MonDieu!Anovel with a serious Jesus complex

Abook that labels itself a novel on the cover and then proceeds inside to be something else altogether – a seamless blend of memoir, history and theology – should put readers on their guard. Where is the line between fact and fiction?

Yet the curious hotchpotch that is The Kingdom has been a runaway bestseller in Carrère’s native France, so there must be something to it.

And, indeed, there is – a whole basket of pleasing things, among them a painfully honest section where Carrère (well known as a novelist and screenwriter in France) recalls the three years in his early 30s when he was strictly Catholic, doing everything by the Book, seeking certainty yet struggling to banish his own doubts.

Those with a sharp eye for such details will spot the hint of a staggeringly immodest parallel being drawn here with Jesus, whose own three-year public ministry between the ages of 30 and 33 ended with him on a cross lamenting: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

As if to confirm such suspicions, when Carrère writes in his notebook as he finally abandons his faith, he appropriates this line from the son of God, adapting it to ‘I forsake you, Lord’.

Whether you enjoy The Kingdom will depend largely on whether you warm to Carrère. For me, he is too self-absorbed but others may find him an illuminating guide to the early decades of what was still not quite the Christian Church. He is not, however, a reliable narrator, especially so when he homes in on the Acts Of The Apostles, the New Testament text that tells how, after his death and resurrection, Jesus’s followers laid the foundation of a global Church. Conventional accounts give most of the credit to Saint Paul, whose ceaseless missionary journeys around the Middle East making converts ended with his execution in Rome in 64 AD. What concerns Carrère, though, is the identity of the author who witnessed Paul’s deeds and wrote them up in the Acts Of The Apostles, the same scribe traditionally credited by Church historians with producing Luke’s gospel, the third of four versions of Jesus’s life included in the Bible.

Luke was not just recording, though, Carrère argues, but also making it up.

So the miracle-working figure of Jesus in Luke’s gospel (so different from the Jesus of the two earlier gospel accounts of Mark and Matthew) is nothing but a creation, shaped not by facts but by the author adapting claims made by Paul.

Carrère provocatively extends this charge of artistic licence against Paul’s adoring acolyte to place a question mark over Jesus’s resurrection, the detail on which Paul built the Church.

It is not exactly a new theory but is told here with a new, accessible flourish.

But beware. If some of Carrère’s speculations do have some basis in current historical research, many don’t. Where there are gaps, he gives his imagination free rein.

This may facilitate a crowd-pleasing ending but also justifies that frontpage claim that The Kingdom is a work of fiction.

‘Where there are gaps, Carrère gives his imagination free rein’