[There] is evidence of imaginative energy in "Man of Nazareth." If the book's portrait of Salome seems a shade lubricous and overelaborate, the portrait of Judas Iscariot (political innocent cynically used by the Establishment) is cunning and provocative. And genuine liveliness breathes in the disciples' often coarse talk among themselves. "I touched him," says Thomas after the Resurrection, "and then he gave me this mouthful about it being better to believe without seeing…. There was no doubt at all about it. Right, Matt?"

In the end, though, "Man of Nazareth" doesn't achieve for this reader its goal of lending solidity to Jesus' teachings. The reason is, I think, that the author is insufficiently concerned with the intellectual dimensions and power of the deeds at the center of the life of Christ. In recent decades writers of many persuasions, not merely crisis theologians, have come to understand this life in contexts different from that of otherworldly salvation. They have seen it as charging Christendom with the obligation of reconceiving human freedom as a choice for or against self-transformation in the here and now. Re-examining the Gospels, novelistically, from such a perspective might have put readers in touch, at the minimum, with the still unexhausted capacity of this religious tradition for imaginative renewal. But "Man of Nazareth" misses the chance. It behaves throughout as though the secret of revitalization lay solely in lightness or off-handedness—in empty urbanity, breezy colloquialism and the rhetoric of skepticism and comical play.

"Your Jesus has wept; you may joke now," Auden said in "The Age of Anxiety," noting wryly the firmness with which the Passion, once understood even by unbelievers as bearing profoundly on the whole of daily human life, is now sealed off from seriousness. Anthony Burgess's grinning "Man of Nazareth" might have had more impact if, once or twice in its length, it had aspired to break that seal. (p. 20)