ABSTRACT
I want to tell you a story. It is a tale with which you are likely to be very familiar, so please be patient. An uncannily gifted but unconventional child, raised by his surrogate father and a deeply devoted woman who did not expect to be a mother, upsets the authorities by challenging their rules. The boy prefers the company of thieves and outcasts to that of other children, has a habit of correcting his teachers, and causes people to leave the comfort of home behind to live unpredictable, even sacrificial, lives. One does not need to be a Christian to recognize this spare outline. The plot is recognizable to most readers raised in a world where biblical narratives have been told and retold. You may also recognize these narrative details as a skeleton sketch of J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013), a piece of fiction that, when concisely described, sounds like a clear-cut rewriting of the canonical gospels. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, in the case of the playful, oblique, and slippery Coetzee, matters are more complicated.
