In my quest to immerse myself in the life and teachings of Christ I intend to read and watch a few works that don’t synchronize with the Gospel accounts.
One such work is The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer. As you can guess from the title, this is a fictional first-person account of Jesus’ own life. The Jesus who narrates this account is attempting to correct falsehoods, exaggerations, and half-truths included in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order to enlarge their own folds.
After such a start, there is not much to be said for the rest of the book. The Jesus offered in Mailer’s narrative is a doubting, sinning, 
slightly above-average human with some suspicion that he might be divine. The Jesus offered us here is in many ways the opposite of the one presented in the synoptic Gospels; he has traces of the divine but is mostly human.
God is pictured as limited in His love, and if superior to Satan at all, only in that he is slightly more cunning.
The book was a bit if a labor to finish. It is certainly undeserving of the accolades included on its cover: “A staggering work”, Bold… daring”, “A triumph”.
It is none of the above – not in craft or literary quality. It is rather some parts of the Gospel texts interspersed with Mailer’s conjecture about what happened before and after.
And I suppose that not really unique; we all do this to an extent. What we fill in with conjecture merely betrays our biases.
