novel where He had homosexual affairs, another where He had
an affair with Mary Magdalene. What they don���t understand is
that I never allowed it to become a temptation. I wanted to do
the Christ that���s presented to us in the Gospels. I was trying to
understand that story. I wanted to write that story in a way that I
could understand it.
CB: You wanted to write the available story in a comprehensible
way?
NM: Yes, I wanted to treat the Gospels as if they were absolute
gospel, in other words, received information that could not be
departed from. That difficulty was interesting. To take Christ in
one or another imaginative direction would have been very easy
and would have been my natural inclination.
CB: The restraint of staying faithful to the Gospels is the key to
its success, I think. There���s tremendous compression. You refer to
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the authors of the synoptic Gospels,
as scribes who didn���t get it exactly right, perhaps because they
wrote about Christ a half century after His death.
NM: Well, they���re not scribes. Let���s call them Gospel writers,
because the scribes to me had a particular meaning ��� the people,
who were in a sense the court reporters, the professional intellectuals
in the temple.
CB: One of the things that interested me in your novel was how
the authority of the writer was linked to the authority of Jesus.
Jesus got His authority by knowing the Scriptures, by knowing
the lessons of the Old Testament. He can quote what Moses said.
He can quote the prophets and His authority derives from His
HYLAND
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