Fictional Transfigurations Of Jesus

Many novels revolve round the figure of Jesus. Some of the finest of them are defined by Ziolkowski as fictional transfigurations of Jesus. They share a modern hero patterned on Jesus the culture-hero, whose life consisted of the motifs of the last supper, lonely agony, betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. The aesthetic challenge of adapting this most familiar story for their generation has attracted an unusual number of great writers, among them Papini, Kazantzakis, Hesse, Mann, Greene, Faulkner, and Gore Vidal. The form began with the new image of a humanized Jesus which developed in the 19th century. The interest in religious paranoia and hysteria at the turn of the century instantly expanded its potentialities as novelists began to explore the theme of christomania. This was followed by studies of Jesus as a mythic figure and then Marxist-oriented portraits of Comrade Jesus. Finally the form became inverted into parody in the Fifth Gospels in which not Jesus, but Judas, is the central figure.

At the heart of Christian theology lies a paradox unintelligible to other religions and to secular humanism: that in the person of Jesus, God became man, and suffered on the cross to effect humanity's salvation. In his dual nature as mortal and divinity, and unlike the impassable God of other monotheisms, Christ thus became accessible to artistic representation. Hence the figure of Jesus has haunted and compelled the imagination of artists and writers for 2,000 years. This was never more so than in the 20th Century, in a supposedly secular age, when the Jesus of popular fiction and film became perhaps more familiar than the Christ of the New Testament. In Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film Graham Holderness explores how writers and film-makers have sought to recreate Christ in work as diverse as Anthony Burgess's Man of Nazareth and Jim Crace's Quarantine, to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. These works are set within a longer and broader history of 'Jesus novels' and 'Jesus films', a lineage traced back to Ernest Renan and George Moore, and explored both for their reflections of contemporary Christological debates, and their positive contributions to Christian theology. In its final chapter, the book draws on the insights of this tradition of Christological representation to creatively construct a new life of Christ, an original work of theological fiction that both subsumes the history of the form, and offers a startlingly new perspective on the biography of Christ.

David Bethea examines the distinctly Russian view of the "end" of history in five major works of modern Russian fiction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this book, Charitini Christodoulou argues that a certain perception of openness that she calls “dialogic” permeates Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation. Partly based on Umberto Eco’s theory in Opera Aperta and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, the term “dialogic openness” refers to the idea of antithetical forces clashing and thus revealing different forms of tension that are not resolved at the end of the novel. Thus, it is shown that subjectivity and meaning is always in the process of becoming. The different aspects of identity formation unfold before the eyes of the reader, who becomes a witness to the leading characters’ process of becoming. Christodoulou demonstrates that there are dialogic elements in tension, which can only be brought forth not as a synthesis, such as the stylistics of a genre implies, but as openness perceived as a process of identity formation.

This volume examines the Bible's role in the modern world, with a focus on its dissemination throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

The Gospel accounts of the transfiguration of Jesus continue to puzzle the average reader. The purpose of this book is to address some of the perplexing issues surrounding the event, and to explain the significance of the transfiguration, particularly in Matthew's Gospel. It demonstrates that Matthew's account of the event is to be seen in the context of first-century controversy between Christians and Jews about Jesus and Moses, with the Jews emphasizing Moses' greatness and Matthew portraying the transfiguration within Moses-Sinai categories and also in terms of the enigmatic Son of Man figure in Daniel 7. Possible influence of the transfiguration event is also seen elsewhere, particularly in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, where, the author argues, Paul uses his Damascus road experience as a counter to his opponents' emphasis on the law and Peter's witness to Jesus' transfiguration.

This book provides a detailed exploration of the spiritual and religious contexts and subtexts of contemporary fiction.

The greatest Christian mystery resolved! Of all the stories about Jesus, the transfiguration has been the most difficult to understand. It contains improbable, miraculous elements: a secret meeting on a mountain with Moses and Elijah - both long since dead, God speaking from a cloud, Jesus with his face and clothes transfigured by heavenly light. The story sits, with curious inconsistencies, uneasily in the gospels. There are two current theories: either that it is an allegory or a misplaced post-resurrection account. The author carefully analyses the text to show that neither is right and, in the course of his investigation, causes the pieces of the puzzle to fall dramatically back into place. The underlying Jewish narrative of the first of the four canonical gospels is once more revealed. The transfiguration story is part of the lost ending of Mark, displaced within the text and modified by later Christian editors. It tells of the awesome moment when Jesus, his body scarred through crucifixion by the Romans, came down from Mount Hermon to greet a waiting crowd.