The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère review – the man who invented Jesus

A brilliant, genre-bending French bestseller uses the story of the early church as a parable for the author’s own life

Translated by John Lambert

Tim Whitmarsh

Friday 24 February 2017 08.14 GMT
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his is a brilliant, shocking book. What shocks is not Emmanuel Carrère’s demystifying novelisation of the first decades of the Christian church. Nor is it the intermittent sexualisation of that story (Nikos Kazantzakis, after all, got there first with The Last Temptation of Christ). Nor is it his use of the scholarly methods favoured by theologians to attack theology itself. The real scandal of this book is its relentless narcissism. Only someone with Carrère’s mountain-sized ego could reinvent the story of the early church as a parable for his own life (and, perhaps, vice versa). Luckily for the reader prepared to grapple with this complex, intellectual but compelling book, he is also witty, painfully self-critical and humane. The Kingdom is not without its problems, but it is a work of great literature, which has sold by the hundreds of thousands in the author’s native France.