c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Looking back on the scriptural accounts of his earthly life, the Jesus of Norman Mailer’s new novel,”The Gospel According to the Son,”has the same complaint as many in our own time who have come under intense public scrutiny.

He was misquoted. His words were taken out of context, his motives misconstrued, and his actions distorted in the four official versions of his life cobbled together by church fathers.”While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration,”Mailer’s Jesus tells us in the opening pages of the novel, published by Random House.”And I would offer less for Matthew and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.” The Jesus of this spare, respectful and occasionally eloquent work of fiction seems intent not so much on setting the record straight, but on getting the nuance right.

This, then, is a gospel of nuance by a would-be 20th-century evangelist, an American Jew who fought in the war that defeated Hitler but could not prevent the Holocaust from happening.

Mailer’s retelling of the story of Jesus is replete with the themes of postmodern theology: ideas of a deity whose powers can be diminished by evil, a God who witnesses human suffering but does not necessarily want to intervene.

In an era of theological relativism, when free-form belief is as accepted as the rock-ribbed variety, sacred texts are no longer the sacred cows they once were.

Salman Rushdie’s rewrite of the life of Mohammed may have earned him a fatwa from the ayatollahs, but rewriting Judeo-Christian scripture has become a standard pursuit for contemporary academics and artists, from the revisionism of the Jesus Seminar, to Jack Miles’ much-praised”Autobiography of God,”to Walter Wangerin’s recent”The Book of God: The Bible as Novel.” Curiously, though, Mailer’s book seems to have been singled out for a western-style fatwa by literary critics.”Jesus Wept”was the headline on A.N. Wilson’s sharply critical review in the on-line magazine Slate.”He is finished,”James N. Wood exulted in a Mailer critique published in the New Republic.

They have scorned the Mailer gospel for its neo-biblical language, for his decision to stick to the basic details of the story, even for his arrogance to write such a book. The only exception seems to be John Updike, who praised the novel in a recent New Yorker review.

Arguably the least humble and most inventive novelist of his generation, Mailer has celebrated love and lust in the 30 books he has written during the past half-century; he has infuriated women with what some perceive as his chauvinism; sought the stars with the astronauts; and plumbed the darknesses of the human heart with stylized biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald.

But in his fictional version of the life of Jesus, Mailer has set hubris aside to paint an emotional, psychological and mystical portrait of a sensitive young man’s unfolding awareness that within his human identity as a carpenter is another, higher being; at once man, miracle-worker and messiah.

Not that the Gospels are totally wrong, in the narrator’s estimation. Yes, he is the son of God who died to save humankind, rose from the dead and sits somewhere in the vicinity of the right hand of the Father.

But even in that eternal place beyond space and time, Mailer’s Jesus tells us, Father and Son don’t always understand each other. And they don’t talk much. Father is mainly engaged in his ongoing war with the Devil, which grows progressively worse with each century, each savage dictator, each holocaust, nuclear or genocidal.

God is still winning the war, but only barely. Crucial battles have been lost, large and small. Though his heavenly parent’s love for creation is considerable, it is not without limit. And the Son marvels at how believers so blithely ignore the possibility that God will be deaf to their prayer.

Born into a family of Essenes, whose piety and purity codes set them apart from other Jews, Jesus suffers from survivor’s guilt, haunted by the Jewish babies slain by Herod’s armies while his parents fled to safety with the newborn messiah.

His mother, proud as she is pious, wants nothing but the best for her boy. She imagines a future for him poring over scrolls at the monastery of Qumram and is less than pleased by his decision to venture out in the world, preaching to Galilean pesants and the religiously unclean.

Mailer’s young Jesus moves Zen-like through his world: As a master carpenter he achieves oneness with his wood, resonating with the symmetry of its grain, the small miracles of dovetails and joints, the spirit that resides within.

His first miracle is a meditation on the mind of God over matter: As Jesus thoughtfully consumes a single grape at a wedding feast, the jars of water redden into wine. Later the multitudes are fed with a few loaves: Despite the Gospels’ claim, there was no actual multiplication of bread and fish, people consumed only a crumb and they were satisfied.

In fact, the book’s appeal rests largely on Mailer’s deft embroidery of many small details. The Devil, pomaded and arrayed as a being of great beauty and intelligence, is also a feminist, castigating God for the sexism of his scripture and the misogyny of his priests. Jesus rides into Jerusalem not on a donkey, but astride a bucking colt, an apt metaphor for his own inner struggle and the headstrong human nature that Christianity seeks to tame.

And of all the indignities Mailer’s Jesus suffers on his way to Golgotha, the most poignant is the revulsion felt by the master carpenter at the crude and sloppily constructed cross on which he was to hang.

In small insights such as this resides the genius of”The Gospel According to the Son.”Suddenly it becomes clear why great writers, even arrogant ones, are moved to retell one of the greatest stories ever told.

MJP END CONNELL