Reading Jesus

A taxi ride sets Mary Gordon's book in motion. While the driver tunes in to a religious broadcast, Gordon reflects that, although she has been a Christian all her life, she often finds herself at odds with others who use the same label. Wanting to know whether she has simply made up a Jesus who suits her own desires, she decides to read the Gospels as literature and to examine Jesus as a character in a story.

Gordon walks through the central episodes, including the Prodigal Son, the Temptation in the Desert, the parable of Lazarus and the Agony in the Garden. Along the way she considers how strange it is to think of God living as a human being, the many questions the texts leave open, and the difficulty that the Resurrection poses for a modern, skeptical reader. Her approach is personal and direct, and she finds a body of teachings that overlap and sometimes contradict one another, feeling at once familiar and hard to pin down.

The book's pull comes from that unresolved puzzle. Gordon does not offer a neat answer. She keeps the question open, and the search itself is what carries the reader from one page to the next.