Conclusion

The Hidden Years is an exemplary model of a complementing narrative in that it successfully balances faithfulness to its Gospel sources with an original and artistically successful narrative. It takes the Gospel portraits as its basis and translates Jesus into the modern genre of a novel by fleshing out his character with more details—psychological, social, situational, and relational. The pious Christian reader can immediately feel comfortable with

69 this fictional Jesus who is like the Gospel Jesus in essential matters. Unlike competing

narratives, The Hidden Years refrains from challenging any orthodox Christological categories or characteristics.

Boyd manages to provide a rewrite that avoids disassembling and challenging the Gospel Jesus mosaic while still providing a fictional Jesus that is extremely engaging and compelling. Boyd's Jesus is at once both loving and easily loveable, both human and humane. He is "an individual rich in humanity, without malice or sin, endowed with a heart capable of deep, faithful, gentle affection."110 Like the Lukan version of Jesus, this one too grows in wisdom (cf. Luke 2:52) about himself, his mission, and the world as he humbly learns not only from his heavenly Father but also from those around him. Because he is not presented as a divine being hovering slightly above the earth but as one who identifies with humanity, readers are enabled to identify with and to approach him. Yet this novel does not allow the Christian reader to simply sit back and enjoy a nice, pretty picture of gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Just like a good sermon, The Hidden Years makes Jesus come alive, penetrates to the heart of his message, and uses his example to challenge its audience.

Boyd's Christological portrayal also complements the Christology of at least the Synoptic Gospels better than most other orthodox novels, including Rice's Out of Egypt, precisely because it hints at Jesus' divinity rather than shouting about it. Simon can say that listening to Jesus was "like listening to a voice out of the burning bush," but he does not say that he is listening to God himself (138). Other complementing novels, such as those written by Holmes, the Thoenes, and even Rice, display a more fully developed Christology than the Gospels themselves. As we have seen through Rice's example, however, such portrayals also tend to run into problems trying to represent these more developed Christological notions, such as omniscience and kenosis. In some of the complementing novels, there is never a question

70 about Jesus' divine identity because often characters know from a very early stage that Jesus is God incarnate. The Hidden Years, like the Gospels themselves, is more circumspect and has its characters gradually come to understand who Jesus is.

What makes this novel so powerful and more successful than many other complementing narratives is that, unlike them, it presents a Jesus who questions and struggles with serious theological dilemmas, a trait that is often only seen in competing novels. Many works of popular Christian piety feature a Jesus who is completely confident in his identity and certain of his mission. While these works are pious and complementing, they are also bland and lifeless. They mundanely retell the Gospel stories and fill in a few gaps here and there, but typically, they offer little critical reflection and appear almost afraid to do so.

The Hidden Years, however, does not hesitate to ask the hard questions and to point out problematic areas in Christianity by having its Jesus expose similar issues in Israel's religion. During the novel's temptation scene, Satan accurately summarizes the character of Boyd's Jesus and also hits on the reason why many complementing novels prefer a Jesus who has all the answers rather than one with multiple questions. He says, "You are a man who insists on asking, Why, Why, Why? And whoever asks why, him religion destroys. . . . Any attack on religion, however heinous religion is, is judged by religious people to be blasphemy; and blasphemy is an 'insult to God'" (227).

Boyd through his Jesus character can playfully satirize the pompousness and insipid nature of much of his own tradition through scenes like the Capernaum synagogue, the temple

official's visit to Nazareth, and the rich Pharisees' prayers in the temple. His criticism, however, is constructive because it aims to correct aberrations rather than to condemn either Christianity or the Gospels' portrayal of Jesus, two motivations that are common among competing narratives. The Johannine Jesus' image of pruning a vine to bear more fruit (John 15:1-5) springs to mind as an accurate description of what Boyd attempts to do with his Jesus

71 character and his implicit (and sometimes explicit, as in his temptation scene) castigations of Christianity.

In literary terms, the novel is a success because it does not simply parrot the Gospel Jesus' words or replay the same scenes. Boyd takes Jesus' words and repackages them in a format more accessible to modern readers, and he places his Jesus character in new situations where his actions display a likeness to those of the Gospel Jesus. Boyd successfully transforms the Gospel Jesus into a fictional one and gives him new stories to tell and new adventures to experience. With The Hidden Years, a reader can enjoy a novel that is literarily unique while also remaining within the Gospel boundaries with its fictional Jesus. As a paradigmatic example of complementing narratives functioning according to their intentions, this novel makes the fictional Jesus and his world come alive and can easily provoke its readers to return to the Gospels with a fresh zeal for understanding their world and their portrayals of Jesus.

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Chapter 4: Nino Ricci's Testament as a competing rewrite

1. Introduction

2. Fictional gap filling or mosaic moving?

3. Taking the Gospels "all to pieces": Competing techniques 4. Competing or complementing Christological portrait? 5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

In 2002, Canadian author Nino Ricci published a new version of Jesus' story in the novel Testament. The child of Italian immigrants, Ricci was raised in the Roman Catholic Church and dabbled in evangelicalism before finally leaving Christianity all together. Ricci says that while by his early adulthood he could no longer call himself a Christian he was still never able to forget about Jesus. Testament is the product of his wrestling with this larger-than-life figure, with the complexities he sees within the Gospels, and with the problems he has with the

Christian religion. For his efforts with the novel, Ricci has garnered many critical accolades, such as the Trillium Award, the U.S. Booklist Choice for Top 10 Historical Novels of the Year, and U.K. Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year.

With this novel, we arrive at our first case study of "mosaic moving" seen in this overt attempt to challenge the Gospel portrayals of Jesus and to encourage doubt regarding the credibility of their testimonies. In the first part of this chapter, we will focus on the ways in which the novel attempts to undermine and call into question the Gospel forms in which the pieces were originally placed. We will do this by first exploring how Ricci sets the stage for a comparison between Testament and the Gospels with the form in which he casts the novel. Then, we will look at the direct and indirect use of Gospel material in Testament and summarize the various ways in which the novel supports, subverts, or rejects outright the testimony of the evangelists. Next, we will consider how Testament questions not only the evangelists’ testimony but also its own witnesses by framing them as unreliable narrators.

73 Through this analysis, it will be shown that the novel attempts tosubvert the Gospel

testimonies both on a mirco level, by challenging presentations and interpretations of specific events given by the evangelists, and on a macro level, by calling into question the reliability of the Gospel narratives themselves. Finally, we will examine the portrait Ricci constructs in place of the Gospel Jesus and compare these portraits with one another before offering a response to Ricci's attempt at competing with and subverting the Gospels. By using Ricci's Testament as a case study for competing novels, we shall be better able to recognize competing techniques used in other Jesus novels and also become familiar with an important example of Jesus imagery in modern literature.

2. Fictional gap filling or mosaic moving?

As noted in the prolegomenon, images often conflict with one another, and sometimes one even succeeds in supplanting another. Often this occurs unintentionally, but in the case of removing the gems belonging to one mosaic and repositioning them into a starkly different pattern, it is hard to imagine that such action has been taken without at least some intention to challenge the original form. When artists remove pieces from their original positions in the Gospels and replace them in new works that offer competing Christologies, their actions suggest that these "mosaic movers" have some sort of problem with the original portraits.

2.1. Mosaic moving intentions

The problem, of course, varies depending on who is looking at the Gospel images and on what they hope to find in them. In Ricci's case, as well as that of many historical Jesus questers, the problem appears to be that while he wants to find the actual Jesus in the Gospels the evangelists were more interested in painting portraits that captured who they believed Jesus really was and not solely how he appeared in actuality. In one interview, Ricci states, “My

74 idea in Testament was to try to look at the figure of Jesus in purely human, and hence non- Christian, terms. In other words, if we supposed that some actualhistorical figure lay behind the myth of Jesus as it was handed down, what might he have been like, stripped of the interpolations and inventions of Christian tradition?”111 In this search to find the actual Jesus behind what he believes to be layers of myth hiding Jesus in the Gospels, the influence of modern historical criticism on Ricci is evident.

2.2. Challenging the original form and supplanting the "testimony" of the Gospels with a new Testament

Instead of deriving his portrait from the final form of the Gospels or from any Gospel Jesus mosaic, Ricci has more confidence in the historical Jesuses constructed by various Jesus

Seminar participants. As Ricci himself states in his Author's Note, his own narrative portrait of Jesus is influenced more by their work than by the original Gospel pictures themselves (457). In fact, with Testament, Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, has finally gotten his wish for a fictional narrative that places Jesus within a different narrative context. Even better than having only one new "gospel" as Funk desired, Ricci provides him with four!112 The parodied gospel form used by Ricci is intentionally subversive.

Also, because the novel is presented as a recognizably fictitious narrative of Jesus’ life, Ricci is apparently making a statement on what he and others, such as Funk, perceive to be the fictitious nature of the canonical Gospels. If this is his aim, then Ricci is not the first to attempt such a maneuver. Celsus, one of the earliest critics of Christianity, once created a fictional dialogue between a Jewish Christian and other Jews in which he couched his own criticisms of Christianity. One of the more covert intentions behind Celsus' decision to use a fictional genre

111 _{Cited on September 1, 2008, from http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/} ricci_testament.shtml (italics mine).

75 for his attacks was that its use would be likely to expose what he deemed to be the "fictitious" nature of the canonical Gospels. The aim of such writing was that after reading the work the audience would agree with the implicit suggestion embedded in the fictitious form—that the Gospel stories are just as fictional as the fictions Celsus created.113

Ricci challenges the claim that the Gospels are reliable testimonies of Jesus' life and mounts his assault against the evangelists' portraits by using both dismantling and constructing techniques. As in Irenaeus’ analogy, he first pulls the image of the Gospel Jesus “all to pieces” and then reshapes and rearranges these pieces while adding new ones as well so that they fit together in a new narrative structure that offers a competing fictional portrait of Jesus. In a word, Testament'sultimate aim is to supplant the testimony of the Gospels by undermining their original form and replacing the evangelists' testimonies with new recognizably fictitious parodies of them.

3. Taking the Gospels “all to pieces”: Competing techniques