Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth

"I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road.

"Then what am I to die for?" the old man asked.

Jesus took a small notebook from his pocket and copied the question. "If I may have your name and address," he said, "an answer will be sent to you."

A. J. Langguth's Jesus Christs is a little like the Bible-as-Groundhog-Day: What if Jesus didn't come to earth just once, but over and over again, to live the same life and die the same death in a new context? And not just Jesus, but the whole entourage: each age has its own Mary Magdalene, its own Mother Mary, its own Peter, Judas, Matthew, John the Baptist, and John the Beloved. He dies, is resurrected, and returns--only to start over again.

It sounds a little like a science fiction novel, maybe, like A Canticle for Liebowitz or The Sparrow, or maybe an allegory meant to trace out a consistent theology like The Screwtape Letters. In fact, Jesus Christs often borrows the Screwtape image of heaven as a giant bureaucracy, where God is a distant boss and Jesus is just a cog in a machine--an image perhaps equally inspired by the capitalist Jesus of The Man Nobody Knows. But Jesus Christs is too scattered, too reliant on vignettes, to give either a full explanation of how these reincarnations are meant to work or a programmatic theology. Some of these vignettes are short and more humorous than profound:

A brazen girl possessed of seven devils was brought before Jesus to be cured. "I am going to cast out those seven devils from you," he said. 

"May I ask you for a favor?" She spoke impudently. 

"What is it?" 

"Cast out six."

But others are speculative fiction in a literal sense sense; they give a sense of what Jesus might have been, which is really something incredible in a world that is consistently convinced about what Jesus was. In one longer scene, Peter pretends to be Jesus at Gethsemane and is killed in his place, which transforms his denial of Christ into a protective act. In another, Jesus goes into the desert where he meets a tempter he assumes to be Satan, but who really turns out to be another Christ--who, of course, assumed he was Satan as well. In another, Jesus is grilled by a Nazi officer on his way to the gas chamber:

"So I am to be killed as a Jew." Jesus thought of the thousands of men who had preceded him into the death  chambers. "Then I have failed."

"Even death must be on your terms?"

"My life follows a formula. In this age of science that's become hard somehow for men to comprehend." Jesus felt his legs begin to tremble, as they sometimes did, and he held the soles of his feet squarely to the floor. The next sign was often a tic at the corner of his eye. He began to squint slightly to cover that spasm if it appeared. "There is a pattern for the Messiah that I must match, and men must feel threatened enough by my message to kill me to silence it. Otherwise I am no savior. I become only a man of the kind you prize so highly--living his own life, dying his own death."

These stories, through their infinite variation, try to cut the Christ story down to its essentials, and therefore ask the question, what are the essentials? Judas always betrays, but can betrayal be heroism? Jesus dies, but for what end? Langguth's Jesus, even in his various incarnations, is beset with anxieties about his role and a suspicion of his own inadequacy. He's trapped in a recurring drama from which there is no escape, and for which there seems to be diminishing returns.

In the final section of the novel, Jesus has disappeared. His disciples--Martha, Mary, Judas, Thomas, Matthew, John, even Lazarus, now a little boy--have taken up squatting in an abandoned home like a commune. Supposedly Jesus comes into the house after everyone has gone to sleep, leaves money for the household, but vanishes before they wake up, and the disciples must learn to keep their house going while they wait for Christ to return. In the basement, Judas the inventor has perfected a serum that will grant immortality, which he uses on the boy Lazarus after an accident.

"I am Jesus then." Thomas hooked his thumbs into his belt, and his crisp white shirt bulged out below his vest. "Except for what Judas did tonight, I could have gone on forever trying to recapture the faith I had lost. I'd be born again, rage against God's silence and die. And in the hearts of a few men, my anguish would continue to ignite small fires. Even when doubts overcame me, I could go on because there was no question more important. Tonight Judas has made no question less important."

In this scene Langguth manages to make a very banal question--what do we need religion for in a scientific age?--worth paying attention to again. If Jesus must be reincarnated for each generation, when do we reach a point where He's not needed anymore? And what do we do when He turns his face away, and we have to take his place, only to be met with the same doubts and fears that preoccupied Jesus, in Langguth's version? Jesus Christs is an elegy for Jesus in the modern world, torn equally between believing that He's no longer needed and desperate for his return.