Philip Pullman - The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

‘Who do people say I am?’ Jesus asked.

‘Some say Elijah,’ said one disciple.

Another said, ‘They think you’re John the Baptist, come back to life.’

‘They say all kinds of names – prophets, mainly,’ said a third. ‘Like Jeremiah, for instance.’

‘But who do you say I am?’ said Jesus.

And Peter said, ‘You’re the Messiah.’

‘Is that what you think?’ said Jesus. ‘Well, you’d better hold your tongue about it. I don’t want to hear that sort of talk, you understand?’

When Christ heard about this he hardly knew how to record it for the Greek stranger. He was confused, and wrote it down in the disciple’s words, and then erased them and tried to formulate the expression to be more in keeping with what the stranger had said about truth and history; but that confused him further, so that all his wits seemed to lie scattered about him instead of working firmly at his command.

Finally he gathered himself and wrote down what the disciple had told him, up to the point where Peter spoke. Then a thought came to him, and he wrote something new. Knowing how highly Jesus regarded Peter, he wrote that Jesus had praised him for seeing something that only his Father in heaven could have revealed, and that he had gone on to make a pun on Peter’s name, saying that he was the rock on which Jesus would build his church. That church would be so firmly established that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Finally, Christ wrote that Jesus had promised to give Peter the keys of heaven.

When he had written these words, he trembled. He wondered if he were being presumptuous in making Jesus express the thoughts that he himself had put to his brother in the wilderness, about the need for an organisation that would embody the Kingdom on earth. Jesus had scorned the idea. But then Christ remembered what the stranger had said: that in writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor; and he felt uplifted.

Jesus continued his mission, speaking and preaching and offering parables to illustrate his teaching, and Christ wrote down much of what he said, letting the truth beyond time guide his stylus whenever he could. There were some sayings, though, that he could neither leave out nor alter, because they caused such a stir among the disciples and among the crowds that came to listen wherever Jesus went. Everyone knew what he had said, and many people talked about his words; it would be noticed if they were not in the record.

Many of these sayings concerned children and the family, and some of them cut Christ to the quick. Once, on the road to Capernaum, the disciples were arguing. Jesus had heard their raised voices, but was walking apart from them and didn’t hear what they were saying.

When they went into the house where they were to stay he said:

‘What were you arguing about on the way?’

They fell silent, because they were embarrassed. Finally one of them said:

‘We were discussing which of us was the most important, master.’

‘Were you, indeed. Come around here, all of you.’

They stood in front of him. Now in that house there was a little child, and Jesus picked him up and showed him to the disciples.

‘Whoever wants to be first,’ he said, ‘must be last of all and servant of all. Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes as humble as this child will be the most important in heaven. And whoever welcomes a child like this in my name welcomes me.’

Another time, Jesus had stopped to sit down, and people brought their little children to him to be blessed.

‘Not now!’ the disciples said. ‘Go away! The master is resting.’

Jesus heard them, and was angry.

‘Don’t speak to these good people like that,’ he said. ‘Let them bring their children here. Who else do you think the Kingdom of God is for? It belongs to them.’

The disciples stood aside, and the people carried their children to Jesus, who blessed them, and took them in his arms, and kissed them.

Speaking to his disciples as well as to the parents of the children, he said, ‘You should all be like little children when it comes to the Kingdom, otherwise you will never enter it. So be careful. Whoever makes it difficult for one of these little ones to come to me, it would be better for them if a millstone were hung about their neck and they were drowned in the depths of the sea.’

Christ noted down the words, admiring the vigour of the imagery while regretting the thinking behind it; because if it were true that only children could be admitted to the Kingdom, what was the value of such adult qualities as responsibility, forethought, and wisdom? Surely the Kingdom would need those as well.

On another occasion, some Pharisees tried to test Jesus by asking about divorce. Jesus had spoken about that subject in his sermon on the mountain, but they had spotted what they thought was a contradiction in what he had said.

‘Is divorce lawful?’ they said.

‘Haven’t you read the scriptures?’ was Jesus’s reply. ‘Don’t you remember how the Lord God made Adam and Eve male and female, and declared that a man should leave his father and his mother and join his wife, and the two of them shall become one flesh? Had you forgotten that? So no one should separate what God has joined together.’

‘Ah,’ they said, ‘then why did Moses make his specification about a certificate of divorce? He would not have done that if God had forbidden it.’

‘God tolerates it now, but did he institute it in Eden? Was there any need for divorce then? No. Man and woman then were created to live perfectly together. It was only after the coming of sin that divorce became necessary. And when the Kingdom comes, as it will, and men and women live together perfectly once more, there will be no need for divorce.’

The Sadducees also tried to trick Jesus with a problem concerning marriage. Now the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection or an afterlife, and they thought they could get the better of Jesus by asking him a question about that.

‘If a man dies without having children,’ they said, ‘it’s the custom for his brother to marry the widow, and beget children for him. Is that not so?’

‘That is the custom,’ said Jesus.

‘Well, now: suppose there are seven brothers. The first marries, and dies childless, so the widow marries the second brother. The same thing happens again: the husband dies childless, and she marries the next, all the way down to the seventh brother. Then the woman herself dies. So – when the dead are resurrected, whose wife will she be? Because she’s married all of them.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Jesus. ‘You don’t know the scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God. When the dead are resurrected they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They’ll live like the angels. As for the resurrection of the dead, you forget what God said to Moses when he spoke from the burning bush. He said, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Would he have spoken in the present tense if they were not alive? He is not the God of the dead; he is the God of the living.’

The Sadducees had to retreat, confounded.

But for all Jesus’s defence of marriage, and of children, he had little to say in favour of the family, or of comfortable prosperity. On one occasion he said to a crowd of people who wanted to follow him, ‘If you don’t hate your father and your mother, your brothers and sisters, your wife, your children, you’ll never become my disciple.’ And Christ remembered Jesus’s words when he’d been told that his mother and brothers and sisters had come to see him: he had rejected them, and claimed that he had no family except those who did the will of God. To hear his brother speak of hating one’s family worried Christ; he would not have chosen to write those words, but too many people had heard Jesus say them.