The Gospel According to H. L. Hix

Literary Nonfiction. Religion. First we have to talk about the elephant in the room--though that might not be the most polite term for Jesus For many millions of people around the world, Jesus is the Son of God, the divine source of their salvation, his story told in the familiar four gospels of the Bible, and any tampering with that story understandably will be met with suspicion, distrust, even hostility. So let's begin with what this book isn't. H. L. Hix covers this in detail in his Introduction to The Gospel, but for now it's enough to say that this isn't Jesus Christ, Superstar, or The Last Temptation of Christ. Nothing in this Gospel secularizes or desacralizes Jesus Christ. You don't get less of the divine Jesus here, you get more. That's because Hix has gone back to the original source materials, both the canonical and noncanonical gospels and histories and stories of the life of Jesus, and created out of them a single, more comprehensive and nuanced narrative. A good analogy is to film editing. Most movie directors shoot more film than ever makes it into the version we see on the screen, film that ends up on the editing room floor, the result of commercial decisions often far removed from the director's vision of the film. Occasionally the director gets the chance to re-edit the film to restore that lost material, producing a Director's Cut that may be very different from the commercial film release. So we can think of The Gospel as an ultimate Director's Cut of the story of Jesus, with all of those bits that didn't make the official version (edited by early church leaders to serve a specific agenda) at last restored. Something for those enthusiasts who want to dig deeper, to know more. But that's not all he's done. Among other virtues of his Gospel, Hix has restored the meanings of essential words as they would have been understood by contemporary audiences when the source materials were first written, overcoming what he calls translation inertia, the tendency to retain a translation over time even after the sense of the word has changed for current readers. Thus Lord becomes Boss, and the apostles apprentices, changes that allow for a novel understanding of the role of Jesus and of believers' relationship to him. Also of crucial importance, Hix has eliminated gendered language wherever possible, in the process inventing new terms that decouple our understanding of Jesus and divinity from the limitations of gendered human bodies and relationships. Thus Son becomes Xon, for example, a form of literary transubstantiation that renders the divine even more transcendent, in the process opening the Gospel and its promise of salvation to greater inclusivity. Gospel, of course, means good news. And the very good news of THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO H. L. HIX for believers and for non-believers alike, is that what has been called the greatest story ever told, the life of Jesus, just got greater.