On a dreary morning just before my Catholic grade school freed us students for Easter break, my teacher slipped a tape that had been wonkily recorded from cable TV into the classroom VCR. Before I knew it, there was Richard Burton in a Roman soldier’s uniform, expounding on the nature of the gods to bombastic, regal trumpet music, and suddenly a boring half-day dangling before time off became a lot more interesting.
The film, 1953’s The Robe, based on a 1942 novel of the same name by Lloyd C. Douglas, centers around a Roman centurion, played by Burton, who is sent by the future emperor Caligula to a post in Judea as punishment, where he is promptly ordered to carry out a crucifixion. Thinking little of this common order at first, he soon is beset by a terrible madness at the touch of a robe he won gambling that belonged to the man he crucified (guess who).
Having been raised on a healthy diet of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, retold biblical stories weren’t in and of themselves a novel idea to me, but that an entire Empire-spanning epic could be written out of a nameless figure the Gospels place at the foot of the cross? I was never the same. Soon every bookstore I entered endured my hunt for original imaginings and fresh perspectives on characters hardly mentioned, or strange tales typically brushed under the rug of neat religious interpretation. I had parameters: I did not want to be preached at (I now know that to be its own subgenre); I wanted a story that was difficult and challenging and devoted to facing the Bible’s questions and contradictions head-on, something that feels more important than ever. Every time I found one, I felt like I had unearthed a treasure left behind specifically for me by likeminded literary explorers.
As my collection of these kinds of narratives grew, shelved beside similar works that took on Greek myths and other trails of ancient history, I began to write my own stories in this same vein. Looking back now, I realize that I had been drawn to this since before I even knew what the Bible was: as a very young child plopped down in a church pew, I would entertain myself in that strange but beautiful room by making up backstories for the pretty people depicted in the stained glass windows around me. My fascination with religious art of all stripes never waned, eventually leading to a graduate degree on the subject as well my debut novel, Marble.
The protagonist of Marble certainly isn’t an obscure or unnamed biblical character, but she is one whose image has taken on a massive life of its own in the intervening 2,000 years since the New Testament was composed, fully escaping the containment of the relatively scant lines devoted to her in the source material. In my novel, the figure often referred to the Virgin Mary is called Maryam, and she begins her story years before her controversial pregnancy, leaving me with fresh terrain to create a whole new world around one of the world’s most famous mothers not as a mother, but as a young girl with her own dreams and desires.
Below are eight beloved books from my shelves that have likewise completely reimagined and reexamined figures from the Bible, proving just how fertile the ground is beneath stories we’ve heard before and think we know.
Continue reading “8 Novels that Completely Reimagine the Bible by Taylor Catalana” →
