controversial way that Pullman has created a twin brother (Christ) for Jesus.

Hurry though, this offer ends on Friday 16th April at midnight GMT.

For more details about the app, here’s a short promo:

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Buy on the app store

“As soon as men who believe they are doing God’s will get hold of power, whether it is in a household, or a village, or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them.”

Philip Pullman’s closing comments from the Oxford Literary Festival have received a lot of attention over the past few weeks, so we thought we’d share with you some of the video footage that didn’t quite make it into the app.

We visited Mr Pullman at his house in Oxfordshire, and (as well as the Q&A which is exclusive to the app) 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.

Pullman has recently said that this “soliloquy” is the only part of the text where he has Jesus speaking for the author. Last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in discussion with Marina Warner, Mr Pullman said that he “depicts Jesus losing his faith” and it is in this section that the loss of faith is most obvious. Jesus addresses God only to find that he is answered by silence, and in this reading, Pullman displays the vitriol and anger he feels not towards religion, but to the institutions who claim to be doing the work of God.

Find out more about our app for The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ in this short promo:

Purchase the app from the App Store or check out more of the features.

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.)

From one of the great modern thinkers, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ re-assesses the treatment of Jesus in the gospels, inviting readers to question how the myths and stories which have come to define our culture have themselves been formed, and to ponder the relationship between ‘gospel truth’ and history.

Part of the extremely successful Myths series, we are proud to announce the arrival of Philip Pullman’s latest novel on the App Store, and to add another Canongate title to our list.

The app contains the full text synchronised with the unabridged audiobook, expressively narrated by Pullman himself. Also included are nearly 20 minutes of intimate, exclusive video Q&A with the author, in which he expounds on how the book came to be, his own religious beliefs, and how he hopes the novel will be received.

Watch the trailer to find out what Philip Pullman thinks about enhanced ebooks, and to get a sneak peek at the app’s features:

Purchase the app from the App Store or check out more of the features.