Posted on 27 August 2010, 11:53

Since Jesus was born long before the age of the in-depth interview, the brief conversations recorded in the Gospels often leave you wanting more. The disciples were too slow and overawed, and the religious experts were too hostile, to give Jesus the curious, intelligent grilling which would have been good for him and priceless for us.

The closest we get is the nighttime conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus, a friendly Pharisee seeking answers to perceptive questions, but his voice quickly fades out of the narrative, leaving us with Jesus in familiar monologue, talking to no one in particular.

But now Jesus has a new conversation partner in Simon Parke, a former Church of England priest who is an author and newspaper columnist. In his new book, Conversations with Jesus of Nazareth, Parke sits with Jesus to talk, question, interrupt, joke, answer back and – above all – listen in frequent surprise to the astonishing things he says.

In the print version of the book (it will also soon be available in digital and audio format), the text is presented as a script, with the words of Jesus interspersed with the questions of Simon Parke. As the blurb says, ‘While the conversations are imagined, the words of Jesus are not; they are authentically his, taken from the various records of his life in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Thomas.’

There’s an obvious danger in this exercise that the questions will simply be Sunday school prompts in which the right answer is always Jesus. Or there’s the opposite danger that the questions will become more important than the answers, recasting Jesus in a role of the author’s choosing. It’s to his creative credit that Simon Parke keeps Jesus centre stage while establishing for himself a Boswell-like role, although one with sharp perception and flashes of humour.

Transposing monologue into dialogue and making it sound like it always was dialogue is a highly skilled task. There are moments in these conversations when Jesus seems to be looking into the middle distance and not specifically answering Simon Parke’s questions, but then Jesus in the Gospels could be like that. ‘Should we pay taxes to Caesar?’ he was asked, and famously answered with ‘Show me a coin.’ In fact, Jesus frequently answered a question by asking one of his own, which is what also happens in this book.

But then there are passages when Jesus seems to snap into direct eye contact with Parke, creating moments of genuine drama. Especially arresting are the points where the author contradicts Jesus, telling him (for example) that forgiving your brother seventy times seven times is ‘a ridiculous amount of forgiveness’. When Jesus relates how he told the Pharisees they were choked with extortion and wickedness, Parke tartly responds, ‘You are a craftsman in the art of rudeness.’

In a sense, every sermon or book about Jesus is a conversation with the text of the Gospels in which Jesus is freshly interpreted for a new audience. Parke’s interpretation, which is achieved by weaving together separate passages from Jesus’ teaching which superficially appear not to belong together, reads like an honest search for greater understanding about the enigmatic man from Galilee.

I especially like the way he uses verses from John’s Gospel, where Jesus talks about his relationship to ‘the Father’, to shed light on Jesus and Joseph. ‘The father loves the son and shows him everything, all the secrets of his craft,’ says Parke’s Jesus. Despite the slight tailoring at the end of that verse, the author takes a Puritan approach to the text. There are no embellishments or inventions: strictly the words of Jesus skilfully sewn into a coat of neglected colours.

The book moves purposefully through the life and teaching of Jesus, taking us towards his death and resurrection. My prediction, based on how the book worked for me, is that even readers who know the Gospels well will discover an unfamiliar and unsettling Jesus in these pages. As Parke tells him, ‘You make things so simple and yet so hard; so attractive, yet so impossible.’

Making the extremely familiar unfamiliar again is a very special gift, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Conversations with Jesus of Nazareth is a new kind of Gospel for readers today.