Philip Pullman apparently missed the entire 20th century

In at least two ways.

The background: The author of the His Dark Materials books has now written a book about Jesus. The Guardian reports:

Using the four Gospels as its source, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which will be published on Wednesday, has the naive young Mary giving birth to twins after a visit by a mysterious stranger claiming to be an angel.

Hmmm, how clever: Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde meets the Four Evangelists. Per the usual rewritings of the life of Jesus (now taken on by approximately 5,267,201 authors, of whom 83.54% deny the existence of Jesus), Pullman relies on the four Gospels while seeking to undermine, subvert, and dismiss much or most of what is in the Gospels. Thus, Pullman's book "contains manipulated versions of familiar episodes from the Gospels, including the Wise and the Foolish Virgins. According to Pullman: '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.'" This is something like the Jesus Seminar on crack—which is akin to a drunk on crack—when it comes to biblical scholarship. (It is really just a riff on the old "historical Jesus" vs. "Christ of faith" debate. Yawn.) Think of it: Pullman denies that the Gospels aren't accurate in recording Saying A of Jesus because it doesn't seem similar enough to Sayings B, Q, and Z, which also appear in the Gospels, but which are accepted as being more legitimate because...um...well...Pullman says so.

In other words, Pullman's book wouldn't exist except for the Gospels, but exists in order to destroy the Gospels. Nifty. Just another form of deicide, which Pullman is fixated on (he once said, "My books are about killing God".) It is, in other words, a microcosm of viral, Christian-bashing secularism in the West, which spends much of its time attacking Christianity and denouncing the Church while living comfortably off of the political, cultural, and social achievements of Christianity and the Church.

Which brings us to the first example of Pullman's lack of knowledge of the 20th century (a lack that is quite strange considering Pullman spent the first fifty-four years of his life living in that particular century):

At a climactic point in the story, Jesus condemns the idea of a church, saying it would cause the devil to "rub his hands with glee" and predicting that "from time to time, to distract the people from their miseries … the governors of this church will declare that such-and-such a nation or such-and-such a people is evil and ought to be destroyed … and they'll raise their standard over the smoking ruins of what was once a fair and prosperous land and declare that God's kingdom is so much the larger and more magnificent as a result".

"He is really speaking for me in that section," said Pullman. He added: "Of course I don't condemn speculative thinking, or organising people to help them do good, or setting up hospitals or giving hospitality to travelling strangers or educating people. But we have seen very recently how some aspects of all this can go wrong. People can abuse power.

"The greatest excuse in the world is that 'God told me to do it': hence the Crusades. Once you are appealing to an authority that can't be checked, you are doing something dangerous."

Wrong, flat wrong. The greatest excuse in the world for mass killings, despotism, and utopian hell is not, "God told to me do it," but, "I can do it because there is no God." That, in essence, was the stance and slogan of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other mass murderers who together killed tens of millions in the 20th century. For example, in a speech given in October 1920 to the the Russian Young Communist League, Lenin said,

In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality?

In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God's commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landowners and the bourgeoisie invoked the name of God so as to further their own interests as exploiters. Or, instead of basing ethics on the commandments of morality, on the commandments of God, they based it on idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God's commandments.

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.

Lenin was in power from 1917-1924, and it is estimated that he was responsible for the murder of four million people. In the course of just a year or so (1932-3), Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine and other areas resulted in seven million deaths, and historian Robert Conquest estimates that during the Great Terror of 1935-38, another five million were murdered. To put that into some perspective, a fair estimate of those who died during the Crusades, over the course of two hundred years (1095-1291)—a substantial number of them soldiers and combatants—is somewhere between one and two million. So, let's give Pullman some credit for stating the truth when he says, "People can abuse power." The fact that this is as obviously true of atheists, agnostics, dog catchers, and opera singers as it is of Christians shouldn't diminish Pullman's minor accomplishment, should it?

The second point is one I suspect I'll return to once I learn more about the book or (ugh) read it myself:

"I also read Acts and the Epistles and I was intrigued to see how much more Paul was occupied by Christ than by Jesus. I found this very interesting, and wanted to tell a story emphasising the separate qualities of Jesus and Christ, so I decided to make them into two characters."

In a previous 2009 news piece, Pullman said this about Paul:

'By the time the gospels were being written, Paul had already begun to transform the story of Jesus into something altogether new and extraordinary, and some of his version influenced what the gospel writers put in theirs. 'Paul was a literary and imaginative genius of the first order who has probably had more influence on the history of the world than any other human being, Jesus certainly included. I believe this is a pity.'

Wow, why hadn't someone ever thought about Paul in this way before?? Well, why? Oh, wait, they have. In fact, there was a huge passel of (mostly) German scholars who did just that, beginning in earnest in, oh, the 1840s. A number of them got really worked up about the theory that Paul had fiendishly kidnapped, reworked, or otherwise "transformed" the story of Jesus for his own twisted ends. Although Friedrich Nietzsche was not a Scripture scholar, he drank deeply from that well and summed it up rather memorably when he wrote that Paul

represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Savior: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: In his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself.

As I explained in a recent article for This Rock, "Did St. Paul Invent Christianity?" (July-August, 2009), this approach to St. Paul was quite popular—in the late 1800s and into the mid-1900s. While it still gets some attention among a few academics and much more attention from conspiracy-theorizing popular writers, it isn't taken seriously by Scripture scholars (as opposed to sociologists, anthropologists, and DanBrowniologists) for a number of reasons, some of them mentioned in my article.

Pullman, in short, is following in the footsteps of his celebrated atheist brethren, who, as Dr. Edward Feser points out, "are supremely self-confident in their ability to dispatch opponents with a sarcastic quip or two. And they show no evidence whatsoever of knowing what they are talking about." While Feser, a philosopher and the author of The Last Superstition, focuses on the serious philosophical deficiencies found throughout the popular works of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Co., the same observation applies to Pullman and his understanding of history and Scripture.

• Philip Pullman's neo-Gnostic faith (December 6, 2007)
• "[H]ere is the man who killed off God." (December 3, 2007)
• Philip Pullman's childish atheism (November 2, 2007)

Comments

[Woppodie]

So Pullman is buying into the evil twin theory about the resurrection as well? (Inferred from the statement that twins were born to Mary.) That is an extremely silly way to explain away the resurrection, especially when Mary was right there as Jesus died and would be one who could distinguish between twins. Then the twin, after stealing Jesus' body and impersonating him to his disciples disappears without a trace after 40 days without Mary so much as considering the possibility that it was the other twin. Yeah... That fad will pass as quickly as the fad of trying to explain Jesus' miracles "scientifically" (Hey look! The Sea of Galilee froze in the middle of a desert without anyone noticing, least of all the people sailing on it on a boat, so Jesus was able to walk on the ice!)

[Bill White]

To be published on Wednesday, eh? [checks calendar...] yep, here comes Easter. The media's sacred triduum of slander, lies and mockery should be coming to a head this week. They have an uncanny sense of liturgical time, don't they?

[Alan]

Why don't secularists, when pointing out that religious believers misused power decide to limit power rather than thoughts?

The issue is power over our fellow human beings... limit that, and people can have whatever ideas they want.

Of course, they really do want power over others.... they are just the right ones to have that power.

[Charles E Flynn]

Pullman is trying to compete with Richard Dawkins for "Dimwit of the Century":

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100031796/richard-dawkins-pope-benedict-is-a-leering-old-villain-in-a-frock/

[Geoff Arnold]

What interests me more than the content of the books these authors, these self appointed experts create, is the fact that Dawkins sees God as irrelevant, and apparently so does Pullman. Yet they write about God incessantly, trying to demonstrate through their verbal histrionics and muscular rationality that, yes, God is not only dead, but never was to begin with. If indeed God is irrelevant to the "conversation", why ever would these men continue to write about it? When I find something irrelevant, I move on and generally have nothing more to do with it. But then, they wouldn't have the financial windfall they've received had they just not bothered with what they find irrelevant. Ah, so it really is all about making a buck, then.

[Carina]

My jaw literally dropped when he tried to separate Jesus from Christ. This guy has got some loose screws in his head.

Maybe he'll get into the Colbert Report only to get ripped apart by Colbert. I remember Colbert's interview with Bart Ehrman last year, when he called out Ehrman for implying that he knew the early Jews better than the early Jews.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/224128/april-09-2009/bart-ehrman