Son of Mary: A Tale of Jesus of Nazareth is a profound and deeply moving novel that ranks with some of the finest Christian-themed fiction ever written. I was led to Christ by the writings of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis, so when I tell you this book is on par with their works, that’s the greatest compliment I can give. It had me crying or laughing or simply awe-struck in every chapter, and, after 565 pages, wishing it were far longer--but consoled by the knowledge that it's the first of four volumes in the complete Crown of Thorns saga.
Writing a fictionalized account of the Gospel story is a challenge that has defeated more than a few famous authors, from Norman Mailer to Nobel laureate José Saramago. Randy Ingermanson has succeeded in a way only possible for a writer guided by the Holy Spirit. He’s been researching first-century Palestine for nearly forty years, so I wasn't surprised at the compelling way he evokes its sights and scents and sounds. He's an award-winning writer, so I took it for granted that his Gospel characters would be convincingly portrayed as men and women with motivations and emotions I understand and relate to. Other authors, including Anne Rice and Nikos Kazantzakis, have done that, if perhaps not so movingly as in Son of Mary. But what sets this novel apart is the author's profound feeling for and insight into the Gospel. In fact, if I could give my young son only one book to read to accompany Scripture when he comes of age, this would be it.
First-person narration is one of the keys to the novel’s power. Most of Son of Mary is told through the eyes of six characters: Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus), Miryam of Nazareth (his mother Mary), Yaakov of Nazareth (his brother James), Shimon of Capernaum (Simon Peter), thirteen-year-old Yoni (John, son of Zebedee), and Miryam of Bethany (Mary sister of Martha).
As one might imagine from the book’s title, Miryam of Nazareth (along with Yeshua) is central to the story, which begins and ends with her narration. In this version of the Gospel story, neither she nor her husband ever told their son or the village of Nazareth the true story of his birth (people then were no more likely than people today to respond well to a teenage girl, pregnant out of wedlock, telling them some wild story about a meeting an angel). As a result, the townspeople—who might cut her some slack if she’d only own up to the truth and tell which man really got her pregnant—despise and torment her. Miryam in turn is filled with a fierce, bitter resentment, and how she (and Yeshua) deal with those emotions is at the heart of volume one of Crown of Thorns.
Of course, any retelling of the Gospel will succeed or fail based on its portrayal of Jesus. Ingermanson’s Yeshua deals with uncertainty and doubt, but his charisma, compassion, and courage are beautiful and utterly convincing. I’d have a hard time picking a favorite among the other characters.
Yaakov of Nazareth, filled with a mighty macho spirit, is eager to take on the mantle of Messiah himself and bring the fight to the Romans. He’s a sharp study in contrast to his brother, whom Yaakov views as utterly unfit for the job of liberating his people. This is a good example of how Ingermanson takes full advantage of the reader’s familiarity with the Gospel story, because this portrayal of James heightens our anticipation of—and longing for--the man he will one day become.
Yoni—short, of course, for Yohanan (John)—often steals the show. It makes sense that in the year 29 he would only have been a young teenager, given that his Gospel was almost certainly written at the end of the first century. His brilliance, sensitivity, and youthful exuberance are a delight.
Miryam of Bethany, divorced by her husband because she is barren, treated disrespectfully by her sister, is one of the novel’s most moving characters.
Shimon, the Rock, is well drawn; we love him at the same time we’re frustrated with him, and we see that Peter’s legendary obtuseness is more a reflection of first-century Israel’s misunderstanding of what sort of man the Messiah would be. And Shimon’s flashes of insight in Son of Mary are appropriate for the man who we know will one day correctly answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?”
But that’s for a later volume, because Son of Mary ends with the Messiah being rejected by the people of Nazareth, as depicted in Luke 4:16-30, when Yeshua was hustled out of the temple and taken “to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.” I don’t do spoilers, so all I will say is that this scene is replete with both high drama and rich theological insight. And if it doesn’t reduce you to a puddle of joyous tears, well, you’re made of tougher stuff than I am!
By choosing to tell the story in four volumes, Ingermanson gives himself room to create an epic. If I were still a betting man, I'd put serious money on the proposition that people will be reading the Crown of Thorns quartet one hundred years from now, just as they'll still be reading another classic it brings to mind, Lord of the Rings.
The Humanity of Jesus
“ For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are… ”
“We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man…in all things like unto us, without sin… ”
Any presentation of Biblical characters as complex, well-rounded human beings is sure to stir up controversy, especially when it comes to Jesus and his mother. Most notably, the Vatican banned Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, published in 1952, and its author was excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. The firestorm around that book (and the 1988 Martin Scorsese movie it inspired) focused on the depiction of Jesus as a man who felt sexual desire and at times longed for a wife and children.
How that could possibly be considered blasphemous is beyond me. The humanity of Jesus of Nazareth is clearly implied in the Gospels themselves as well as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which affirms that Jesus was tempted in every way we are. But that didn’t sit well with Gnostics and other Docetists, who believed Jesus’ apparent humanity was an illusion. To them, only the spiritual was pure and good; the Word was never Incarnate, but only seemed to be.
Much was at stake when the early Church opposed the Docetists, for, as Gregory of Nazianzus noted, “that which He [the Christ] has not assumed He has not healed.” If Jesus wasn’t a man who experienced the same desires and longings we do, then not only would Biblical fiction be a lot less interesting, we would not have been saved from sin![1]
This was precisely what was at stake in 451 when the Council of Chalcedon affirmed Jesus Christ as “perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body.” One would think that put the matter to bed, but the Gnostic impulse runs deep. As a reviewer for the New York Times put it, commenting on the outrage engendered by The Last Temptation of Christ:
"A reading of the history of Christian doctrine suggests that the humanity of Jesus has always been in more jeopardy than His divinity. Even today no theologian will get in trouble with the Vatican or the Campus Crusade for seeming to dilute the humanity of Jesus. The Docetists and their heirs are alive and well…”
Jesus’ Identity and Self-Awareness
The Jesus of Son of Mary is a man with normal human desires, but I doubt Ingermanson will be so lucky as to garner the free publicity that would surely result from having his book banned. He deals with Jesus’ sexual thoughts and feelings only enough for us to believe that He was indeed “truly man,” but dwells at length on a far more interesting subject: Jesus’ growing awareness of His identity and destiny.
Google “when did Jesus know He was God?” and you’ll find a number of Evangelical sites which claim, “it is likely that Jesus always knew of His divine nature.” Always? Really? At the age of twelve? At three? Inside the womb? This is implicitly a Docetic point of view.
By contrast, an Eastern Orthodox priest answers the same question this way:
“Because Jesus was fully human, we must affirm that he, as well as Mary and other followers, experienced a progressive understanding of who he was. In the Jewish context, titles such as "Messiah," "Son of God," and "divine" could apply to anyone who was sent by God and spoke and acted with the authority and power of God. It was only with the decisive events of Jesus' resurrection and the gift of the Spirit that full knowledge of Jesus' intimacy with God and his sharing of God's glory as divine Lord were revealed.”[2]
Because Yeshua’s self-awareness is at the heart of the plot, and perhaps because Evangelical Christian views are so prevalent in the United States, Son of Mary has a page before the story begins, titled “Who Told Jesus?” After acknowledging that we can’t know for sure whether Jesus’ parents told him his destiny, or if he was indeed “born knowing he was doomed to the cross,” the author writes,
“Could it be that he discovered his destiny gradually?
The same way you and I do, step by step, working it out?
We read. We talk. We think. We pray. We listen.
Bit by bit, we find our way in the world…”
Placing the focus on Yeshua’s growing awareness of his identity and of what it means to be the Messiah is brilliant on two levels. First, what could be more fascinating than the psychological drama of gradually discovering you are not only the Annointed One, but the very Son of God?
Second, not only was Yeshua’s growing understanding of his role as Messiah profoundly dissonant with the first-century Jewish mindset (a frame of reference which Jesus shared with his countrymen, so imagine his inner confusion!), but also with much of contemporary Christian thinking. While this last point is never addressed explicitly in the novel, it’s one that will occur to every thoughtful reader.
The Role of Mashiach, The Heart of HaShem
Ingermanson reminds us that the story is set long ago and far away by making the characters’ syntax slightly different from ours, by using Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek names, and by incorporating some key Hebrew words. In the passages below, Mashiach is Hebrew for Messiah, and HaShem means ‘The Name,’ used out of respect in place of the actual name of God.
Early in the novel (which begins like Mark’s Gospel, during what Ingermanson pegs as the summer of AD 29), the news reaches Nazarath of “Yohanan the immerser” (John the Baptist), a prophet calling Israel to repentance. Yeshua knows “that some man of HaShem foretold I would do a great thing for our people. We do not speak of it openly, but all the family thinks I will redeem Israel. And the sign I am about to redeem Israel is that a prophet will rise in Israel.”
Yohanan is that prophet.
The question, however, is what “redeeming Israel” actually means. This is the subject upon which Yeshua is meditating in the following passages:
“Here is a mighty question that has tormented me long. Every son of Israel knows Mashiach will destroy the Great Satan and bring a fiery judgment on earth and kill many evil men. Mashiach will be sent by HaShem] to do these things. Yet I do not think HaShem takes a delight in killing evil men. How is it that HasShem will send a man to do a thing HaShem hates?”
And later on:
“I have been waiting and waiting for HaShem to speak to me on his wrath.
And I hear nothing, only a few whispers.
Then I look on a man who needs kindness, and HaShem tells me more kindness on that man in a moment than a scribe could write in a month.
There is a thing wrong with me.
All my life I heard I am to redeem Israel.
To redeem Israel is to do battle with our enemies…”
As it turns out, Yeshua the Mashiach is indeed commanded to do battle with Israel’s enemies, the Four Powers. But who—or what—are these Powers? The answers to this question are revealed, one by one, in each volume of Crown of Thorns. The revelation of the identity of the First Power is one of the most thrilling and insightful moments in Son of Mary (and since I don’t do spoilers, you’ll just have to find out for yourself!)
Our theology, our understanding of Scripture, of how we ought to live our lives—of whom or what we must battle against!—is dependent on our understanding of the character of God. The first-century Jewish understanding of the Messiah was in conflict with Yeshua’s understanding of HaShem’s heart.
Differences in the understanding of God’s character are at the core of some of the most profound theological controversies. Sure, say some, God is Love, but that’s only one aspect of his character; He’s also a God of Justice, a God of Wrath. Sin is infinitely offensive to the Holy One, and not only does He indeed take pleasure in “killing evil men,” he justly condemns them to an eternity of torment in Hell.
No, say others—and my guess is that Ingermanson is one of them—God is One, and God, as John tells us, is Love. If we take that as a profound truth statement rather than a mere platitude, then His wrath and His justice, along with His mercy, must all be aspects of His love. If so, there are huge implications.
Of Judgment and Justice
Fairly early in the novel, Yeshua and some of the first disciples are sitting with a large group after the evening meal, and people take turns telling stories from Scripture. The crowd’s favorites are tales of judgment, of the wrath of HaShem falling on the wicked: Noah and the Flood, and Daniel coming out alive from the lion’s den, followed by the king throwing his counselors in the den along with their women and children.
As he sees and hears the crowd’s enthusiasm for these stories, Yeshua thinks, “I feel there is a wrong thing here. These tales of judgment are told with wrong hearts that look for vengeance, not justice.” He asks Shimon’s brother, Andre, to tell the tale of Jonah, but the people “do not like this tale of how HaShem sent a man to make goyim [non-Jews] repent.”
But what is the nature of God’s justice? Once again, the answer will depend on our understanding of His heart.
The first insight we get into how Ingermanson addresses this question comes indirectly, from—of all people—the Rock, Shimon of Capernaum, before he ever meets Yeshua. Shimon is watching the crucifixion of a man who has killed one of his brothers. Though he hates the man, he is horrified by his terrible suffering, and muses, “I should feel glad. I should rejoice that HaShem is making a justice.” Why isn’t Shimon satisfied that a killer is being punished? The answer that comes to him intuitively is, “This would be a justice, if I got my brother back from the grave.” [italics added]
While Ingermanson’s Peter would not have been able to fully understand the implications of his thought, his beautifully simple insight is that only restorative justice is true justice. Justice is only done when all wrongs have been set right, and that can never be accomplished through purely retributive justice. Taking out your enemy’s eye will never restore sight to your eye that he blinded. It’s an understanding elegantly articulated by George MacDonald in his classic essay, “Justice,” from Volume III of Unspoken Sermons. And it’s at the heart of the Patristic doctrine of Apokatastasis, the restoration of all things, the reconciliation of all beings to God (sometimes referred to as “universal reconciliation”).
Am I reading my own belief in the Apokatastasis into Ingermanson’s tale? Perhaps, but certainly there is nothing in Son of Mary that a believer in universal reconciliation would find jarring.
Reimagining the Old Testament Tales
When Jesus read chapter 61 of the Book of Isaiah, he famously stopped mid-sentence, before the words, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” It’s an omission that his first-century Jewish audience would have immediately—and angrily!—noticed.
One of Ingermanson’s most inspired guesses is that Yeshua did that on many occasions.
The Letter to the Hebrews makes it clear that God’s self-revelation is only made perfectly in Christ Jesus, not in the understandings of the Old Testament prophets. In his reading from Isaiah, in the Sermon on the Mount, and in other parts of the Gospel, Jesus corrects misunderstandings of God’s character.
And yet, what of the Old Testament tales of wrath-filled judgment?
Ingermanson is well known as a writing coach, and one of the maxims of good writing is “show, don’t tell.” In what might be a bit of an inside joke—but regardless, in what is an utterly convincing part of the story—Yeshua decides that the best way for his countrymen to understand how wrong they are in loving the apparently vengeful justice meted out in their favorite stories from Scripture is not to tell them, but to show them.
As Yeshua gains confidence in his understanding of HaShem and of his mission as Mashiach, he takes the Old Testament Greatest Hits mentioned above and spins in them in an entirely new way. Jesus was surely a highly charismatic and gifted speaker. In Son of Mary, Yeshua is such a spell-binding orator that his audience feels that the stories he relates are taking place before their eyes.
In the coda to the tale of Daniel, the king’s counselors’ wives and children are thrown to the lions, and one listener describes what happens next:
“The women wail and wail for their grief. The children shriek and shriek for their terror. I see a little girl of the age of three, holding a small doll. She clings to her brothers and her mother. She is screaming.
I see the lions pounce again. They tear apart the men. They tear apart the children. Last of all is the little girl, hiding in the corner.
A lion comes to her, snarling for his fury.
She screams.
The lion claws her face…”
The crowd is left shaken, no longer able to delight in the wrath of HaShem. Similarly—but even more powerfully—when Yeshua tells the story of Noah, his listeners imagine themselves as participants in the scene. At first, they are delighted as they imagine the fate that awaits all except Noah and his family. But read what happens next (the narrator is Jesus’ mother, who shares her countrymen’s belief in a wrathful God):
“A fat drop falls on my head.
Another one.
More.
Many.
I am wet. My whole head is drenched.
This is a bad tale. There is a thing wrong with this tale.
I am watching from inside the tale.
But I am watching from outside the boat.
All Father Noah's enemies are angry on him. They beat on the sides of the boat. They shout on Father Noah for mercy.
I shout on Father Noah for mercy.
The rain falls harder now...”
The rest of what Miryam of Nazareth recounts is harrowing and devastatingly powerful. Yeshua’s stories show that retributive justice is empty, horrific, no justice at all. And the book’s conclusion shows the awesome power of restorative justice, yet without in any way being saccharine or simplistic.
There are many more wonders that Ingermanson works in Son of Mary, but if I wrote of every one of them, the internet would not have room for all those words…
(with apologies to the Apostle John)
[1] Orthodox Christians, in keeping with the early Church Fathers, saw the Incarnation as the central act in our salvation, while Reformed soteriology is focused on the Cross. Whether Ingermanson’s perspective on this matter will be made clear in Crown of Thorns remains to be seen.
[2] https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/orthodox/2000/07/did-jesus-know-he-was-god.aspx