Eyes Wide Open

The author of a fictional life of Christ says the Jewish teacher's power was in his extraordinary vision.

BY: Interview by Paul O'Donnell

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Canadian novelist Nino Ricci's latest book, Testament," is a retelling of the gospel stories through the eyes of three familiar biblical figures-Judas, Mary Magdalene, and his mother, Mary-and a fictional Syrian shepherd who narrates Jesus' lonely and desperate end in Jerusalem. In Ricci's conception, which owes much to recent historical and textual scholars, Jesus is entirely human. But given the history we know is to come, the book reads almost like a mystery, as Ricci weaves a trail from a mystic Jewish teacher to the traditions of a worldwide religion. We talked with Ricci recently about what he found out while writing "Testament."

Why did you write a novel about Jesus?

It just seemed like a very good book to write. As a young child, I was taken by Jesus as a role model in the way children are. And I had a Catholic education and took to it quite strongly. Although I fell from grace in my teens, I never lost an interest in the subject, and I returned to it. It had that strong sort of inner compulsion.

Your first novel, "Book of Saints," concerns an illegitimate birth and a woman whose life is changed by it. This sounds a bit like Mary in "Testament."

In the novel "Fifth Business," by the Canadian Robertson Davies, the main character is a hagiographer, someone who studies the saints. He points out that saints are rabble-rousers, renegades who took things to extremes. That always stuck with me. The people who became heroes were always troublemakers. That certainly was true of my character Christina, in my first novel. She is an adulterer, and therefore the obvious sinner. But she also exemplified the spirit of sainthood in sticking to her beliefs and behaving how she damn well pleased.

Certainly that's in Jesus. From his mother's point of view, he's a typical delinquent son. He leaves home. He fails to look after her. He seemed to pointlessly defy authority, and he ends up executed as a criminal. To someone who didn't know he was going to become the central figure in a major religion, Jesus would have seemed an abject failure. On the other hand, he sticks by his beliefs no matter what people around him think.

Yet your portrait of Jesus is less political than, say, the Jesus Seminar's.

There were a lot of political movements at the time. You had the collaborationists. You had the Pharisees, who were probably more revolutionary than we give them credit for. There were the Essenes, who believed the way to stay pure was to separate themselves. The Zealots seem closest to today's Islamic sense of jihad. They believed the only political leader was God, and the only way to purify the land was by completely eliminating the foreigner.

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