L’Évangile selon Amélie : autobiographie apocryphe d’un Personal Jesus
The Gospel according to Amélie: the apocryphal autobiography of a Personal Jesus

Summary/Abstract: Jesus has never attracted as much interest as he does today, his understanding and portrayal in religious consciousness and literary works making him a central historical figure in Western culture. The search for the "real" Jesus has led to the creation of a Jesus who is a prophet, a hippy, a revolutionary, a feminist and a philosopher, even a Hegelian, a proto-communist and a positivist. In the face of such diversity, it is difficult to discern which is the most faithful. Its mystery remains two thousand years later. But the challenge, particularly for historians, is to present a Jesus who is conceivable, even possible, a Jesus whose portrait has been scrupulously verified by an in-depth analysis of the sources, going beyond the dogma of the "Christ of faith". To create a creative, original and captivating work, contemporary writers must free Jesus Christ from his role as an "antitype", linking him to two major figures, Moses and Elijah, and position him as a conceptual figure or a problematic hero. Contemporary authors are endeavouring to separate morality from theology, with the aim of distinguishing the "historical Jesus" from the "dogmatic Christ", by exploring the unexplained areas of the Gospels, not from a hagiographic but rather from an apocryphal perspective. Their writings focus on the man Jesus in order to question, through an exegetical approach, the multiple roles traditionally associated with his figure. The protagonist of their stories is therefore not Christ, but Jesus, often a "personal Jesus", as evoked in the Depeche Mode song. To illustrate the significance of this syntagm, which seems to encompass the contemporary trend, we aim to study the biblical transposition of the Passion of the Christ in the interior monologue of Jesus in Amélie Nothomb’s novel Thirst (2019).

• Details
• Contents