Bishop's anthology

Michael Bishop writes:

"From the beginning, then, I wanted to compile an anthology of Christ fictions that showcased this same dizzying array of personal "takes" on this significant figure. After all, for nearly two thousand years, his worship, meditation, neglect, or conscious rejection has informed the corpus of Western Civilization.

I am a self-declared follower of this Christ, albeit often a doubting, shame-faced, and/or unorthodox one. Like the female Sufi mystic Rabi'a 'al-Adawiya (born in Basra c. 717), I reject the theological necessity of hellfire and paradise, and regard the stick of the former and the carrot of the latter as irrelevant to our need to love God purely, and to love God for bestowing on us the poignant, often painful benison of life. Many will find such a formulation of Christian belief deficient, heretical, or self-contradictory, but I do regard Jesus as the Son of Man and his sacrifice on our behalf as a real sacrifice. Also, at sixty-one, I am capable of no other belief but this doubt-, even heresy-, plagued system, and I am weary of apologizing to myself, and hypothetically, to others for my sustaining private credo.

The story of this crucified first-century Jew fascinates me. Clearly, it also fascinates others, and in putting together this collection of Christ fictions I hoped to manifest in my literary life a genuine devotional act. From the beginning, I understood that this motive would mean little, if anything, to some of the anthology's contributors. Indeed, why should it? One, or two, or more, might have regarded it, had I announced it upfront, as odd, if not stupid and off-putting. I also understood that this motive would have little or no impact on attracting readers, who would gravitate to this collection of their own reasons, some seeking inspiration, some illumination, some mere distraction, some corroboration of views long held, and maybe a few the fulfillment of needs hard to articulate."

That's from the Introduction (subtitled "An Epistle to the Curious") to A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales about the Christ. I've mentioned it in this space before.

Quite by accident I stumbled across the paperback edition of this at the library and have spent time reading some of the stories, time that I should've spent on homework. Ah well.

Literarily speaking, some stories are quite good. Others, not so much. Some suffer from too much preaching - they come across as thinly-veiled attack ads. These kind of confused me at first: the attack ads were usually not that compelling.

For example, the militantly anti-religious character in "Behold the Man" gives a number of speeches that are apparently supposed to be utterly damning of Christianity; at least the religion-obsessed Glogauer can offer no responses. The author also tosses in factoids to explain aspects of Jesus' story. The thing is, having been exposed to contemporary New Testament scholarship, I've gotten a sense of the Jewish/Greek/Roman historical context and of the ways in which the Gospels aren't peasant folktales but are fairly sophisticated literary creations stemming from oral traditions. So I kept thinking things like "Hold up, what's this pagan sun god stuff? It makes much more sense to see Jesus in the milieu of 1st century Judaism..." Other, more theological, stories had me scratching my head and thinking "Well of course it's cruel to sacrifice your son. But the whole point of the Incarnation concept is that God was voluntarily sacrificing Godself." So I didn't object so much to the fact that the authors were critiquing the historical Jesus and/or the Christ of faith (though excessive preaching does ruin stories), as to the fact that the critiques often seemed factually mistaken or wildly off the mark. They didn't make much sense to me. I found myself thinking of better criticisms that could have be made, but weren't.

But then it occurred to me that the authors were criticizing the Jesus in their own heads, not necessarily the Jesus inside my head. Or they were criticizing particular forms and versions of Christianity, stories and theologies they heard from parents, televangelists, preachers, theologians, or ideas they derived from their own reading of the Gospels. People would respond to these stories based on which Jesus they had in their heads, and which historical or theological viewpoints they'd encountered. I'm sure some people will read the more positive stories about Jesus and object because in their understanding he was deluded demagogue or judgemental charlatan who shouldn't be treated positively in any way whatsoever. Was it Albert Schweitzer who said that we invariably see the Jesus we want to see, the one we expect to see? It's like Bishop says: every story is a personal "take" on Jesus.

Anyways, forgive my quibbling: I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile collection. I'm impressed by the introduction and the breadth and generosity of Bishop's selection. So far I've particularly liked Noni Tyent's "Miriam," Jack McDevitt's "Friends in High Places," Karen Joy Fowler's "Shimabara," and Bishop's "Sequel on Skorpios." My reaction to those last two was "Whoa! Can they ever write!" I'm going to have look up more Michael Bishop someday. And of course I was happy to run into Dostoyevsky, Borges and Gene Wolfe. I always am.