Wednesday, September 09, 2009

This Will Piss Some Folks Off

British writer Phillip Pullman, who threw a whole lot of fundies into a tizzy with the His Dark Materials series, has a new project that's bound to push them over the edge again:

He enraged America's religious right with his portrayal of God as a senile old man in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and now Philip Pullman is set to court more Christian controversy – this time with a novel about 'the Scoundrel Christ'.

The book will provide a new account of the life of Jesus, challenging the gospels and arguing that the version in the New Testament was shaped by the apostle 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,' said Pullman . . .
The book is part of a series of authors retelling myths from different perspectives. I'm sure the Greeks won't go nuts about retellings of The Odyssey or the myth of Prometheus, but I wonder what the Bible thumpers will think of Pullman's work. Not like a fictional work about Jesus has ever caused controversy before, right?

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