Testament by Nino Ricci

...Simon's personal story is moving (and continues the motif of sexual violence) and his exploits are even comic as he takes off with a con artist to follow Jesus...

...the other disciples do not trust him and suffer his presence resentfully...

...Testament, his new novel, covers new, daunting, and unexpected territory: the life and death of Jesus...

...Theologians have in recent years rescued Mary Magdalene from her traditional role as a reformed prostitute (a tradition with no basis in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John...

...Mary the mother of Jesus' gospel recounts his birth and childhood in Alexandria, evoking long-standing theological theories of Jesus' illegitimacy but going much further...

...He witnesses a body being removed from the cave where the crucifixion victims have been brought, but he cannot say for sure that the body is Jesus'-and he begins to understand his own belief as far more mysterious than what he has seen with his own eyes...

...Ricci questions the familiar details and even some of the central images of Christian tradition, yet in these four startling gospels also conveys the absolutely compelling power of Jesus, who changed everything, utterly, for those who followed him...

...Indeed, one of the novel's aims is to point out the difficulties of representation itself, especially when the figure represented is Jesus...

...His complicated Myriam is the daughter of a Jewish father and a pagan mother, influenced by two traditions but willing to follow this new teacher who sees the balance between the physical and spiritual worlds...

...His gospel, in taking on the Resurrection, differs from the others in a crucial way: none has directly confronted the issue of Yeshua's divinity- the novel has thus far probed only the human, if spiritual, Jesus-but Simon faces the question head-on...

...Mary Magdalene's version aptly follows Judas's, since it is she who most resents his presence...

...But because this Miryam's gospel so contradicts traditional notions of the obedient, generous, faithful Virgin-Ricci's Miryam is proud, furious, aware of Yeshua's holiness but resentful of his independence- it is the most challenging and unsettling of the Testament gospels, the one to which Ricci has been building...

...Her relationship with Yeshua is intellectual and chaste, yet her presence in his camp (along with the other female followers) incites gossip and envy...

...Ricci depicts Mary as a victim of rape, his reimagining of the Virgin Birth making of Jesus' nativity and Mary's defiance an ironic overcoming of sexual violence...

...The four gospels of Testament are told by Judas Iscariot (Yihuda), Mary (Myr-iam) Magdalene, Mary (Myriam) the mother of Jesus (Yeshua), and a Syrian shepherd named Simon of Gergesa...

...Each is beautifully written, the first three with understated restraint, the last, fittingly, with passion...

...Much of this retelling accumulates a mysterious power of its own, even as it roils the reader and sends her back to the more familiar Gospels for a close rereading of these events in Jesus' life- and to contemporary theologians for their interpretations...

...Testament is, perhaps most obviously, a fictional companion to the postmodern theory that questions the stability and reliability of narrative authority...

...In Testament Jesus speaks only through the voices of fallible humans, and their own weaknesses continually distort and undermine the stories they tell, engaging the reader in an ongoing examination of belief itself...

...Besides suggesting why Yeshua's mission is so threatening to the Roman authorities, his version also lays the groundwork for the case all four gospels ultimately support: that accounts of Yeshua's miracles are in fact wild exaggerations of the sensible healing he practices throughout Palestine...

...Many scholars recognize her as a crucial disciple, and Ricci echoes this understanding in his portrayal of her fierce loyalty to Yeshua and her centrality among his followers...

...Yihuda suggests that Yeshua's spiritual authority relies not on magic (though his fame does), but on holiness...

...The first three offer alternative visions of both Jesus and the narrators themselves...

...Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is author of five novels...

...the gospel of Yihuda presents him as a political rebel, dedicated to the overthrow of the Roman Empire until he meets Yeshua and begins to question his own commitment to revolution...

...It is also a fictional extension of contemporary theological debates about the historical Jesus in this era of the Gnostic Gospels, the Jesus Seminar, new readings of gospels excluded from the New Testament, and new studies of early Christian communities...

...Ricci, whose account consists of four fictional gospels, carries off the move from the twentieth century to the first with authority, yet takes pains to suggest the inadequacy of each version (and, in an afterword, says forth-rightly that the novel, while aiming for "historical plausibility," does not "purport to be an accurate representation" of Jesus...

...When Simon becomes the eyewitness to the Crucifixion we see the scaffolding of Ricci's narrative-the construction of plot, with all its manipulations and coincidences and bids for pity-more clearly than in any of the three revisions of characters we thought we knew well, yet Simon's stark recounting of the death of Yeshua is wrenching...

...Yihuda is the most educated and the most formal of the four narrators...

...A trilo-gy of childhood, youth, and adulthood, they move from post-World War II Italy to Canada to form a painful yet beautiful meditation on modern immigration, poverty, illegitimacy, and alienation from culture...

...But Ricci's aim is clearly an appeal (or perhaps I should say challenge) to the common reader...

...Yeshua resets broken bones and the lame walk, but Yihuda is more interested in the discipline of Yeshua's spiritual practice, the subtlety of his teaching, his embrace of the poor and suffering...

...Retelling the Jesus story yet again requires both audacity and humility (not to mention some awareness of the genre, which includes such wildly disparate titles as Gore Vidal's Live from Golgotha, Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, and Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son...

...This Miryam's gospel, though, ends like the two preceding it, before Yeshua's passion and death, which are recounted by a fictional character, Simon of Gergesa...