Easter religion posts continue...

Hey, Easter is almost over, and so is the run of religious articles on death and resurrection.

Slate has re-run a 2008 short article on resurrection which is of interest. Chances are that I did read it back then but have forgotten. It seems to contradict the book I noted a couple of posts back which argues that Jesus would not have understood resurrection in a corporeal sense.

(By the way, I now see that the Vermes book came out in 2008. The Biblical Archaeology Review must be an Easter reprint.)

In other Christian themed articles, I see that Philip Pullman's novel on Jesus has this plot:

As he tells the Gospel story, Mary did not have one son but twins—a gifted but pious and humble one called Jesus and his more calculating and sophisticated brother, Christ. Observing his modest sibling, Christ concludes that the story needs to evolve in certain ways if the wandering faith-healer’s work is to become the basis of a world religion. In the end Christ colludes with his brother’s death and helps, directly and indirectly, to construct a new narrative about his resurrection. When the disciples meet their risen master, it is really Christ they are encountering, not his twin, Jesus.

There was an extract of Pullman's book in The Guardian recently, and the writing style certainly has no appeal to me. It is, as the reviews tell us, to be read as fable; not a realistic telling of what might have happened.

Unsurprisingly, Rowan Williams (an old admirer of Pullman) offers his review in The Guardian, and it is more or less positive. Of course, Williams seems to be a philosopher who ended up a Church's world leader by accident. He's a nice enough sounding man, but one suspects he has helped more people out of his Church than into it.