“If Jesus lived today, he would smell like smoke”: Contemporary Visions of Jesus Christ in Philip Pullman’s Novel and Tumblr Blogs

Abstract

Influenced by critical race theory and drawing on historical Jesus scholarship, the paper discusses the portrayals of Jesus Christ in Philip Pullman’s novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), and the poems written by young, mainly anonymous, poets found online on the social media platform Tumblr. The interpretation of Pullman’s novel and the selected poems is placed within the context of past and current struggles over the historicity, human/divine status, and politics of Jesus Christ.