The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman review

Over the millennia, the Jewishness of Jesus has been an embarrassment to Jews as well as to Christians. In antiquity, the response of rabbis to the increasingly gentile character of the church was an icy show of silence. When they could bring themselves to mention Jesus at all, it was to cast him as a failed student who, out of pique, had fallen to worshipping a brick, and then been condemned to hell, there to be boiled in excrement. Perhaps, then, it is one measure of today's improved ecumenical climate that Jesus should no longer be quite so persona non grata among Jews as once he was. A few years back, for instance – inspired by Géza Vermes, the great Jewish historian of the historical Jesus – Howard Jacobson made a TV documentary that sought to reclaim for Judaism the man who is, after all, the most famous Jew who ever lived. Now, with her ambitious new novel, Naomi Alderman has given us an entire Jewish gospel, the story of a preacher who may be madman, miracle-worker, or both: Yehoshuah, the son of Miryam.

We see him through the eyes of four people: the characters that Christian tradition commemorates as Mary, Judas, Caiaphas and Barabbas. Each brings a different perspective. None is quite what the gospels would lead us to expect. Miryam, for instance, is certainly no virgin, nor has it ever crossed her mind that her son might be the son of God. It is a year after the crucifixion, and such are the depths of her wretchedness that she can barely bring herself to think about her first-born at all. In a lacerating study of despair, Alderman portrays a woman who feels herself doubly bereaved: not only by the death of Yehoshuah, but by his rejection of her while he was still alive. "Her heart is a stone. Her mouth is a closed door." The metaphor is typical of Alderman's method. Brilliantly evocative in its own right, it also casts her grief as a rejection of what the followers of Yehoshuah are already interpreting as the supreme miracle of the resurrection.

None of Alderman's four protagonists even pauses to consider that the disappearance of Yehoshuah's body from the tomb might be mysterious, nor that he might indeed have been the Messiah. Yet although Alderman's narrative gives us an account of Jesus's life in which he is clearly the son of Joseph, in which Judas does not kill himself, and in which it is Barabbas rather than the preacher from Galilee who summons fishermen, it would be a misreading of the novel's subtlety to presume that it is merely an exercise in myth-busting.

Ambivalence is woven into its very fabric. Hanging over the bare bones of Alderman's revisionist narrative, like the perfume of roasting meat over a sacrifice, is the poetry of Christian doctrine and myth. When Miryam recalls a childhood visit to Jerusalem, her memories echo those of TS Eliot's Magi: men playing dice, trees on a hill. Caiaphas, much like Pontius Pilate in Anatole France's short story "The Procurator of Judaea", barely remembers the episode for which he will eternally be notorious. The condemnation of Yehoshuah, Alderman tells us, with an abrupt and unexpected broadening of her focus, is "the Holy of Holies of his life, the tiny chamber at the centre of his heart which is somehow larger than the whole edifice which surrounds it …" Again, a familiar metaphor is being played upon. "If this is a secret chamber, it is entirely empty."

The result is a novel shadowed throughout by what a literary theorist might term aporia: the unsettling sense of paradox that can batten on to what might seem an author's ostensible purpose. Yehoshuah is a Jewish Jesus, the creation of a Jewish novelist; and yet it is the genius and the generosity of Alderman's novel, it seems to me, that it does not preclude an alternative perspective, one in which mystery does indeed haunt the events it describes.

At the end of her novel, as though in panicked consciousness of this, Alderman abruptly turns historian, giving a rushed account of how the Jewish Yehoshuah became the Roman Jesus, attempting to purge from her reader's mind the sense of ambiguity that is the legacy of her own literary sophistication. "Do not imagine," she tells us, "that a storyteller is unaware of the effect of every word they choose." But should we believe her? The clue, perhaps, lies in the riddling, teasing title she has chosen to give her novel: The Liars' Gospel.

Tom Holland's In The Shadow of the Sword is published by Little, Brown.

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