No-one interested in the presentation of Christ in modern fiction and film should miss [this book].
Times Literary Supplement
This book's first part makes an immensely useful contribution to the increasing volume of works covering the interface between theology and film. Taken together with Holderness's own novella, it does demonstrate that it is not only possible but also ... Read morefruitful to explore the dual nature of Christ in a fictional literary vehicle.
Religion and Theology
Re-writing Jesus is a rare and refreshing example of how rigorous scholarship can inform and strengthen imaginative art. … This is quite a different kind of scholarly work. It is rigorous in attention to texts and sources and historical precedents, but it is also the starting point for a creative encounter with implications for today. Holderness studies in order to be inspired, to be renewed, to find something to share with others. … This would make a great supplemental text within a religion and film or religion and literature class. It is written in a learned but lucid style that undergraduates or seminary students would find accessible. .. Graham Holderness is an encouraging companion in endeavoring to unite what academia repeatedly strives to divide: faith and doubt, the ancient and the contemporary, rigorous analysis and creative response.
Christianity and Literature
Re-Writing Jesus is an unusual, provocative, theologically well-informed, and sensitive study of a Christ ‘without form nor comeliness’, existing for Holderness far beyond the word or image.
Cambridge Quarterly
One of the most balanced and scholarly analyses of Jesus-fictions ever produced. Well-argued and strongly supported, Re-writing Jesus is an invaluable addition to the fields of both Christ studies and popular culture studies.
Journal of Popular Culture
This is in a quite different class of originality and excellence from anything so far written about the fictional transformations of Jesus’ life. Acute analysis of a wide variety of novels, films and plays is combined with a rare sensitivity to the large underlying issues not only about the nature of doctrine but about religious language itself as it works and fails to work and reinvents itself in modern culture. A really stimulating and welcome book.
Dr Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, UK, and formerly Archbishop of Canterbury
In Holderness' book we encounter, with historical and theological sureness of touch, the Jesus who mysteriously persists in contemporary film and fiction. Beginning with The Da Vinci Code, Holderness takes us back to the nineteenth century, and through the fiction of George Moore, leads us into the theological terrain of the late twentieth century. For readers who have never progressed much beyond Dan Brown, this book will be a fascinating journey into the continuing power of the central figure of the gospels in the culture of our time.
David Jasper, University of Glasgow, UK
Re-writing Jesus shows Jesus to be much more among us than we knew, kicking in the womb and on his cross in so much contemporary film and fiction. But Graham Holderness also demonstrates that such reincarnations are part of a neglected ‘great tradition’ stretching back to Renan’s Vie de Jesus. Holderness takes that tradition more than usually seriously, showing what it can do for theology. He even goes so far as to supplement it himself, in Ecce Homo, his original life of Christ, which is distinctive in really taking on the imaginative challenge of what it would mean to be both divine and human. Lucid, learned, and above all alive, this is a magnetic book.
Ewan Fernie, author of The Demonic: Literature and Experience and editor of Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World
Deeply learned and splendidly accessible, Graham Holderness's brilliant book serves as a fair-minded and thoughtful guide on the quest for last century's literary and cinematic Jesus. Here, readers will find a plurality of Jesus - and Christ - figures on display, each one revealing as much, if not more, about the novelist or the auteur as they do about the Nazarene. Re-writing Jesus is a theological tour de force!
Darren J. N. Middleton, Honors Faculty Fellow and Professor of Religion, The John V. Roach Honors College, Texas Christian University, USA
Every generation or so, Jesus must be re-written, re-imaged, and re-heard. Such cultural resurrections always carry with them the possibility of misrecognition, and so we need a guide to point the way. Graham Holderness proves an astute and alert docent as he travels with us on the Road to Emmaus, allowing us to recognize the re-written Jesus in film and novels of the past century. Along the way Holderness reveals the sacred in science, sacrifice in cinema, and ends with a poetically charged Jesus for the twenty-first century.
S. Brent Plate, author of A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Hamilton College, USA
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