The Novelist`s Bible

The Novelist’s Bible: How Modernist Writers Reimagined Jesus’s Life and Death and What this Means for Religion Today

The bible is full of stories and these stories continue to inspire storytellers today, none more so than the story of Jesus’s life and death. In retelling this story, some novelists have sought to challenge traditional understandings of Jesus, while others have used the modern novel as a way of exploring for our own time the complexity and strangeness of Jesus’s message. This talk will offer a few examples of novelistic approaches to the Jesus story by figures such as D. H. Lawrence and the Nobel-prize winner J. M. Coetzee and explore what these rich and powerful stories inspired by the New Testament tell us about the place of the Bible in contemporary society.

Jamie Callisonis a Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder. He has recently published a book on the relationship between religion and literature. You can read about his work by visiting his website:https://www.modernismandreligion.com.

Arrangementet er en del av Kapittel - Stavanger internasjonale festival for litteratur og ytringsfrihet, 17-21 september 2025. Mer informasjon, program og billetter finner du på www.kapittel.no.