The quest for the fictional Jesus : gospel rewrites, gospel (re)interpretation, and Christological portraits within Jesus novels

Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions for centuries. Jesus novels, a \nsubset of the historical fiction genre, are one of the latest means of not only re-imagining the \nman from Galilee but also of rewriting the canonical Gospels. This thesis explores the \nChristological portraits constructed in four of those novels while also using the novels to \nexamine the intertextual play of these Gospel rewrites with their Gospel progenitors. \nChapter 1 offers a prolegomenon to the act of fictionalizing Jesus that discusses the \nrelationship between the person and his portraits and the hermeneutical circle created by these \ntexts as they both rewrite the Gospels and stimulate a rereading of them. It also establishes the \n"preposterous" methodology that will be used when reexamining the Gospels "post" reading \nthe novels. Chapters 2 to 5 offer four case studies of "complementing" and "competing" novels \nand the techniques they use to achieve these aims: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt; \nNeil Boyd's The Hidden Years; Nino Ricci's Testament; and José Saramago's The Gospel \naccording to Jesus Christ. Chapter 6 begins an examination of a specific interpretive circle \nbased upon Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Beginning with the synoptic accounts of that \nevent, the chapter then turns to how Jesus' testing has been reinterpreted and presented in two \nof the novels. Returning to the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Temptation, chapter 7 \noffers a "preposterous" examination of that pericope, which asks novel questions of the text \nand its role with Matthew's narrative context based on issues raised by the Gospel rewrites. \nThe thesis concludes by suggesting that Jesus novels, already important examples of the \nreception history of the Gospels, can also play a helpful role in re-interpreting the Gospels \nthemselves.