Philip Pullman’s Jesus

James Crossley (SBL, 2014)

Introduction
What I want to do in this paper is to use Philip Pullman’s book, The Good Man Jesus and the
Scoundrel Christ (2010), to look at some popular ‘secularised’ receptions of Jesus, and see how they
tie in with academic reconstructions of the historical Jesus.

Philip Pullman and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Philip Pullman is a bestselling novelist best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy. His Dark
Materials engages extensively with biblical traditions (particularly as refracted through Milton) but
Pullman does so as a self-identified atheist who has been, in the UK at least, a high-profile critic of
the church and religion. For reasons that may become clear in due course, it is worth mentioning that
Pullman was, until recently, a supporter of the Liberal Democrat party. For those unfamiliar, the
Liberal Democrats are, for now, the third major political party in the UK. They are typically deemed a
‘centrist’ party who are, broadly speaking, socially and economically liberal, strong on civil liberties,
and critical of state intervention in the life of the individual, though a tradition of state intervention for
the more needy in society is also a significant part of their political history. For reasons that may also
become clear, it is worth mentioning that Pullman has close connections with Oxford.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a retelling of the Gospel and New Testament stories
with Mary giving birth to twins, Jesus and Christ. Put crudely, these represent the Jesus of History and
the Christ of Faith, as Pullman has also claimed, and as the title implies. The character of Jesus in
Pullman’s book is perhaps already familiar to historical Jesus scholars. This is someone who is blunt,
charismatic, just, fair, and expects the imminent kingdom of God. This Jesus is also opposed to what
is conventionally labelled ‘organised religion’ and bureaucratic development of a church which will
inevitably bring about hierarchies and abuse of power as it tries to distract people from their miseries.
The darker character of Christ, of course, represents Gospel embellishment and the establishment of
church authority and power. Pullman has admitted that some of Jesus’ criticisms of ecclesiastical
development in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ are effectively his own voice. This is
not a surprise to anyone familiar with Pullman’s thinking.

Singling Out Jesus

Pullman’s book stands in a long tradition of singling out Jesus as a figure who had been
misunderstood by the Church and even by the New Testament and Gospel writers. In fact, this
construction of Jesus has a fairly precise ideological match with Pullman’s presentation of the Good
Man Jesus in that this Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Jesus has been a way for those who
identify as ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’, or those who are hostile to what is perceived to be ‘organised
religion’, to reclaim a Jesus for more liberal or politically radical sensibilities. Such a ‘Jesus’ distinct
from ‘Christ’ and ecclesiastical dogma can be found among a number of diverse figures and groups,
figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Berkman, H.G. Wells, John Lennon,
Monty Python, Bill Hicks, Sinéad O’Connor, and Russell Brand (the latter even looks like the
physical manifestation of the radical Jesus). It is the sort of Jesus that might be associated with
popular receptions of (say) Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, or even Russell Brand, and
a Jesus who is remembered as preaching an anti-establishment message of love and tolerance and
siding with the marginalised, rather than (say) predicting weeping and gnashing of teeth, talking about
the Passover sacrifice, calling a gentile woman a ‘dog’ or seeing himself with a prominent authority
position in the coming kingdom. The comedian Bill Hicks, for instance, directly contrasted the
implied violent, Uzi-carrying right-wing Jesus with a Jesus—Hicks’ Jesus—who would have been
critical of American foreign policy, the American government, advertisers, and corporations. This
anti-establishment Jesus is, like Hicks, understood to be part of the resistance and thus has to be killed
(Hicks perform mock-executions of himself at the end of his act). But if we all follow the vision of
this radical Jesus (and Hicks) things might be very different. 1 Hicks concludes:
It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now,
between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns,
close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one…Take all that money that we
spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and
educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being
excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. 2
Pullman’s Jesus is not quite so revolutionary and stands comfortably in a more sedate liberal tradition
of Jesuses which have been associated with likeminded English thinkers. Fellow Oxford-connected
atheist and Liberal Democrat supporter, Richard Dawkins, has had similar things to say about Jesus. If
Jesus existed, Dawkins argues, his morals were ‘a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old
Testament’ and ‘surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is
way ahead of its time’.3 Dawkins even wrote an article called ‘Atheists for Jesus’. 4 A close friend of
Dawkins and yet another with ties to the Liberal Democrats (especially their precursors, the Liberal
Party) is the late sci-fi writer, Douglas Adams. Adams also openly identified as atheist and,
predictably enough, produced a similar take on Jesus to those Dawkins and Pullman. According to
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979):

1
B. Hicks, ‘Relentless’ (Centaur Theatre, Montreal, 1991), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIA5dL7VJxg.
2
B. Hicks, ‘Shock and Awe’ (Oxford Playhouse, November 11, 1992), http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=UTwgooaYC3U .
3
R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), p. 250.
4
R. Dawkins, ‘Atheists for Jesus’, Free Inquiry 25 (2005), pp. 9-10.
 And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree
for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in
a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all
this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This
time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
While Pullman’s Jesus may be part of a broad, Enlightenment-inspired tradition, we can see how this
Jesus is used in a more specifically a product of the English liberal middle class with some strong
Oxford connections and which, particularly in the form of New Atheism, has produced some of the
most high-profile critiques of their constructed opposite: religion, and particularly fundamentalism.

The Good Man Jesus in Scholarship

Plenty more examples of non-ecclesiastical, non-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian liberal or radical
secularised Jesuses could be given. And plenty could be given, of course, from New Testament
scholarship and the common use of the dichotomy of the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. As
Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote in his review of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ,
‘Pullman knows his biblical scholarship. Virtually everything in his novella, except for the
storyteller’s brilliant restructuring of the tale as of two brothers, is foreshadowed in what Protestant
professors have been saying in Tübingen and Berlin over the last two centuries.’ 5 While Pullman was
emphatic in claiming that the novel really was fiction, he did claim that ‘I think my version is much
closer to what Jesus would have said. The version in the Gospels is so different from what he said
usually.’ Indeed, the Afterword to The Good Man Jesus tries to explain precisely this, as well as
laying down a challenge to Christians.

MacCulloch is right: this Jesus is embedded in the history of the field and there are no signs of an
uncoupling. As Halvor Moxnes has shown, the quest for the historical Jesus was being developed in
the nineteenth century and in line with European nationalism, as old authorities, including
ecclesiastical authorities, were being dismantled and new nationalist and liberalised models of the
nation state were being discussed. Enter Jesus the Great Man of History who could function as the
universal representative of these developing ideas. 6 These ideas have hardly gone away. Of his own
reconstruction of Jesus, Sanders insisted that he would ‘propose explanations just as does any
historian when writing about history’ and suggested that ‘Jesus’ own theology and the theologies of
his first followers’ were to be explored, tellingly, ‘in the same way as one studies what Jefferson
thought about liberty, what Churchill thought about the labour movement and the strikes of 1910 and

5
D. MacCulloch, All Too Human’, Literary Review (April, 2010),
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/macculloch_04_10.html.
6
On nineteenth-century quests for the historical Jesus, see H. Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A
New Quest for the Nineteenth Century Historical Jesus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).
1911, what Alexander the Great thought about the union of Greek and Persian in one empire, and
what their contemporaries thought about these great men while they still lived…The historian who
studies a great human being…’7

Yet such Jesuses can generate or work alongside the ‘nice’ Jesuses, particularly those who want to
distance themselves from traditional theological or ecclesiastical authorities, even if Sanders himself
elsewhere tried to distance himself from making a judgment on whether Jesus was ‘a uniquely good
and great man’.8 We can see such tendencies at work, for instance, in the very methodologies the field
produces. The criterion of dissimilarity worked with the assumption that Jesus was unique and
different from his surroundings. Even the updated version (double dissimilarity and double
similarity), still functions with the assumption of uniqueness and difference, even if qualified with
more similarity than previously assumed. According to Roland Deines, ‘Jesus stands out as somehow
“unique-ish” and that it is ‘indeed essential that the person Jesus of Nazareth is to be understood
within the Jewish traditions of his time, but at the same time it is equally true that he cannot be fully
captured by any or even all of these traditions.’9 As with Wright’s famous formulation, Deines’ take
seemingly assumes as a methodological necessity that Jesus must be ‘unique-ish’. And is this idea of
singling out Jesus not implied in some of the classifications of Jesus and the very way scholarship
goes about classifying Jesuses? We need only think of Jesus the sage, Jesus the wisdom preacher,
Jesus the social critic, or even Jesus the healer or Jesus the prophet.

The Good Man Jesus might be more easily associated with some of these Jesuses than the popular
image of Jesus the eschatological or apocalyptic prophet. But that the spirit of the Good Man Jesus
does live on in the Jesus the eschatological or apocalyptic prophet is a testimony to its mythic power.
In many ways it is obvious from Schweitzer’s construct of Jesus as a heroic failure who inspired
Schweitzer himself as well as helped Schweitzer in his attack on modernity. 10 For Ehrman’s Jesus,
close in some ways to Pullman’s, God may soon send a cosmic judge but would be one who would
‘overthrow the wicked and oppressive powers’ and inaugurate a ‘perfect kingdom in which there
would be no more hatred, war, disease, calamity, despair, sin, or death’. This would be salvation for
the poor, the downtrodden, and oppressed. But Ehrman, of course, typically has an eye on his
‘fundamentalist’ past which functions in much the same way as dogmatic Christianity does for other
constructions of the Good Man Jesus. While fundamentalists like Hal Lindsay and other ‘evangelical
7
Sanders, Historical Figure, pp. 2, 4-5. It should be pointed out that Sanders’ concerns as an ancient historian
over against theologian have brought significant benefits to New Testament studies. On this see Crossley, Why
Christianity Happened, pp. 29-32.
8
E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), p. 320.
9
R. Deines, ‘Jesus and the Jewish Traditions of His Time’, Early Christianity 1 (2010), pp. 344–371 (350-51,
369-70)
10
W. Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2007).
doomsayers’ may also have a message of imminent catastrophe, they have not, Ehrman argues,
‘embrace[d] the full message of Jesus with all its rich texture and nuance’. 11 This includes a message
for the present:
Jesus’ disciples were not to engage in acts of violence now…Jesus’ disciples were to treat all
people equally and fairly now – even the lower classes, the outcasts, the destitute; even
women and children…No wonder that Jesus saw this kingdom as good news and invited his
hearers to join him in preparing for it…12

We can make a similar case for the common scholarly rhetoric of Jesus the Jew. Vermes’ charismatic
Jesus the Jew is well-known. But, as a notable point of comparison with Pullman, Vermes (who was
yet another Oxford-based, Liberal Democrat supporter, as it happens) saw his Jesus as a corrective to
the established ecclesiastical Jesus and who would challenge an institution from his own past: the
Roman Catholic Church. For instance, when Ratzinger published his book on Jesus, Vermes
responded that he ‘must protest against the reiterated papal claim that the divine Christ of faith – the
product of his musings – and the historical Jesus – the Galilean itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher
– are one and the same’. Yet, Vermes’ Jesus again has what we might even call an apologetic function
of the Good Man Jesus:
…after a lifetime of study of Judaism and early Christianity and in the light of hundreds of
letters inspired by my books, voice the conviction that the powerful, inspirational and, above
all, real figure of the historical Jesus is able to exercise a profound influence on our age,
especially on people who are no longer impressed by traditional Christianity…Contrary to
Pope Benedict’s forebodings, the world would welcome this authentic Jesus. 13
Vermes, of course, stands in a tradition of Jewish reclamations of Jesus. This is significant as Jewish
readings are also potentially hostile or indifferent to the Christian Bible, or at least they may wish to
extract that which is deemed valuable. Jacob Taubes noted the long Jewish tradition of reclaiming
Jesus: ‘There’s a literary corpus about Jesus, a nice guy, about the rabbi in Galilee, and about the
Sermon on the Mount; it’s all in the Talmud and so on…a sort of pride in this son of Israel. But when
it comes to Paul, that’s a borderline that’s hard to cross.’ 14 This was written in the context of his
attempted reclamation of Paul for Judaism but he Taubes was also anticipating the return of the
radically political Paul singled out in contemporary Marxist philosophy and where both Jesus and
Paul have received supreme compliments by way of analogy. Both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek

11
B. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.
243-44.
12
Ehrman, Jesus, p. 181.
13
G. Vermes, ‘Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, reviewed by Geza Vermes’, The Times (May 19, 2007)
14
J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 5.
have compared Jesus with Marx and Paul, as his controversial interpreter, with Lenin. 15 No matter
where we turn, it seems, the assumption of this Good Man Jesus keeps turning up.

Concluding remarks
Of course, historical Jesus scholarship cannot be reduced to variants on the Nice Jesus or the Good
Man Jesus, though this should not be mistaken with the idea that alternative Jesuses are somehow
ideologically immune—it is something close to a truism that our Jesuses all partake in our
contemporary ideological games. But the Good Man Jesus tendencies are certainly an important
feature of the ways in which the historical Jesus is understood. This is not to say, of course, that the
historical Jesuses discussed above are necessarily inaccurate or accurate reconstructions—for what it
is worth, I find that some of those scholars I have discussed have produced more accurate
reconstructions than others. Nevertheless, we are still dealing with culturally constructed Jesuses
throughout, ones which inevitably use the language and ideas of modern times. What is striking is just
how common the Good Man Jesus is among those who are openly not part of church life or an
obvious theological tradition, and even or especially among those openly identifying as atheist or
agnostic. And we might even go as far as putting a spin on the old anarchist argument that political
power ultimately depends on a notion of divine authority: in the case of the Good Man Jesus we have
a more ‘secularized’ notion of the perhaps unconscious need, it seems, for a higher authority to justify
ideological positions.

Aspects of contemporary scholarship may thus provide another context for understanding Pullman’s
Jesus. Or is that vice versa?

15
A. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2; S.
Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p.
9.