Philip Pullman: How Stories Become Stories
In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman takes us back two thousand years to the time of Jesus, for his own version of the New Testament story. Here, he explains some of his ambitions in his approach to the world’s most influential myth.
The story I tell here takes its cue from the difference between Jesus and Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. The title makes it clear whose side I’m on, and of course I hope to persuade readers to share my view; but nothing is as simple as a title makes it seem. If Jesus is the voice of my conscience, Christ is the voice of my imagination, and I couldn’t help sympathising with him as I wrote the story. Scoundrels often have that effect on those who tell stories about them.
Finally, I’m sometimes asked what sort of audience my stories are ‘aimed at’, and I find it impossible to say, because I think no storyteller has the right to assume any audience at all. Here, though, I think it would be sensible to say that people who already know the Gospel stories (the temptation in the wilderness, the transfiguration, the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins, Jesus’s encounter with Mary and Martha, and so on) are likely to get a little more out of this than people to whom the Gospels are unknown. But this is not a Gospel. Parts of my story are like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that, because it is among other things a story about how stories become stories, and any readers who get as far as the end, whether or not they know the Gospels, will be intelligent enough to see what’s going on.
Philip Pullman, 2009
