The Bible

I know! Shocking, right? Frey says that he expects to “get blasted” for this. The press has happily joined him in rubbing its hands together over the prospect, deploying words like “controversial” and “firestorm” in stories that Frey promptly posts to his website. “I tried to write a radical book. I’m releasing it in a radical way,” Frey told the New York Post. So it’s possible his Christ might be a skateboarder, too.

But seriously, who besides good ol’ Bill Donohue at the Catholic League can possibly be counted on to take offense at such a stunt? “I’m sure the religious right will go crazy,” Frey said. Well, at least someone is sure. But since Philip Pullman barely raised a snort from them with “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” last year — and that was a famous atheist’s revisionist account of the historical Jesus, not just a fancifully smutty imagining of his second coming — I would not advise the author to hold his breath.

In fact, there’s already a long history of revisionist literary accounts of Jesus’ life and social criticism disguised as fiction depicting his return. Among the most renowned in the first category are “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis (1951), “Quarantine” by Jim Crace (1997) and “The Gospel According to the Son” by Norman Mailer (1999), as well as the comic romp “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore (2001) and about a zillion New-Agey retellings that turn Mary Magdalene into the heroine.

The observation that the Jesus of the Scriptures would be dismayed at what his professed followers get up to today is also by no means rare. In 2008, Roland Merullo published “American Savior,” in which a pro-choice Jesus runs for president, and in 1990, James Morrow’s “Only Begotten Daughter” has the Messiah reincarnated as a woman. Science fiction writers have been particularly fond of using the trope to illuminate the hypocrisies and injustices of our time, as Frey presumably intends to do. Theodore Sturgeon’s last novel, “Godbody,” features a savior who communicates divine love by touch and who predictably winds up slaughtered by a mob. And surely the best-known crypto-Christ in all science fiction is Valentine Michael Smith of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a human instilled with the hippieish values of Mars, who meets an equally ugly end.

The most celebrated literary second coming of all, however, is the “Grand Inquisitor” section from Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” in which Christ returns to Medieval Spain and is sentenced to be burned at the stake by the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell on the eve of the execution and delivers a long explication of how the Church has moved beyond his teachings after realizing that the vast majority of human beings cannot cope with and do not really want freedom. It’s a profound meditation on courage and free will. That’s a tough act to follow, Mr. Frey, no matter how radical you’re prepared to get.

But controversial? Not really. Kazantzakis’ novel did provoke some genuine furor when it was first released 60 years ago, and the book has a history of being banned. Nowadays, however, you can’t expect mere print to get you properly blasted. You need pictures. Protesters picketed theaters screening Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, and are believed to have seriously damaged its earnings. The following year, conservatives used Andres Serrano’s photograph “Piss Christ” as an argument to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave him $15,000 for the work. A decade later, New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum for exhibiting a purportedly blasphemous painting.

So no wonder Frey has hooked up with the art world for this particular scheme. It’s like going to Blackwater for bodyguards; making the holy rollers mad is just what they do. Still, the project itself seems a miscalculation. So far, Frey’s notoriety has been founded on two pillars: producing a memoir that turned out to be partially fabricated and running a sort of book factory in which recent MFA graduates are gulled into laboring like sweatshop seamstresses for meager pay. Before that, he attracted attention by bad-mouthing more famous writers.

The genius of this strategy is that it focuses on offending that tiny class of Americans who still care about books and can be expected to notice the people who write them. Who else would wax indignant on the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction and/or the exploitation of aspiring novelists? And that’s certainly not the same crowd who rants about the War on Christmas or tries to put prayer back in schools. In fact, it’s not clear that that crowd ever reads anything — including the Bible. Even Pullman, who was piping atheist propaganda directly into our school libraries for a nearly a decade, didn’t get called on it until they made his book into a movie.

Could it be that Frey, for all this talk about getting blasted, is now courting the very people he once specialized in outraging? You can become a minor hero to the liberal intelligentsia if your work gets you persecuted by bullies like Bill O’Reilly. Of course, that would involve Frey making himself over as a victim, when the world he inhabits seems much happier to cast him as the villain. A role-change like that isn’t going to be easy. As a matter of fact, it’s going to take a miracle.

Further reading

The New York Post on James Frey’s announcement of “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible”

The Rumpus interviews James Frey

James Frey’s website

New York magazine on Full Fathom Five, James Frey’s fiction factory

Salon on the fabrications discovered in James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” in 2006

Though I’m no longer a believer, and in principle I support the notion of adherents to a religion familiarizing themselves with its scriptures, it sometimes seems like the old Vatican had a point. In his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book,” religion professor Timothy Beal describes all the angst and doubt that Bible reading provoked in him during his youth, as well as the frustration many American Christians experience as a result of their own encounters with the book. This doesn’t prevent them from buying truckloads of the things — Beal notes that “the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year” — but actually reading them is another matter. Beal believes that’s because today’s Christians are seeking a certainty in their holy book that simply isn’t there, and shouldn’t be.

“The Rise and Fall of the Bible” is a succinct, clear and fascinating look at two phenomena: what Beal calls “biblical consumerism” — in which buying Bibles and Bible-related publications and products substitutes for more meaningful encounters with the foundational text of Western Civilization — and the history of how the book came to be assembled. The latter story, albeit in a severely mangled form, came as a revelation to many readers of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code.” Beal, who teaches an introductory course in biblical literature at Case Western Reserve University, estimates that more than half of the students who come to his classes know more about the Bible from Brown’s conspiracy-crazed potboiler than from “actual biblical texts.”

For anyone with more than a passing familiarity with biblical history, however, the historical portions of “The Rise and Fall of the Bible” will be old news. The thing is, many Americans — especially those raised in the less reflective Christian denominations — know nothing about how the Bible was compiled. That’s why so many of them were amazed to learn from “The Da Vinci Code” that the Old and New Testaments are assemblages of texts written at different times by different authors, most of whom were not eyewitnesses to the events they describe. In Brown’s crackpot version, the Emperor Constantine gets cast as the arch-villain, ordaining that conservative texts be officially canonized, while more politically radical (and less misogynistic) works got kicked out of the scripture clubhouse. The real story is even more unstable than Brown’s inaccurate potted version, with dozens of official and semiofficial variations (including or excluding certain marginal books) produced in the centuries after the death of Jesus.

The bestselling New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who, like Beal, was raised in a conservative evangelical family, has written in greater depth on early Christian texts; that isn’t really Beal’s purpose. Ehrman became an agnostic, but Beal is still a Christian, and with “The Rise and Fall of the Bible,” he wants to argue against the common perception of the Bible as God’s infallible handbook on how to live, “totally accurate in all of its teachings” — a view, incidentally, that nearly half of all Americans (and 88 percent of “born again” Christians) claim to believe. Beal is the sort of Christian who doesn’t want to raise his son to “think that creationism is a viable alternative to evolutionary biology or that homosexuality is sinful,” but he is as skeptical of liberal attempts to simplify the Bible as he is of the more predominant right-wing reductionism. He would rather see his co-religionists embrace the fact that the Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies and come to regard it not as “the book of answers, but as a library of questions,” many of which can never be conclusively resolved.

Some of the most interesting chapters in “The Rise and Fall of the Bible” explore the world of Bibles created for specific subcultures and needs: the manly Metal Bible and Duct Tape Bible, kicky handbag/Bible combos and special editions geared toward teenagers, African-American women and so on. These can contain as much as 50 percent “supplemental” material, “explaining” the scripture according to the taste of the intended audience. Then there are Biblezines, publications in which articles about how to grill steaks or talk to girls (in the case of a Biblezine for boys) share the page with biblical quotations. Well-meaning older relatives give this material to young Christians, hoping it will make the Bible itself seem more “readable.” Beal thinks the kids just wind up reading the articles and skipping the quotations. He compares Biblezines to the “sweeter and more colorful roll-ups, punches, sauces and squirtable foams that I buy for my kids’ lunches” in lieu of the unprocessed fresh fruit they refuse to eat. At least you can tell yourself you’re giving them fruit.

Even more insidious, in Beal’s eyes, is the trend over the past couple of centuries away from word-for-word translations of the Bible and toward “functional equivalence” and “meaning driven” translations. These considerably fiddled-with versions iron out the wrinkles and perplexities in the ancient texts and nudge them closer toward the advice, directives and “values” so many people expect from their Bible. Beal argues that the Bible industry resorts to this sort of thing precisely because the Bible doesn’t offer cut-and-dried guidance — or Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, as one popular modern acronym would have it.

Much like the professor who assigned the Old Testament during my sophomore year of college, Beal would prefer that people read the Bible as if it were a work of art — that is, as a text permitting multiple interpretations and as a spur to further thought and self-examination rather than as the last word on all of life’s enigmas. Or, as he rather fetchingly puts it at one point: “This is poetry, not pool rules.” His approach is, of course, more congenial to nonbelievers than the conviction that the Bible describes historical facts and constitutes the “inerrant” word of God. Still, even an optimistic secularist may find it difficult to credit Beal’s prediction that his way of reading the Bible is just about to catch on, big time.

Beal thinks the current boom in biblical consumerism amounts to a “distress crop,” the last great efflorescence of the old authoritative ideal before people move on and learn to embrace biblical ambiguity. I’m not so sure. Craving the certainty and absolutism of fundamentalism is a fairly common response (across many religious faiths) to the often terrifying flux of modern life. If certitude is the main thing American Christians are seeking when they turn to the Bible, then they’re unlikely to tolerate, let alone embrace, Beal’s “library of questions” model. You can learn a lot about how the Bible was created in the past 2,000 years, and about the many strange forms it has taken in the present, from “The Rise and Fall of the Bible.” But where it’s headed in the future is a mystery much harder to solve.