Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film by Graham Holderness (review)

Better to entertain the possibility that God sustains the human identity during this state, so that the human soul preternaturally still ‘‘knows’’ its flesh and thus the body, in some way, is purified along with the soul. One also can concur that the discarnate human soul longs for her resurrected flesh, to perfect her heavenly beatitude, without subscribing to Griffith’s conclusion that there is no ‘‘beatific vision’’ without the resurrected flesh. Second, Griffiths proposes that discarnate sinful souls headed for annihilation will never be reunited with their flesh. How can this position be reconciled with John 5:29, in which Jesus speaks of a ‘‘resurrection to condemnation’’? This difficulty raises the only weakness I discern in this fascinating book, namely, that whilst Griffiths attends closely to conciliar and papal teaching, he struggles only rarely with the witness of Scripture. Decreation addresses questions that inescapably confront all humans in the devastation : it is not a work easily dismissed from the mind and imagination. It presses the reader to think more coherently about these theological topics; it challenges what is intuitively held from years of reading The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Faustus; and it expands the heart’s wonder over the mystery of the novissima which the Lord intends for the creatures he mercifully brings forth from nothing. Michon M. Matthiesen University of Mary, Bismarck, ND Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film. By Graham Holderness. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-4725-7331-5. Pp. 256. $29.95. The record-breaking box office of The Passion of the Christ (2004) inspired a boom in films focused upon the historical roots of Jesus from The DaVinci Code (2006) to recent examples like Risen (2016), The Young Messiah (2016), and Ben-Hur (2016). Has the abundance of options pushed audiences towards indifference? How should we analyze cinematic representations of Jesus which range from the skeptical to the devotional? As a Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, Graham Holderness reaches back to the ‘‘Jesus-novel’’ tradition and its roots in 19th-century biblical criticism to forge a way forward. As an accomplished novelist and poet, Holderness demonstrates how the humanity of Jesus can be portrayed alongside the divinity of Christ in his creative conclusion, ‘‘Ecce Homo.’’ Rewriting Jesus is a rare and refreshing example of how rigorous scholarship can inform and strengthen imaginative art. Re-writing Jesus is an expansion of shorter, previously published essays. An excellent introduction and historical overview outline the central tensions discussed in the chapters to follow. Holderness notes that ‘‘Most people are more likely to derive impressions of Christianity from fiction, film and visual art than they are from scripture or church teaching’’ (2). Viewers are likely unaware of the biases inherent in the ‘‘Jesus-novel’’ tradition exemplified by Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus Book Reviews 187 (1898). It turned the quest for the historical Jesus into a dramatic form, complete with skepticism towards miracles and all things supernatural. Authors (and later filmmakers) may share a similar doubt about the divinity of Christ and lean upon Jesus’ internal ‘‘human’’ struggles for the sake of dramatic tension. Novels and films written with devotional intent often fail to deliver dramatic interest. How to make Jesus interesting if he has no faults or struggles? The first two chapters of Re-writing Jesus begin with divergent portraits from the 1970s and 1980s, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1976). Holderness begins both chapters with the literary sources of the films, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation and Anthony Burgess’s Man of Nazareth. Holderness acknowledges the demythologizing inherent in Kazantzakis’s endeavor, but also points out the sincere religious struggle percolating within Temptation’s pages. Kazantzakis explored the tension between the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of Christ because he didn’t feel they could be resolved, thus the title of the chapter, ‘‘Half-God, half-man.’’ Holderness contrasts the dualism or even Docetism of Kazantzakis with the more holistic and incarnational approach of film director Martin Scorsese. As a...