USING THE LORD'S NAME

By Paul Gray

Jesus of Nazareth was one of history's most powerful and charismatic teachers, but he never published. Until now. That, at any rate, is the premise of Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son (Random House; 242 pages; $22), a novel that purports to be a first-person memoir written by Jesus. Questions will immediately occur, even to readers most willing to suspend their disbelief for the sake of the narrative to come. When did Jesus write this story, and for that matter, where? Why did he wait nearly 2,000 years to present his own Gospel? Why did he choose Random House to publish it?

Mailer anticipates and tries to soothe the initial uneasiness that his book will arouse in most of those who pick it up. In the very first chapter, his Jesus writes, "For those who would ask how my words have come to this page, I would tell them to look upon it as a small miracle. (My gospel, after all, will speak of miracles.) Yet I would hope to remain closer to the truth. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were seeking to enlarge their fold." In other words, Mailer's Jesus suggests that the New Testament is rife with errors and exaggerations and that the time has come to set the record straight: "What is for me to tell remains neither a simple story nor without surprise, but it is true, at least to all that I recall."

Believing Christians are going to have a little problem with the Son of God portraying himself as if he can't remember all the details of his own life. But you needn't be a Christian to find The Gospel According to the Son a dubious and ultimately failed enterprise. Conceivably, imaginative literature at its highest pitch could do what tons of historical research and theological studies have failed to accomplish: present a convincing account of what it may have felt like to be the man Jesus, human like his contemporaries but given a divine vision, mission and fate that they have been spared. But not even the Christ-haunted Dostoyevsky tried to go where Mailer has now rushed in.

There are moments in this imagined memoir when the author creates a credible impression of Jesus. Most of these occur early, during the period least thoroughly covered by the four Gospels. Mailer's Jesus writes movingly of his time as an apprentice carpenter: "So my trade became my pride, and I knew respect for the tools in my box. A rasp, a plane, a hammer, an auger, a gimlet, an adze, a cubit rule, a saw, and three chisels for paring, as well as a gouge--all were mine. And my knowledge of how to treat wood became another tool."

If Mailer's Jesus sounds a tad like Ernest Hemingway here, so be it. The flat sentences effectively convey the step-by-step pleasure of learning a trade. The real Jesus may well have had such feelings. Far less successful are the many passages in which Mailer's Jesus sounds quite a bit like Norman Mailer.

The first sign of big trouble arrives when Mailer's Jesus tells of his temptation by Satan after 40 days of fasting. The Antagonist is resplendent in sensual attractions: "I could also perceive how greed came forth from his body. For that was kin to the odor that lives between the buttocks." Mailer's preternatural olfactory alertness will be familiar to his readers, particularly those who made it through Ancient Evenings (1983), his novel about old Egypt, and Mailer's Jesus shares the same obsession with smells: "It was hard not to remember the breath of John the Baptist when he embraced me, for it was full of all that is in the odor of an exhausted man." Of washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, Mailer's Jesus remembers, "Some of their feet were clean, and others' stank of the alleys of Jerusalem."

When not conveying the assaults on his nostrils, Mailer's Jesus takes pains to debunk or diminish most of the reports of his miracles in the Gospels. The story of the loaves and fishes was "much exaggerated," he confides. All he really did was cut up five loaves and two fish into tiny pieces that somehow managed to satisfy his 500 followers: "And this was a triumph of the Spirit rather than an enlargement of matter." But much as Mailer's Jesus disparages Scripture, he uses it extensively; some chapters present little more than strung-together quotations from the Old and New Testaments.

If a purpose can be found for the existence of The Gospel According to the Son, it must be sought in Mailer's interpretation of what Jesus' life and death actually mean. That is fair enough reason to write a book, but merely attributing the author's opinions to Jesus himself seems like dirty pool. Mailer's Jesus remembers Satan's words during the temptation: "Your Father is but one god among many." That is of course what the Devil would say, but Mailer's Jesus comes to agree that his father is not omnipotent. After his account of his Resurrection, he writes that God's "wars with the Devil grow worse. Great battles have been lost." Mailer's Jesus now views his death on the cross as a "debacle and disaster" that Christianity was invented to disguise. In a better book, this conclusion might seem unbearably wrenching and provocative; here it is as unconvincing as all that precedes it.