Religion: Kagawa’s Jesus

Japan’s No. 1 Christian has written a novel about the life of Jesus. Author is soft-faced, reedy-voiced, myopic Toyohiko Kagawa, who is also Japan’s No. 1 writer, turns out quantities of poems, tracts, devotional books, novels on economic and agrarian subjects. Behold the Man (Harper; $2.50) is his most ambitious work yet.

Among countless critical and biographical studies of Jesus, about a dozen are standard today, either for scholarship or popular appeal. Kagawa’s book is not likely to displace any of the dozen. Nor does it rank in craftsmanship with George Moore’s fanciful The Brook Kerith (which had Jesus survive the Crucifixion, pass a long life in retirement) or with Sholem Asch’s best-seller of 1939, The Nazarene (which among other things presented a supposed “gospel” written by Judas). But Behold the Man is vivid, emotional, at times almost cinematic in its blood-&-thunders. Like the works of Upton Sinclair, it may find a wide, unsophisticated readership in other tongues as well as English.

Author Kagawa tells his story from nearly every point of view except from that of Jesus. From the beginning of His mature teaching period until the Resurrection, the impact of His career is shown not only on the disciples and the two Marys, but on the high priests, Herod Antipas and Salome, Pontius Pilate and his wife, the rabble and the revolutionaries of Palestine.

Red-bearded Judas emerges as a shifty, bootlicking, debt-ridden chiseler, and a onetime lover of Mary Magdalene. High Priest Caiaphas is a pompous, bull-like prelate, Pilate an ineffectual figure. In a rather too pat invention, the “good thief” crucified along with Jesus is no thief but a revolutionist whose daughter is a Christian. The miracles, and the appearance of angels at the tomb of Jesus, are reported matter-of-factly.