The Gospel of the Twin

Stepping up to the task of reimagining Jesus Christ, Cooper (Purple Jesus) gives him a twin brother, Thomas, and borrows from the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas and other ancient writings to spin a satisfying tale of an enigmatic, wandering spiritual teacher and his followers. Jesus is charismatic, a touch simple-minded, and given to poetry and metaphor, while his twin is a realist, observing with open eyes the duplicity of Jesus’s followers, chiefly Peter and Judas, as they spin Jesus’s actions into miracles. Anyone familiar with research on the historical Jesus, and some of the fiction it has fueled, will not be surprised by Cooper’s story. Though his research is good, he hasn’t successfully conjured an ancient world; the settings are undersketched, and some of the minor characters hard to tell apart. It’s good biblical fiction unhampered by conservative religious sensitivities, but it could be a better story. (June)