PHILOSOPHY: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel ChristBy Philip Pullman Canongate, 245pp, £14.99

ON THE evidence of his work to date, Philip Pullman is thoughtful and serious about the art of writing and is unafraid of grand themes and subjects. It is not for nothing, then, that he wishes us to understand clearly and emphatically that his new work is a story – that he, Pullman, has made all this up.

In separating Jesus from Christ, as he does in this story, in making the one into two distinct characters, he disentangles aspects of the historical Jesus and his legacy.

He is not saying "this is how it was", instead he is asking us simply to entertain his story as a valid thing in itself. It is a playful speculation, if you like, with its pun on " Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate".

In essence, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christis a meditation on how we should understand "revealed" truths in the light of what we actually understand about ourselves.

It is also a meditation on the melancholy fact that no human institution, no matter how well intentioned its founders, can escape the entropic fall into decay and corruption.

The book rests on a handful of propositions: that Mary gave birth to two sons – the simple, good-hearted Jesus who was direct and charismatic, and the quieter, more reflective, more politically-aware Christ; that Jesus taught values and virtues artlessly, directly and simply; that his brother, Christ, was in awe of him but concerned that Jesus’s message would not survive his death, and so Christ felt both moved and authorised to take what measures seemed best to ensure that the message of his brother would be transmitted to future generations.

Pullman suggests the contradictions between faith and authority are there from the beginning. We are still living with them.

The present debate about the need for a radical return to the values of the Sermon on the Mount, on the one hand, and the impulse to protect the institution of the Church erected on that foundation, on the other, raises problems that are both acute and very likely insoluble. This is not true of a story, of course. In the story and in our thinking about the story we can entertain propositions that would cause serious anguish, perhaps even paralysis, if we were to subject them to the premature and perhaps meaningless question: is this actually true in the real world? All we can ask of a story is, does it engage us as thinking and feeling creatures?

The only reliable truth is, of course, that everything is a story. We can know nothing for certain in this world; even what seems to us our own personal experience is mediated by our telling stories to ourselves about ourselves.

Only a very simple person would dare to imagine that they own the truth about anything, and that the truth is singular.

The Jesus of the New Testament appears in this book as a bright, good and loving man. Perhaps he is possessed of a more robust common sense than the Gospel makers have allowed in their stories, but Pullman’s instinct of how a fully human Jesus would act and speak, whether Son of God or not, seems to me both adult and sound.

Take the story of the loaves and fishes: in the Gospel this is presented as straightforward miracle – Jesus makes a few loaves of bread and a few fish feed a multitude. There is no need to ask if what is being recounted is a true record of an actual event to see that it is a very powerful image in a story. Pullman’s version is somewhat different: Jesus shares out what he has, and then asks of the multitude: “See how I share this food out? You do the same. There’ll be enough for everyone.” They do and there is. Here, as elsewhere, we are free to reflect on what may or may not have actually happened, that is on whether or not Jesus performed “real miracles”.

Jesus himself, in Pullman’s story as in the Gospel, promises that the Kingdom of God is at hand. We know, however, that Jesus did not live in the end of times. That simple fact shifts us sideways to where we can understand the character of his brother, Christ.

In Pullman’s story, Christ, guided by a suave and intelligent unidentified helper, is persuaded, or allows himself to be persuaded, that his brother Jesus is on the right track as a messenger of salvation, but is hopelessly deluded as to the length of time it will take to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Prompted by his hidden adviser, Christ slowly but surely comes to see himself as laying the foundations for what will become the institutional Church, gifted with Jesus’s teachings and mandated to bring them to ultimate fruition.

Christ, in other words, is the “practical” man who builds the human institution that will enshrine and protect the words and deeds of the naive, unworldly visionary.

Whether or not the hidden helper is St Paul or the devil is skilfully occluded, but there is a delicate, perhaps misleading hint in the passage where Christ says to him: “There are others besides you, sir?” and receives the answer: “A legion”.

Pullman invites us to consider that we live in a world where truth may not be durable, but truths are our daily bread. This artfully wrought, provocative book asks us to think about what story is, and how stories tell truths.

Theo Dorgan’s latest collection, Greek was recently published by Dedalus Press