Another book read on the Kindle: Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which falls like Moorcock's Behold the Man into the category of re-renderings of the Jesus story that appear from the perspective of unbelievers to be ultimately respectful, even devotional, though there's of course a difficulty for believers in seeing that to be the case. Pullman has presented himself publicly as an atheist, but as in Dark Materials he keeps that case in the background; in both stories there is a requirement for mysterious evil persons that have something to do with institutional religions to also have powers that can't be explained, that in fact have overtones of the Satanic, and therefore to cast the worlds in which they occur as magical in ways that Pullman's real atheism wouldn't allow. In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ it seems that the Devil is directly involved in the construction of the Christian narrative as we know it, from birth to resurrection through death.
The particular wit of the "Pullman version" of the Gospels is that it makes as much use as possible of the materials of the originals, but split between the stories of Jesus (which amount to the kind of nonbelievers' redaction that has a fairly long history I believe, where claims to divinity are not only discarded by rejected and the "hard sayings" to the rich and hypocritical are brought to the fore) and the back story of Christ, in such a way as to make Pullman's retelling almost credible. As you might expect, though the character of Jesus is powerfully distilled, the character of Christ, composed shall we say of more contemporary literary glues as well as bits and pieces of the Passion narratives, held equal interest, at least in my reading.
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