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Reading Thomas Jefferson’s Bible
“Jefferson’s narrative rumbles along at ground level, on square wheels—no baptismal shock of light from above, no dove descending. And no risen Jesus. The Jefferson Bible ends with Jesus snug in the tomb, the cave mouth securely plugged, gobstopped, by the not-to-be-moved stone. No more words. Resurrection foreclosed. And it’s odd: As a regular, somewhat inspired guru-human, Jesus makes less sense than before. My yoke is easy and my burden light … I am the good shepherd … Stripped of their divine warrant, these weird claims make the Jeffersonian Jesus sound like Charles Manson.”
📚 The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, by Peter Manseau
(LUCILLE CLERC)
Philip Pullman’s Problem With God
“Pullman’s 2010 counterfactual retelling of the events of the Gospels is … a fiercely imaginative encounter with Christianity … Here’s Jesus, and Jesus is okay—more than okay; he’s a rebel and a trickster and an overturner, in love with the people, a proper republican in the Pullman sense of the word: instinctively fraternal and anti-institutional, spreading his rough-and-ready enlightenments across the horizontal axis. Pullman’s Jesus doesn’t do miracles—no magic here—but he does change people.”
📚 The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman
(COUNTERPOINT)
A Sinner Reimagines the Bible
The protagonist “has stitched together a ‘Bible of her own’ … She’s been radically reimagining Old and New Testament stories. In 62 very brief tales, she evokes kindred spirits buffeted by a sense of divine implacability. Isaac feels lost, invisible. ‘Get out!’ a terrified Mary tells the angel Gabriel, repelling him again and again before she at last lets him in. God, too, is on edge, unmoored.”
📚This Is Why I Came, by Mary Rakow
(DJENNO BACVIC PHOTOGRAPHY / THE ATLANTIC)
What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?
“At a September 2012 academic conference in Rome, Karen King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, made a major announcement. She had discovered a fragment of papyrus that bore a shocking phrase: ‘Jesus said to them, My wife.’ If the scrap was authentic, it had the potential to upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.”
📚 Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, by Ariel Sabar
The Testament of Mary Isn’t About Jesus’s Mother at All
“Mary relates some of Christ’s most well-known plot points—the raising of Lazarus, turning water to wine, the crucifixion … To Tóibín’s Mary, Christ and his disciples aren’t the varnished figures you’d see in a da Vinci painting; instead, they’re awkward, slightly unruly outcasts—more like a group of gangly, cargo-shorted teens who skipped the Homecoming dance to go cliff-jumping at the quarry.”
📚 The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín
About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Mary Stachyra Lopez. The book she’s reading next is Endless Night, by Agatha Christie.
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