The Christ Trilogy

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The Christ Trilogy is a major work in Patrick Roth's literary oeuvre , which consists of three self-contained prose texts: Riverside. Christusnovelle 1991, Johnny Shines or The Resurrection of the Dead , 1993 and Corpus Christi , 1996. Developed independently of one another, the three works were first combined in 1998 under the title The Christ Trilogy and published as three volumes in one cassette. In 2017 a new edition with commentary appeared in one volume.

overview

It is a novel Riverside and two novels by Johnny Shines and Corpus Christi in dialogue form, which take up images from the Bible and re-contextualise them. All three works are based on the central Christian motif of the resurrection or new becoming. The figure of Christ itself appears only indirectly - in the subjective perceptions of the protagonists who met Jesus personally and who report about it in retrospect. The Johnny Shines novel, which is set in the contemporary present and whose hero is unconsciously identified with Jesus, offers a second possibility of indirect representation .

The centerpiece of the trilogy is located in the California Mojave Desert at the beginning of the 1990s and is about the homeless pastor's son Johnny Shines, who literally takes the word from the teaching of the disciples “Wake up the dead!” Mt 10.8  EU . Johnny appears uninvited at funerals, where he gains access to the coffin and orders the dead man to get up. The symbolic meaning of raising the dead is at the center of the dialogue that Johnny has in a prison cell with an unknown woman. It reveals the unconscious motives for his awakening obsession by leading him back to childhood and teaching him to remember traumatic experiences.

The first part of the trilogy , the novella Riverside , takes place in historical Palestine and is about Diastasimos, suffering from leprosy, who unexpectedly receives a visit from Jesus. On his last walk to Jerusalem, Jesus stops in the cave of the hermit who quarreled with his Jewish God to heal him. The encounter with God in the Judean mountain desert is the lynchpin of a conversation that Diastasimos had in AD 37 with two students of the apostle Thomas, who wanted to record the old man's testimony for Thomas's collection of sayings, which was in the making. In the verbatim reconstruction of the event, Diastasimos teaches the boy the lesson he has learned from his personal experience of Jesus.

Thomas Didymos , the disciple known from the Gospel of John who doubts the resurrection, is the narrator and hero of the third part of the trilogy. Corpus Christi is about the faith problem of Thomas, who in the days after the crucifixion goes in search of the body of his master, which he believes stolen from the grave. In an intensive conversation with a stranger from Damascus, Tirza, who was found by the Romans in the rock tomb on Easter morning, Thomas realizes that the woman suspected of robbing the grave is in reality a "Sophia", a wise woman and a companion of Jesus, namely a witness of Mystery of the Resurrection, which she experienced in the tomb of Jesus.

Templates and sources

The works of the Christ Trilogy are based on central images and experience patterns of Christian tradition such as baptism, the Lord's Supper, crucifixion, resurrection and healing, which are recast in modern forms and thus updated. They openly and covertly refer to the texts of the Gospels, the Apocrypha (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas ), the dialogues of Plato, the Jewish legend, alchemy and the Kabbalah.

Another important source of inspiration for the dramatization of the material and the atmospheric design of individual scenes is the film. B. Ben Hur (in Riverside ), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (in Johnny Shines ) and Redbeard (in Corpus Christi ).

With regard to the characteristic entanglement of inner and outer reality, consciousness and unconscious, concrete reality versus memory and dream experience, the concept of the psyche according to CG Jung plays a major role; z. B. the plot of Johnny Shines is laid out as an inner psychic drama, as a so-called soul speech, just as the dialogue between Thomas and Tirza, who constitutes Corpus Christi , is deliberately kept in balance between dream and reality.

reception

The first global assessment of the Christ Trilogy has Gerhard Kaiser presented. His study from 2008, which bears a disguised quote from the Johnny Shines novel in the subtitle, locates the work beyond confessional Christian poetry and at the same time distinguishes it from modern, secularizing transformations. Kaiser puts the focus of his investigation u. a. on the conception of the Christ figure. This corresponds neither to the type of a “Jesus incognito” nor to that of a “social utopian” - instead it embodies the type of the true “Son of God, Messiah and Savior”. Precisely because the figure of Jesus in the trilogy has been removed from the traditional ecclesiastical context of faith and has all the traits of a numinous figure, it has the effect of an “overwhelming provocation and presence” on the reader.

The annotated new edition of the Christ Trilogy provides for the first time an insight into the biblical reference texts on which the representation is based, names the sources used by the author in writing it, refers to influences from the film, literature and depth psychology and explains the semantic content of certain recurring constellations that lead to the distinguish Christian myth. In this sense, theologians often view the Christ Trilogy from the perspective of a modern revision and continuation of the New Testament: “Almost two thousand years after the end of the canon formation and the John Apocalypse, in Patrick Roth's Christ Trilogy we have again a word and written testimony that is the most monstrous History of mankind told. In the flow of words and sentences it gradually becomes clear that depths or heights are being explored and filled with human expression that lie fallow in everyday language, fields of reality that are not linguistically ordered. In Corpus Christi , the author develops the most grandiose idea of ​​Christian literary history: He places a witness of the resurrection on the spot, that is, directly in the grave, and at the appropriate time, on the night of the event. "

The new edition of the Christ Trilogy from 2017 enables the reader to deepen his knowledge of the text, says Michael Braun in his appreciation of the volume: The "pleasantly concise" commentary with the deciphering of biblical names, places and narratives represents an important and necessary " Bridge of Understanding ”to the lost heritage of the Bible. He also gives "insight into the poetological principles of Patrick Roth's writing and into the linguistic, aesthetic and religious-historical peculiarities of his reception of Christ". Using the example of the word "Fountain of Time" (from Riverside ), which is easily skimmed over, it becomes clear how abundantly the poet draws from his sources: from the Bible (Joh 4,14f.), From literature (Thomas Mann's Joseph novels), from the film (Andrei Tarkovsky's World War II film Ivan's Childhood , 1962) and from depth psychology (CG Jung's question about our connection with spiritual sources).

The images from the Bible, film, depth psychology and literature on which the Christ Trilogy is based interweave the here and the hereafter in a peculiar way and create, according to the review forum literaturkritik.de , a “fascinating polyperspectivity”. “In connection with the voluminous Joseph's novel Sunrise - The Book of Joseph , the Christ Trilogy , which has now been newly published and annotated and provided with a list of the most important sources and works, is certainly the core of Patrick Roth's work to date, which has not yet been interpreted. It is thanks to Michaela Kopp-Marx's hard work that Roth's multi-layered work can be rediscovered. "

literature

  • Gerhard Kaiser: Resurrection. The Christ Trilogy by Patrick Roth. The killer will be the redeemer . A. Francke, Tübingen, Basel 2008, ISBN 978-3-7720-8267-2 , p. 15-64 .
  • Patrick Roth : The Christ Trilogy. Johnny Shines or The Raising of the Dead. Corpus Christi. Annotated edition. Edited and commented by Michaela Kopp-Marx . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3065-8 .
  • Patrick Roth: The Christ Trilogy. A workbook with teaching ideas for secondary level II in religion and German , ed. by Thomas Menges u. Martin W. Ramb. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 2018, ISBN 978-3-7840-3570-3 .

expenditure

  • Patrick Roth : The Christ Trilogy. Riverside. Johnny Shines or The Raising of the Dead. Corpus Christi. Three novels and a CD: Patrick Roth, The LA Reading . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1998, ISBN 978-3-518-06546-4 . (Bound in cassette).
  • Patrick Roth : Resurrection. The Christ Trilogy. 3 novels in cassette with audio cassette The LA reading . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2003, ISBN 978-3-518-39957-6 . (Paperback edition).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: Resurrection. The Christ Trilogy by Patrick Roth. The killer will be the redeemer. Tübingen, Basel: A. Francke, 2008.
  2. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: Resurrection. The Christ Trilogy by Patrick Roth, blurb.
  3. ↑ Helmut Müller: Experiencing the resurrection. On Patrick Roth's three stories of Christ in one volume. In: Owlfish. Limburg magazine for religion and education. No. 20 , 2018, ISBN 978-3-7840-3570-3 , pp. 128-131 .
  4. ↑ Patrick Roth: The Christ Trilogy . ( eulenfisch.de [accessed on September 15, 2018]).
  5. ↑ By Anton Philipp Knittel: Revival and rediscovery - the annotated edition of Patrick Roth's “The Christ Trilogy”: literaturkritik.de. Accessed April 16, 2019 (German).