ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 explores how Steven Berkoff’s Messiah: Scenes from a Crucifixion (2000), Howard Brenton’s Paul (2005), and Matthew Hurt’s The Man Jesus (2013) reassess the relation between Jesus and the origins of Christianity. Berkoff reworks the Gospel narrative of Jesus’s life and death from the rare perspective of a Jewish-identified writer. I explore how Messiah locates the origins of anti-Semitism in the New Testament and raises questions about the extent of reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity at the millennium. Brenton highlights Paul as the real founder of a new faith in the ancient world. I consider how Paul, by divorcing Jesus from Christianity, reawakens assumptions that Christianity has superseded Judaism. The chapter concludes with a reading of how Hurt’s The Man Jesus attempts to recover a sense of the historical Jesus. I consider how the play intersects with postmodern ideas about metanarratives, and thus, calls into question not only the religious history it stages, but the very notion of religious truth.
