“'A kind of resurrection'. Memory and the Bible in The Gospel of Judas and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.”

Starting from a brief discussion of the memory of the Bible in contemporary culture, this paper examines the ways two British novels, whose dates of publication frame the 2000s decade – Simon Mawer's The Gospel of Judas (2000) and Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) – represent the complexity of the current remembrance of the Bible. I argue that through their appeal to the creative, transformative mode of memory, Mawer and Pullman sustain the cultural presence of the Bible, enable a kind of mnemonic resurrection of its narratives and images, and (somewhat sceptically) facilitate another revival of the memory of the Scripture on the cusp of the new millennium.