He followed up his monumental trilogy with The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which would be considered by many readers to be the most blasphemous book of fiction they have ever read. In Good Man Jesus, Pullman, a confirmed atheist—in his trilogy, God is a senile geriatric, being carried around by naked sexless angels—posits a radical theory, that Jesus Christ was not one person. That night in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to twins, one called Jesus and the other Christ. And the stranger visits Christ again. For what Pullman’s grand tragedy tells us is that the world hasn’t changed much in the last two millennia.

Source: Mint January 28, 2017 18:07 UTC