Press Release

Testamentby Nino Ricci

• About the Book• About the Author• Praise for Testament• From Testament• On Writing Testament

"[Ricci's] latest book is a stunning historical novel that will only enhance his high reputation . . . An absolutely beautiful, rigorously intelligent, fiercely thoughtful fictional biography." — Booklist, starred review

"Ricci transcends the stale confines of 'the historical Jesus' debate and invites us into that imaginative region where Jesus finds a living context." — Dr. Bruce Chilton, director, Institute for Advanced Theology, Bard College, and author of Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography

About the Book

"When I considered what it was in Yeshua that had held me to him, it seemed exactly the hope of something new: a new sort of man, a new way of seeing things . . . Tell me your secret, I had wanted to say to him, tell me, make me new. And even now, though I had left him, I often saw him beckoning before me as towards a doorway he would have had me pass through, from darkness to light." — from Testament

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? In Testament, Nino Ricci turns the gifts that have won him acclaim as a novelist to reimagining the life of the man Christians know as the Son of God, exploring the ways in which his story might have been shaped by the time and place in which he lived. The result is a captivating, provocative, and moving account that will redefine the way we

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 1 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

look at the possibilities of history and parable.

As seen through the eyes of four people who knew him — and colored by each narrator's own beliefs and desires — the Jesus of Testament is a complex and charismatic teacher, alternately compassionate and difficult but always able to lead his followers to a greater understanding of the world within and around them. Those followers include

• Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas), a political dissident whose challenging conversations with Jesus cause him to question his own convictions;• Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), a disciple whose attraction to Jesus as a teacher and a man gives her a modicum of independence from her cloistered life;• Miryam (Mary), his mother, whose story gives insight into Jesus' difficult past and his insatiable search for spiritual truth; and• Simon of Gergesa, a young Syrian shepherd who travels to Jerusalem with Jesus and witnesses his heartbreaking fate.

In a brilliantly depicted time of social, religious, and political unrest, Jesus' every action and utterance becomes the stuff of controversy, evoking strong visceral reactions from everyone he encounters. In this way, we see how the life of a man who possessed "that quality that made one feel there was something, still, some bit of hope, some secret he might reveal that would make the world over" might have grown and been shaped over time in the retelling, becoming the tale we recognize today as gospel.

Nino Ricci's best-selling trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels — Lives of the Saints (soon to be a motion picture starring Sophia Loren), In a Glass House, and Where She Has Gone — won him widespread international attention and a multitude of awards in his native Canada. Historically nuanced and striking in its vision of the man whose teachings have touched every corner of Western civilization, Testament is his most passionate and engrossing work yet.

About the Author

Nino Ricci's debut novel, Lives of the Saints (published in the United States as The Book of Saints), was an international bestseller and won the Governor General's Award for fiction, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F. G. Bressani Prize. The New York Times Book Review

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 2 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

praised it as "an extraordinary story — brooding and ironic, suffused with yearning, tender and lucid and gritty." The first book in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels, it was followed by In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone, a finalist for the Giller Prize. Ricci lives in Toronto.

Praise for Testament

"This is a remarkable work — immensely savvy about the nature of human longing, compassionate about human failure, and illuminating about the trajectory of the hero. It's beautifully written, an endeavor both humble and risky." — Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams

"Testament is a remarkable retelling of the Jesus story, doing what great art always does — making what is familiar suddenly fresh, daring, challenging. You will never think of the characters of the gospel accounts in the same way again, which is the good news of this stunning novel." — Reverend Stephen Kendrick, senior minister, First and Second Church, Boston

"A bold and brilliant premise for a novel, and Ricci doesn't disappoint. His spare, lyrical prose reflects the extreme terrain of Palestine under the Romans . . . and the rugged psychological landscape that the narrators traverse . . . With this novel, Ricci deserves legions of new readers." — Montreal Gazette

"The sum of these various reminiscences makes a highly readable narrative . . . There is, moreover, an element of suspense that is sustained throughout the novel despite — or even because of — the universally known outcome of Jesus' career." — Toronto Star

"Ricci has given us a contemporary Jesus. Like a palimpsest, with each fresh image superimposed on earlier images, Ricci's Jesus testifies to the inexhaustible power of story, reminding us that enduring myths are not windows through which we view objective truths, but mirrors framing our own evanescent mortality and morality plays." — Globe and Mail

"Testament, a refracted biography of Jesus, becomes too an examination of storytelling itself, for what is Jesus of Nazareth if not a teller of stories? . . . From the good book Ricci has fashioned a great story." — Quill and Quire

"Compelling . . . balances history and parable, political conflict and religious faith." — Ottawa Citizen

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 3 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

From Testament

It won't be long, of course, before everyone has forgotten the man, or remembers only the trouble he had with his women or how he died a criminal or that he was a bastard, which sooner or later is sure to get out. But however things get remembered, you can be certain it won't be how they actually were, since one man will change a bit of this to suit his fancy, and one a bit of that, and another will spice it up to make a better story of it. And by and by the truth of the thing will get clouded, and he'll simply be a yarn you tell to your children. And something will be lost then because he was a man of wisdom, the more so when even someone like me, who when I met him didn't know more than when the crops came up and how many sheep it took to buy a bride, had come to understand something of him in the end . . .

I remembered the vision that Jesus had told us about after he'd raised Elazar. And for a moment it was as if some curtain had been pushed aside in my head and I had a glimpse of something I understood but couldn't have put into words, like some beautiful thing, so beautiful it took your breath away, that you saw for an instant through a gateway or a door, then was gone.

I suppose Jeus was like that for me, something I saw as if in the twinkling of an eye. It was just the week or so that I was with him, in the end, and what was that but half a breath in the middle of all the years of my life. But still when I look out at the fields now or at the sheep grazing on the bit of pasture that overlooks the lake, a sort of haze seems to come off things that wasn't there before, as if I'm expecting something good to come along at any minute, though I couldn't tell you what it is. And though I'm happy enough to be at home, I'll never see the likes of the times I had them, for better and worse, when it seemed that every good and ill that could come to a man, and every wonder and devilry, had passed in front of me.

On Writing Testament

Nino Ricci

The original seed of inspiration for my novel Testament probably goes back to the first book I ever owned, a picture Bible called The Guiding Light that was presented to newborns in my hometown by our local hospital. The gentle,

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 4 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

light-bathed Jesus depicted there became my first hero, and its stories of lepers and sinners and miracles the backdrop to my imagination. As I grew older, that first untroubled relationship I had with Christianity gave way to a thornier, more conflicted one that saw me pass from post–Vatican II Catholicism to born-again evangelism and finally to a last, desperate phase with Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. But though by early adulthood I could no longer have properly called myself a Christian, neither, by any means, could I say I'd got free of Jesus, who seemed far too powerful a figure to rid oneself of by so simple a thing as a loss of faith.

By my university years I had found the way of holding to Jesus by reinventing him, seeing him no longer as a figure of faith but of history, on the one hand, and of myth, on the other. What in my youth had seemed the impenetrable, God-delivered arcana of the priests and nuns, the gospels of the New Testament, now revealed themselves as patchwork texts written by real people in a real time and place, and showing ample evidence of their human composition — in their divergent, often contradictory points of view; in their many gaps and anachronisms and evidences of editorial tinkering; and in the vital, radical, and frequently difficult Jesus that nonetheless shone through in them, one considerably at odds with the sanitized version of him that I'd tended to get through the church. What emerged from this reenvisioning of Christian tradition for me was a double sense of Jesus, as a real figure of vitality and brilliance and contradiction on whom had been overlaid, however, a mythic Jesus of apocalypse and divinity, who in the pattern of death and rebirth relived every ancient fertility myth from the stories of Thammuz and Marduk of ancient Sumeria and Babylonia to the Egyptian Osiris and the Orpheus and Adonis of the Greeks.

The notion of a fictional treatment of the life of Jesus had already begun to take shape in my head by that point, as the logical convergence, it seemed, of my own personal obsession with the figure and my continually deepening understanding of his wider cultural importance. Like a magpie I began to gather up bits of lore and fact on the subject as they came across my path and to acquaint myself, in a fairly unsystematic way, with the vast array of Jesus retellings, from Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus, a groundbreaking if somewhat florid nineteenth-century attempt at a reimagining of Jesus, through to Jesus Christ Superstar. What I found, however, was that few of these treatments, for all the radicalness they may have had in their own time, were quite able to shed the mantle of divinity that cloaked the traditional Jesus. Yet it seemed to me a more interesting Jesus would be an entirely human one, whose power as a spiritual leader and whose resonance

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 5 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

into our own day could not be explained away by divine intervention.

When I finally came to begin my novel, some twenty-odd years after my first conception of it and via the detour of a trilogy of somewhat more autobiographical works, I set about to do my research in a slightly more ordered manner, first trying to ground myself in the current state of biblical scholarship. For all the contentiousness and territoriality that I quickly discovered were the general rule among New Testament scholars, I found that on purely textual issues there was in fact a fair amount of consensus among them. Most agreed, for instance, that the first gospel to be written was that of Mark, probably, based on internal evidence, just after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. Scholars also tend to agree that both Matthew and Luke derived much of their material from Mark — hence the classing of the three as the "synoptic," or "seen together," gospels — as well as from a conjectured second document that scholars had dubbed Q, from the German Quelle, or "source." Q, scholars surmised, was probably an early collection of the sayings of Jesus unadorned with any narrative elements, not unlike a text unearthed in Egypt in 1945, the gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, which some scholars dated as early as the 50s C.E., others rather later. The final canonical gospel, that of John, was apparently somewhat more controversial — it was almost surely the last gospel to be written, and possibly the work of several hands, but showed quirky evidence here and there of a firmer grounding in historical truth than the others, giving some credence to the theory that it had its source in John the apostle.

It was exactly on the question of historical truth, however, that all consensus among commentators seemed to break down. On one hand, I found someone like New Testament scholar Burton Mack, who in his book Who Wrote the New Testament? argued that the gospels were essentially works of propaganda composed according to literary conventions of the time, and who dismissed as futile any attempt to get back through them to a "true" historical Jesus. That the earliest surviving writings of the Jesus tradition, the letters of Paul, did not contain any significant details of the life of Jesus, nor, apparently, did the hypothetical sayings of gospel Q, seemed in some sense to lend support to Mack's view, suggesting that the narrative aspects of the gospels were used to flesh out and make more attractive to followers an earlier tradition that put no emphasis on Jesus' life history. At the other extreme, however, I found the southern American writer Reynolds Price, whose interest in Jesus had led to a lifelong study of the New Testament and

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 6 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

to his bestseller Three Gospels, which included personal translations from the Greek of Mark and John as well as his own "apocryphal" gospel blending the original four. In contrast to Mack, Price argued that the gospels stood entirely outside and above any of the literary genres of their day, and he found incredible the notion that works of such originality and "life-transforming urgency" could be anything other than honest attempts to render the real events of a real life. In support of Price's claim was the fact that the gospel tradition had established itself relatively quickly, within sixty years of Jesus' death, and among a group that was largely poor and isolated and under threat and that would hardly have been in a position for sophisticated efforts at propaganda.

Unfortunately, I discovered, there were few sources to turn to outside of the gospels for any independent verification of their claims. Indeed, it seemed that practically the only other surviving record of any note from that part of the world that was more or less contemporary with the life of Jesus was that of the Jewish historian Josephus, who was born around the time of Jesus' death. Josephus proved very useful in helping me to understand the political and cultural ferment of Palestine in the first century — a place of many sects, from the Pharisees to the Essenes, of many political movements, mainly aimed at the overthrow of the Roman occupiers, and of many messianic figures, who periodically amassed large followings before, as usually happened, being murdered by the Romans or their client kings. He also painted for me a compelling portrait of how these various social currents, along with the increasing brutality and corruption of the Roman regime, led to the disastrous Jewish war of A.D. 67–70, in which the Jews were utterly defeated and their temple destroyed. On the specific subject of Jesus, however, Josephus was not especially forthcoming: the sum of his commentary on him, once the ham-fisted interpolations of later Christian editors had been accounted for, added up to no more than a few lines, portraying him as a wise man who performed many "startling feats," won many followers, and was crucified by Pontius Pilate, for what reason Josephus didn't make clear. "And the clan of Christians," Josephus concluded, as if speaking of some brave but ultimately minor and forgettable sect, "has not died out to this day."

How, then, to make one's way among these widely diverging perspectives — the historian at one end who had accorded Jesus no more than a few passing lines, the devotees at the other who had made him a god, and then the modern commentators fighting over all the territory in between? In the end, I chose the middle course, assuming that a tradition as evocative as that of the

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 7 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

gospels could not have arisen out of nothing but also that the truth claims of the gospels had to be taken in the light of their own inconsistencies and their clearly proselytizing intent. In following this course I was helped by a great range of New Testament experts, from people like Father Jerome Murphy-O'Conner, whose guide to the Holy Land provided me a rigorous archeological introduction, to the world of Jesus, to people like Reynolds Price and British writer A. N. Wilson, who seemed to come to the subject of Jesus, not unlike myself, from the point of view of personal passion, and to the extensive work of the Jesus Seminar, which since the mid-1980s has striven to separate the Jesus of history from the Jesus of myth. Using detailed criteria of textual analysis and of cultural and historical contextualizing, the Jesus Seminar has worked to determine which teachings in the gospel tradition can realistically be traced back to Jesus and which are likely later interpolations; its results have been published in the book The Five Gospels, which provided original translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas along with commentary on each of the utterances attributed to Jesus. The Jesus Seminar helped provide me with a map for making my way through the minefield of Jesus studies, applying reason, methodology, and a spirit of critical inquiry — though I found it had no shortage of critics and detractors — to a field too often marked by dogma and irrationality.

In the many cases, however, where there was no clear guide, I let myself be led by instinct, imagination, and my own intuitive sense of what might best shed light on the character of my protagonist. I was aware, for instance, of an early, possible rabbinic tradition — cited in the second century by the Platonist Celsus in his True Discourse, an argument against Christianity — that Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman soldier. The standard view of Christians, of course, had always been that the story was simply a fabrication intended to discredit them. Yet given that the issue of Jesus' paternity was a central one in Christian thought, it seemed at least possible that there was more to the matter. Indeed, it was the gospels themselves that raised the issue of Jesus' bastardy: in the gospel of Matthew, Joseph, on hearing of Mary's pregnancy, at once assumes she is disgraced and decides quietly to break off with her, changing his mind only at the urging of the angel who visits him. Certainly, then, there was a way to read the tradition in which the virgin birth, and its preempting of any question of paternity, could be seen as an attempt to overcome some irksome aspect of Jesus' conception, such as illegitimacy. Once I'd started thinking in those terms, I began to see a new way of understanding Jesus' teachings — his privileging of the marginalized, his defiance of convention, his emphasis on the inner person rather than on

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 8 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

the outward forms of religious observance.

Similarly, where there were great gaps in the tradition — almost nothing is said in the gospels about Jesus' youth and early adulthood, for instance — I usually simply took a creative leap in the direction that seemed most likely to bear fruit. My Jesus, in line with another, somewhat renegade hypothesis, spends a good part of his childhood in Alexandria. Again, it is the gospels that provide some basis for such a notion, with their story of the flight into Egypt; while Celsus, for his part, claims Jesus, "on account of his poverty," was hired out to Egypt, where he acquired certain magical powers on the strength of which, when he returned home, he "gave himself out to be a god." In the modern era, there has been a good deal of speculation that Jesus may have spent time in Alexandria, based on similarities between his views and those of the Greeks. In fact, Jesus likely need have gone no farther than Galilee to get exposure to Greek views, as there were a number of cities in the area, one only three miles from Nazareth, that were essentially Greek, leftovers of the Hellenizing period that had followed the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great. But the Alexandrian setting seemed to me both plausible and suggestive, providing for an exposure not only to Greek philosophy but to a cosmopolitan culture that in that era would have been one of the most diverse, progressive, and vital in the world.

Albert Schweitzer, in reviewing back in 1906 the already extensive literature devoted to the quest for the historical Jesus, made the point that people tended to find the Jesus they were looking for, each epoch and each individual recreating him in their own image. Certainly the Jesus I came to in the end — a man of contradiction and ambiguity, capable of great wisdom but also of arrogance, a man of peace who was yet perpetually combative — seemed at times too contemporary in his struggles and too relevant to our own era in many of his concerns. Yet coming to the subject from the point of view of a nonbeliever, I had initially suspected I might emerge with a very different portrait, of the sort of deluded, megalomaniacal cult leader common enough not only in our own day but in that of first-century Palestine. That was not the Jesus I ended up with. Instead there seemed, in sifting through the bits and fragments that had come down to us and in piecing together what could have been, the possibility of a Jesus who was entirely human yet visionary, revolutionary and radical in his thought, and who indeed added something new to the world that continued to have relevance to this day. To find this Jesus I often did not have to go much further than the gospels, though reading them, admittedly, with a fairly critical eye and with a much fuller sense of the social, political, and cultural context of the time than they

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 9 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

themselves provide. And if such a Jesus in the end seemed a more relevant and living presence than I had anticipated, then a great part of that, I felt, had exactly to do with the very complexity and ambiguity at the heart of the Jesus tradition, and that seemed to me the best argument of the rootedness of that tradition in a real man of flesh and blood.

BOOKLISTFebruary 15, 2003

Booksellers Home | Trade Home | FAQ | Site Map Privacy Policy | Trademark Information

Copyright © 2003 Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 10 of 10 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved