The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple.

As if imitating the length of the texts from which it borrows part of its title, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple is a short book. Its conception is simple, and clever. Followers of Jesus of Nazareth approach an old woman who was also a follower. Showing her their account of Jesus' life, they prompt her to recall the events herself. The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, recorded in ninety-five "chapters" of varying length, is this account. "The beloved disciple" is a Samaritan woman, perhaps the unforgettable Samaritan woman of John's Gospel. Whoever she is, her Gospel makes for a fascinating - and troubling - read.

This gospel begins with its own infancy narrative. The technique is a standard postmodern one: radical defamiliarization. Miryam is an odd child who hears voices. Yosef is very young. Miryam and her baby escape the slaughter of the innocents because a soldier pantomimes hacking them to death. Like his mother, Jesus is an odd and dreamy boy, who sometimes wanders off by himself. He and his cousin Yohanon play together. Jesus is apprenticed to his father Yosef, who builds "great houses for merchants, Roman officials, and priests," but after he sees Yosef beat an old slave, Jesus leaves home with back wages but no inheritance.

Jesus wanders into the hill country where he meditates, listens to the parables of rabbis, and is taken for a madman. He meets Yohanon at a river, and when Jesus falls in, Yohanon pries the hand loose from the rock to which Jesus clings. Jesus also has "mystical" experiences. First he doesn't see a chameleon but sees and is seen by a raven with a dot of light in its eye. He also hears voices. "Thoughts were little more than scrambled sound. . . . So the secret names [of God] returned, cried out by a voice to whom no speaker belonged."

Later Jesus meets with an insurrectionist band. This is the first of several such encounters, which remind the reader that the first century was a time of political upheaval. However, Jesus' conversation with the insurrectionists sounds more like pop anthropolitical cleverness than the words of an itinerant Jewish mystic. Overall, this "inside" look at the "forty days in the desert" reduces rather than opens Jesus' experience. The four evangelists learned - or hit upon by lucky accident - a common narrative trick. External narrative is often more mysterious than stream of consciousness.

Coming out of the desert, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman. But it is she who tells him that he has a thirst he'll never satisfy. This is another of the numerous reversals of familiar Gospel details. Another comes when Jesus meets a paralytic woman. Jesus says, "I do not have the power to straighten your legs," but, when she replies, "You have a greater power, rabbi," Jesus can only stand silent. The woman also has the last word: "When you didn't touch me, I saw that you too have a need for healing."

Again and again Jesus asserts that he cannot perform wonders. "Neither can anyone else," he says. "The wonders are always there before we come to them." An insight lies buried here, but Jesus' denials contradict what ancient Christian, Jewish, and pagan sources all agree upon: that Jesus did extraordinary things, not easily explained by human means.

Throughout The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple the reader finds strange echoes of the canonical Gospels. A blind man, claiming to see more than the sighted, reverses a typical evangelist's theme. There are also surprising stories of "talents" and new interpretations of the creation story. In an interesting Nietzschean twist, Jesus tells a rich man unable to give up his vanity to practice it boldly. A bit later Jesus says, "I trust only those who know they are empty of God."

Jesus and his small band of followers proceed toward Jerusalem. On this journey, the narrative continues to raise questions about who Jesus thought he was. Praising Carse's Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience in these pages (October 20,1995), Lawrence Cunningham credits Carse with catching "the changeableness of human existence" and "the mystery of human love and the tenuous hold we have on time." The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple has little to do with mystery and almost everything to do with tenuousness.

The book reaches something of a climax in Jesus' encounter with the Roman prefect, Pilatus. Again, however, Jesus' silence in the face of accusations seems a blank silence. The book's inevitable denouement is Jesus' death, but it ends short of the Resurrection. The final chapter finds the Samaritan woman with Miryam at the foot of the cross. "'He is not dead,' Miryam said.... 'I hear him singing.' The Samaritan studied his face in the starlight. His open mouth, black with flies, sounded with the hum of their feast....Not until dawn did she notice the raven, motionless, holding her in its gaze, close enough that she could see the dot of light in its eye."

James Carse is professor emeritus of religious history at New York University. His Gospel may incline readers to see the canonical Gospels in a different light. Does this portrayal of Jesus and his followers as a ragged band of outcasts highlight Jesus' love for the poor? Do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give us a sanitized picture of Jesus' life and times? A more troubling question might be: How much do the four Gospels merely reflect the all-too-human desire to find in an unusual person, a more-than-human power and meaning?

The jacket blurb claims that this gospel rings with authenticity. But authentic in what sense? This portrayal of Jesus reminds me of the line from Joan Osborne's song, "What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us?" Perhaps that is the picture of Jesus which our postmodern age desires.

Ed Block, Jr., teaches English at Marquette University in Milwaukee.