The Jesus biofiction in the twenty-first century

Biofictions about Jesus and about historical figures aligned to Jesus have long been popular and continue to proliferate. The Jesus biofiction has also been a space for considerable experimentation within the form of biofiction, and Jesus himself is often represented as an ambivalent figure. In this chapter, I consider three twenty-first century Jesus biofictions: Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), and Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel (2012). Moore’s Lamb uses deliberate anachronisms and humour in order to rewrite the story of Jesus for a distinctly twenty-first century audience. Alderman, by way of contrast, presents four different, competing versions of Jesus’s life, told by different narrators, to produce a deeply ambivalent, often hostile vision of the rise of Christianity. Pullman likewise presents competing versions of Jesus but does so by presenting the reader with two separate but parallel biofictions about two very different men: the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ. These novels attest to the extraordinary richness and potential of contemporary Jesus biofiction: a genre that transforms the biography of Jesus into a way of understanding our own world.