The Book of Longings: Sue Monk Kidd's Alt Look at Jesus

 

 

The Book of Longings  (2020/2024)

By Sue Monk Kidd

Viking Pres, 448 pages

★★★★★

 

This week features five-star novels, beginning with Sue Monk Kidd and a work that reappeared in 2024. Rightly so, as it’s stunner.

 

I recall a massive protest in front of Northampton’s Pleasant Street Theatre in 1988, when it booked Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. It was based on a 1955 novel from Nikos Kazantzakis, but I guess the diocesan Catholic bishop didn’t read translated Greek novels. He did, though, whip  up fervor among local Catholics to object to a movie none of them had seen. In the film Jesus marries Mary Magdalene (though it was perhaps a dream sequence). It was too much to contemplate Jesus in naked passion with Magdalene, even if she was played by Barara Hershey!

 

How far we’ve come. Recent scholars have pondered a fragment of an ancient Coptic scroll that seems to mention Jesus’s wife. Praise has been heaped upon the novel The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It takes a look at the life and crucifixion of Jesus from the perspective of a willful and intelligent girl named Ana, Jesus’s 15-year-old bride. Kidd deserves kudos for the reverent manner in which she handled her subjects and the brilliance with which she shows what it was like to be a first century A.D. Jewish woman. Hers is a Passion play seen through proto-feminist eyes.

 

Some of you may know songwriter John Prine’s whimsical talking blues “Jesus: The Missing Years.” Prine was a man of faith, but the song deals with the truism that the Bible says very little about Jesus’s life between his childhood and age 30 when he began his public ministry.  Kidd’s novel places Jesus in the context of the powerful Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus. Judea was a relative backwater of the Roman Empire, but one troubled by rebellions against Roman authority, including the terrorism of Zealots. (Yes, we got the word from the Bible.)  Th first century Levant was a whirl of competing religious faiths, philosophical views, politics, and social customs. Concerning the latter, it would have been unusual for the Jewish Jesus to be unmarried into his 20s.

 

Ana is the daughter of Matthias, a scribe to Herod Antipas. The household also includes Ana’s aunt Yaltha, who was exiled from Alexandria, and the orphan Judas Iscariot, who is protective of his half-sister Ana, though he’s already cast his lot with the  anti-Roman Zealots. Precocious Ana learned to read and write several languages, practically unheard of for Jewish girls. Matthias pampers Ana–until it’s time to consider a lucrative marriage. She is promised to an ugly, elderly man named Nathaniel and when she rebels, her parents blame her writing. For her defiance, Ana is offered to Herod as a concubine. Oddly, her refusal makes her a whore.

 

As Ana buries some of her scrolls in cave to save them, she meets Jesus, who is enamored of her fieriness and dubs her “Little Thunder.” In this narrative, Ana is the woman Jesus saves from being stoned to death, and insists he is engaged to her. They marry, move to Nazareth, and live with Mary, Jesus, and extended family, including a jealous sister-in-law. From this point on, Monk follows the Gospels fairly closely, except for Ana and Jesus’s stillborn daughter and Ana’s presence at key moments after Jesus meets John “the Immerser” and pursues the ministry that leads to his crucifixion.

 

Monk fashions narratives for Ana, Tabitha, Yaltha, Mary, and others after the “cult of Jesus” emerges. The Resurrection gets short shrift though an escape by Ana prefigures it. Ana eventually becomes the head of a community of female scholars and devotees of Sophia, a Platonic personification of Wisdom, a female aspect of God, with Jesus the male personification. 

 

Monk’s work is certainly not orthodox, nor is it intended to be. She retells the Gospels from a female point of view, places individuals in different roles than the synoptic Gospels, and situates characters within the polyglot realm of 1^st century AD.  Does she subvert Christian faith? Given what we don’t know, you could make the case that she makes Jesus more historical. An axiom of history is that the meaning of past events looks different depending upon the perspectives of those who lived them. Note that Monk’s title is The Book of Longings. Do we know what women longed for 2,500 years ago? How fascinating to speculate what might be written on as-yet-undiscovered sheets of parchment.

 

Rob Weir