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Summary: Thought Provoking Christ Point-Of-View.
Review: The Gospel According to The Son, is a well written, thought provoking book written from Christ's point-of-view. If Jesus Christ had written an auto-biography this would be it. It gives you a feeling of insight to what it must have been like for Christ to be "God with Us". The stuggle of being both Man & God is beutifully told in this book. If it isn't now this book should be considered a classic work of christian writting.
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Summary: Dispassionate
Review: Sure Mailer took on the daunting task of telling Jesus's story through HIS eyes, but this does not necessarily bring the psyche of the Son of Man into focus. Jesus's actions and thoughts seem routine and often mundane. I wanted to feel the inner struggle that must have accompanied a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Reading Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ) proved ten times more fulfilling in this regard.
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Summary: Still The Greatest Stroy Ever Told!
Review: Very well done, although its been done before. . . Mailer does an excellent job of personifying the Christ spirit using modern day language and struggles. HIs ability to articulate the conscious and struggles of the children on God, through the Christ character is uncanny. This book was a joyful experience.
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Summary: better than the bible?
Review: I found Mailer's book to be uplifting. I feel he helped personalize Christ without any major changes from what was reported in the Bible. Mailer helped to humanize the Christ and make him easier to understand and a bit closer to man.
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Summary: Mailer and His Quiet God
Review: The book seems to be Mailer's attempt to finish killing a God, once only wounded by Nietzsche's fantastic prose, by melding the name and story of Jesus with literary mediocrity. How high will one man's jealousy fly?
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Summary: Mailer's boat left too soon!
Review: Along with an earlier reviewer, I have to agree that Norman Mailer has missed the boat. Look carefully and you will see the truly revelatory and inspiring "THE Autobiography of Jesus of Nazareth and the Missing Years" by Richard G. Patton, way out in mid-stream and with a full head of steam! Mailer doesn't extend our knowlege or insight into the charismatic first century figure of Jesus. In Patton's "The Autobiography..." the author steps out into dangerous territory and brings back the real gold of BELIEVABLITY and conviction - and is not derivative of a thousand other books. Mailer is a great writer, but should look to Patton's work to find originality and true inspiration.
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Summary: Mailer's best book since "The Executioners Song"
Review: While I do not consider myself religious, I have read the New Testament many times (read: childhood education). It may be this familiarity with the Gospels that helped make this book such an entirely enjoyable experience. Mailer's effort here made Jesus Christ seem so human and believable. It made Christ seem very plausible - while at times in the past the whole story has come off a bit impossible. Or if not impossible at least recollections of admirers done 40 years later. I know some may find the whole idea sacreligeous, I instead found it thought-provoking and a real page turner. I can't always say that this topic has that same effect on me.
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Summary: A missed opportunity
Review: I had expected better from Norman Mailer. There's nothing new in simply regurgitating the New Testament as seen through the undeniably creative eyes of Mr. Mailer. Where's the challenge? I don't want to be comforted, I want to be taken BEYOND myself. There's none of the bite and insight of "The Autobiography of Jesus of Nazareth and the Missing Years", none of the passion of Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Last temptation" and none of the ethereal beauty of D. H. Lawrence's "The man who died". For a lesser writer than Mr. Mailer, this would have been a creditable achievement. Sorry Mr. mailer, I guess I get to keep the cigar?
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Summary: Norman Mailer and the personalizing of Jesus
Review: Mailer's great achievment in The Gospel According to the Son is in his humanizing, his personalizing, of the Christ. For instance, like many an errant son off following his own road, Jesus had a strained relationship with his mother, Mary; she is holy and patient and she is vain and demanding, and Jesus alternately bridles under her gaze and worships her. At one point, he rebukes her (and his jealous brothers) and is later overcome with sorrow and regret. His relationship with Dad, who is, after all, God, is described in even more interesting detail. There is mutual admiration and hostility and love between them, as Jesus describes it, and this culminates in a telling scene in which the long-since crucified Jesus now sits in heaven at his Father's right hand where, Jesus tells us, his Father rarely talks to him! How many of us have endured these same paternal travails - felt the love and protection as well as the rage as we grew and searched, only to wind up in silent treaty as the years buffer us from those more raw emotional encounters? That Mailer would imagine Jesus as such, as the good Son who's extraordinary path nevertheless traversed the mundane and the petty as well as the miraculous, is a marvelous thing. While Mailer's plot adheres to the Jesus story we have come to know fairly well, there is nevertheless much in this book that is poetic. Like ripened fruit plucked from a familiar backyard tree, this book nourishes those visceral assocations even as it flavors our current ideas of what God has meant, and can mean in our world.
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Summary: Jesus, still contemporary after all these 2000 years!
Review: This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, especially in its ablility to remain highly readable despite its scholarship. We find here a very human portrayal of a man struggling to literally embody God, and, despite the scope of such circumstances, we are oddly able to empathize with Jesus. He confronts his extraordinary situation, paradoxically, as an ordinary man. The spareness of the biblical style helps us forget the author and the complex theological and historical weight that the story carries. We are able to focus on the personal, day-to-day, hour-by-hour inner life of Jesus, the man. If you expect quirks and controversy, forget it. If you expect either a born-again, hysterical excitement or a ponderous intellectual examination, take a pass. But, if you are looking for an intimate look at the plausible humanity beneath the religeous and emotional furvor, then read this book. Mailer's account is particularly comprehensible to the 90's mind in that he allows us to see Jesus coping consciously with the dangers his "celebrity" as a miracle worker begin to pose. In our celebrity conscious, media saturated time, we are perhaps more ready to appreciate the "crowd-control" aspects of the story of Christ, and the practical and psychological impact that those factors must have had on Jesus' day-to-day decisions. So how can a jewish author in the 1990's create a plain spoken text in biblical dialects that becomes an exciting "page turner" even though we all know from page one exactly how it is going to turn out in the end? No matter how unlikely, Mr. Mailer has accomplished that feat. Read it with an open mind and your mind will open still further.
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