Sunrise - The Book of Joseph

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Sunrise. The book Joseph is a novel by Patrick Roth from 2012.

overview

The focus is on the New Testament Joseph of Nazareth , Mary's husband and foster father of Jesus . In six sections, each with three “Books of Descent” and three “Books of Ascent”, a total of 112 chapters, the novel outlines the fictional life of Joseph, which dates from 7 BC. It spans from BC to AD 30 and is set in various locations in Palestine at the time of Jesus. In the continuation and rewriting of biblical material and poetic language, "SUNRISE" follows on from the works of the Christ Trilogy (1991–96).

The novel was first published in German in 2012 by Wallstein-Verlag in Göttingen ( ISBN 978-3-8353-1051-3 ) and was nominated for the longlist of the German Book Prize 2012. In autumn 2012 he was accepted for radio.

content

First book: "The Bearer" (Chapters 1–29)

The "books of descent" began in AD 70 towards the end of the great Jewish war , a few days before the complete destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Two young Jewish Christians , Monoimos and Balthazar from the congregation in Pella , managed to infiltrate the besieged city. Their mission is to secure the tomb of Jesus before it is razed to the ground. In the chaos of a sandstorm, they find shelter in the house of an Egyptian named Neith. The mysterious old woman not only knows the location of the tomb of the “Lord”, but also the life of the “Lord of the Lord”, the father of Jesus, which she tells the young men below.

The story continues in the spring of 7 BC. A. On the way home from work in Sepphoris , Joseph is overshadowed by a magnificent bird that perches on a tree behind a wall. Joseph climbs on the wall and looks into the garden of a Roman country house; an Egyptian slave who was flogged hangs on the tree in the middle of the garden . Joseph watches a snake from inside the tree approaching the neck of the hanging man - he leaps into the garden and cuts the Egyptian from the branch; he struck down the rushing overseer with the ax. With the unconscious slave on his back, Joseph flees through the night to Nazareth to deposit his load where he once found Mary sleeping: near a dry cistern outside the village. Joseph entrusts Mary the Egyptian to take care of him and that same night flees towards Jordan . In a prophetic dream that comes over him near Daberat, he sees himself climbing down the row of 64 ancestors on a rope in the pouring rain, which reach into the depths in the form of "ragebilders"; Having reached the bottom of the huge temple, the voice of God tells him to break a crucible on the statue of the ancestor Adam . Joseph is supposed to put the shattered vessel back together into a new crucible, so that it may draw food for both of them, man and God. In the morning Joseph commemorates the place of his dream with a stone monument and calls it Beit Re'evim, "House of the Hungry".

The next day, Joseph is south of the area of the later build at this point city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee gen Bethsaida on the northeast shore to his relatives to visit mother. An emerging storm drives his boat east, to the shore of the "land of the displaced" Gerasa . Joseph remembers his last trip with his first wife and first son, Jesus. At that time, too, a storm had broken out in the lake; a wave had struck the baby from Joseph's hand; swallowed by the waves, the child was taken down by a hollow tree trunk. As then, the winds drive Joseph's boat back to the east bank, in the area near Hippos, in the Decapolis . In search of the tomb that he built for the drowned son, Joseph meets the former Roman captain Virdanus, who lives in a burial cave. Joseph experiences how he is driven by an inner demon , repeatedly opens his hand with a stone and learns that Virdanus once commanded the extermination of a village.

In the grave monument of the prodigal son Joseph has a dream: A voice announces the birth of a son, whom he, like the first, is to name Jesus. He returns to the Jordan via the mother's village in the Kochaba region, walking along the Kerit brook; a raven shows the one lost in the fog the way through the river. In Nazareth the cistern lies abandoned, ears of corn grow on its bottom. Maria reports that mercenaries searched the area and that the Egyptian fled after being cared for by her for two days. She admits that she is pregnant without knowing how it happened. On the following night Joseph sees himself in a dream once more standing on the floor of the ancestral temple; an angel commands him to accept the son: what Mary carries in the flesh, he has to carry in the spirit.

Half a year after the birth of Jesus, Joseph is assigned to put out a fire by a group of mercenaries on his way to work in the morning. The estate from whose garden he once freed the Egyptian slave is on fire; in it is the child of the Roman lord, who is sent into the fire to save Joseph. In the burning house he frees a trapped man who is holding an infant in his arms. The escape from the inferno succeeds and Joseph learns that he has saved the girl of an Egyptian maid; the man under the burning beam turns out to be the overseer of the servants, whom Joseph once struck in the throat with the ax. Rumor has it that the overseer started the fire out of jealousy. Joseph is given the task of cutting down the tree that started it all and which is now burned. With the image of the child resting in the arms of a maid in front of his eyes, Joseph climbs over the wall back to Nazareth under the protection of the felled tree.

Second book: "The Pilgrims" (Chapters 30–37)

Twelve years after these events, Joseph and his family moved to Jerusalem to celebrate the first Passover of the twelve year old Jesus. You cross the Jezreel plain and meet at Ofra, where all paths cross, the relatives who come from the north and east, in order to move on together across the highlands of Samaria to the capital. The old royal city of Megiddo on the southern edge of the Jezreel plain, place of death of King Joschiah , and the destination of the journey, the Passover celebrations in Jerusalem, trigger the story of the "Lost Book", which Jesus wanted to hear from Joseph on the way. Joschiah's cult reform forms the historical background of the episode described in the 2nd Book of Kings . It also included the renovation of the temple, during which the code of law was found ( 2 Kings 22.8  Lut ), which equates the tradition with the Deuteronomy . It becomes the subject of the story of the "Lost Book," which unfolds in the telling back and forth between Joseph and Jesus. It represents a parable of one's own calling, which cannot be sought, only to be found.

Also silo , site of the first Israelite temple, to pass the traveler to the south of the Samaritan highlands, is the occasion of a story. Jesus tells the calling of the prophet Samuel from the first book of Samuel as a foretaste of his own calling. At Shiloh, the last stop before Jerusalem, Joseph has a puzzling dream. In it he stands lonely at the edge of a pit in the sandy desert; Ladders lead down. At the bottom of the pit there is a mighty wooden cross, the longitudinal beam formed into a ladder. Coos and cries of people can be heard from the huge cross. On the way back to Nazareth, Joseph receives news of his son's disappearance in Shiloh. In search of him, Joseph first gets into the scenery in Jerusalem, then onto the stage of an ancient theater in which Oedipus is being performed on Colonus .

The following night Joseph sees in a dream his workshop and everything he has ever made go up in flames; the fire spreads to Jerusalem and Joseph realizes that the fire is coming from the temple, which is a huge furnace. On the third day of the search, Joseph finds Jesus asleep on the temple steps. Jesus reports that when he left the city, a voice drew him back to the temple, where he (like Samuel once) fell asleep and God spoke to him. Fear and abandonment came over him when he witnessed the crucifixion of an Egyptian who was driven past him. When the Egyptian turned on the cross, his eye met his and never let go. Then in the temple he, Jesus, received an answer from God. Joseph believes that he recognizes the man condemned to death on the cross as the Egyptian slave whom he once freed from the garden of the Roman country house. A few days later he has a dream: In it Joseph - standing on the summit of Sinai - looks through the spaces and times; the mountain itself is a brooding furnace, a parallel to Moses ( Ex 19,18-20  EU ), above it a cloud from which the voice of God speaks. It asks that the son be brought out to a mountain, as Abraham once did , and slaughtered there for a burnt offering .

Third book: "The Sacrifice" (Chapters 38-50)

Joseph threatens to go crazy with the dream. He closes himself off against his wife and son and often steals away to look for the mountain that was shown to him as a place of sacrifice. He collects stones for the altar, wood for the burnt offering and waits for a sign from God, but it does not come. Under the pretext of keeping an Atonement , he goes after doubts, with Jesus, the sacrificial animal and a donkey as a pack animal. On the way to the mountain, which he goes around twice in a large arc, Joseph conducts an inner dialogue with God in the hope of being able to avert the commandment. On the way up they meet a band of robbers. The men steal the sacrificial lamb and donkey and knock down the rebellious Jesus; Joseph pleads for his son's life. He recognizes the leader of the gang as the mercenary captain who drove him to the Roman estate to get the child out of the flames. Deprived of their belongings, father and son continue up the mountain.

At the nightly campfire below the sacrificial site, which remains in the dark, Jesus tells the story of Jonah , who fled from his mission. He recites the myth handed down in the Book of Jonah in a variant that an old man reported from Gat-Hefer, home of the prophet. Accordingly, Jonah evaded God's commission because he had anticipated the certain fall of the city of Nineveh in a dream. But Nineveh had been spared because Jonah had evaded and God had made reflection possible in this way.

When Jesus fell asleep by the fire, Joseph made final preparations; he ties the sleeping son with a rope and piles the logs on the altar when he hears animal sounds. A rider approaches from the other side of the hill. Joseph watches as the man is attacked by two mountain lions and torn to pieces before his eyes. Shaken, Joseph collapses in front of the sacrificial altar, the knife still in his hand. Jesus, who is secretly observing the scene, flees from the scene. In the mangled corpse, whose head has been torn off, Joseph recognizes the overseer of the servants, whom he once struck with the ax in the neck and later rescued from the fire of the Roman country house. In the torn body he recognizes himself as a dead person who has forfeited his life before God and his loved ones. As a token of his death, he tears his clothes off, dips them in the overseer's blood, and places them on the carcass. Finally, he buries the severed head in the ground of a nearby cliff.

Fourth book: "The Dead" (Chapters 51-65)

The "Books of Ascent" begin with Joseph in a state of death-like sleep, which comes over him in the rocky chasm that is also the burial place. The voices of the relatives wake him up and he watches as Maria breaks down screaming over the trimmed corpse she thinks is Joseph. Joseph wants to make himself known in his hiding place; no sound comes from his throat. The body of the torn man is pushed over the person lying frozen on the ground, and the crevice is closed with a plate. Joseph interprets the scraping and scratching on the stone as erasing his name from the book of life. Later Joseph crawls outside, exposes himself to the cold winds, pulls the cover off the corpse and realizes that it is the blue cloth with the stars woven by Maria on which he once found her sleeping near the cistern. Mary's cloth becomes a tent for Joseph, under which he hides. The slab of rock, which is then pushed in front of the chasm, bears the inscription carved by the son: "After three days of life". Jesus appears once more, finds the grave open and begins a prayer. Joseph, who watches everything, wants to shout, but again he remains silent.

A day-long sandstorm is approaching, Joseph digs up. In a vision he sees a mysterious old woman who is applying ointment to the wounded flank of a horse. It is the mother of the slain rider who is a "son of Amalek". Joseph begins to realize that the rider he identified as the overseer of the servants was torn to pieces in Jesus' place; the old woman means to him that she sacrificed her son instead of Jesus. In the following, Joseph witnesses a conversation between two traders in a caravan. They talk about the impossibility of being saved. This judgment is based on the story of Esau , twin brother of Jacob and ancestor of the Amalekites , the archenemy of Israel; Jacob stole the birthright and blessing from his brother Esau. Joseph hears that no one will be saved until Esau's tears have dried up, but those who know where the tears come from and where they are turning can find redemption. Joseph, who identifies with Esau in his grief, witnesses the story of the "Tears of Esau", which is also the story of " Miriam's well".

Joseph moves on in the storm, wandering aimlessly like a ghost in the intermediate realm of realities, until one day he falls off the path, down a steep slope. A cow lying under a ledge is his first encounter with a concrete being. Crouched against the beast in the wall of the rock, he dreams of a "blood bow" flowing from the mouth of the bound Jesus into Joseph's mouth, giving him new strength. Awakened from the dream, Joseph pulls himself strengthened inwardly over the edge of the ditch, climbs out of the pit in the middle of the night.

Fifth book: "The robbers" (chap. 66-88)

Joseph finds himself in the midst of sleeping people - men of the band of robbers who met him on the way to the sacrificial mountain and who stole lamb and donkey. The gang leader, Dymas, and his son Jesus question Joseph about his origins; since Joseph cannot speak, he mimes how he got among them. Dymas identifies him as the donkey's owner, but Joseph steadfastly denies. Gemas, Dymas' son from his second marriage, informs him that a troop of riders is after them. Dymas' third son, James, who, like Jesus, comes from the first marriage, is said to be among them. Dymas suspects to have been betrayed by James and orders the departure. On the ride through the night Joseph is bound to Jesus, who is weakened by a wound. Back to back with him at the campfire, Joseph sees the image of a fascinating woman in a dream, first in the form of Mary, then as a “black woman” and a familiar companion who now comes into view. She embodies the soul guide, the anima . Joseph's life among the robbers is that of a mute slave in filthy rags who is shackled at night. In Jesus, the son of the leader, whose duplicity he saw right from the start, he has a powerful enemy.

On their way south, the band of robbers attacked a farmstead near Bethlehem after a demon had been used that night to smear the men's lips with blood. Joseph is also seized by a thirst for blood. To protect himself from the growing greed for murder, he destroys the food supplies with the intention of being put in chains. Jesus accuses Joseph of deliberately withdrawing and thereby provoking the act of innocent people. As if to illustrate what was meant, he tells a story from his childhood: the ritual of the scapegoat who is chosen, driven into the desert and thrown down a slope. The flesh of the goat who bears the sins of all villagers is particularly filling and strengthening and reconciling. After the homestead was sacked, the gang moved on through the Jeruel desert to the east. At the Salt Sea, the “Dead Sea”, Joseph has a future-oriented dream. In it he sees the Dead Sea full of living fish and Dymas prophesies a free, rich and fulfilled life.

In order to flee from the persecutors, the gang moves further north into the Jordan Valley, past Jericho . In the vicinity of Atarot, the camp is set up in a spacious cave with two entrances. Dymas orders that guards be set up for protection, but during the night there is a massacre of a procession of Passover pilgrims who were lured into the cave by Jesus and his followers. Joseph witnesses a barbaric slaughter that hardly any pilgrims survive. Dymas suspects Jesus, his son, to have initiated the massacre. But this draws attention to Joseph, who is tending to a wounded man. In the following argument, Jesus wants to force Joseph to stab the wounded pilgrim by holding his hand. At the climax of the dramatic scene in front of the assembled crew, Joseph thrusts the sword into Jesus' chest. Jesus collapses dead. Dymas, whose ear was cut off in the course of the nightly massacre, tells the men about Jesus' complicity with James. Joseph is made an official member of the gang. As a sign of his affiliation, he exchanges his rag robe for clothes, belt and sword of Jesus.

At dawn the gang moved on to the Jordan; The dead Jesus is to be buried at the mouth of the Jabbok . As they cross the river, they are attacked by James' people; Joseph goes into hiding and hides in the reeds on the other bank. From there he watches as the attackers pull the body of Jesus out of the water. Joseph is arrested and taken before James, who believes he is facing his brother's murderer. A boy and a girl, survivors of the cave massacre, step forward and speak out for Joseph: he was a prisoner of the gang. James lets Joseph live, but he has to gather the wood for the cremation and set it up for the stake. Looking back at the dead in the burning pile of wood, Joseph believes he recognizes his own son in the fire. At the last moment he breaks free, jumps through the wall of flames and remains lying on the ground as if dead.

In a state of unconsciousness, Joseph sees himself floating in a boat on the sea. In the vision he removes the planks from the ground and looks into the depths of the sea. It is traversed by blood vessels and strands of blood that lead down into a box that stands in a chamber. In it sits someone who wears a crown. He drinks and sucks the blood and at the same time spills it in rivers. When the "monster" looks up, Joseph realizes: It is God - a cruel, bloodthirsty, bound God tortured to the extreme. When Joseph wakes up, he is blind. Gemas and Dymas, who were hiding on the bank, take him to their home. The three of them cross the river.

Sixth book: "The grave" (chap. 89–112)

Sixteen years have passed. The last book is set in Jerusalem in the year 30 AD. Neith tells of her meeting with Joseph, whom she met by chance in the city's market halls, looking for day laborers to build her master's tomb. The events go back forty years and include Neith's servants in the house of a wealthy Jewish councilor. There she is called, affectionately “broken girl”, after her talent for joining broken things into a whole. The mistress of the house, Esther, has disappeared without a trace for the last two years, to the distress of her husband. A traveling merchant reports that he saw Esther on his last visit to Jericho in the wake of a prophet .

The dealer tells how he secretly witnessed a drowned baby being raised. Neith's Lord realizes that he has lost his wife to the Prophet and falls ill with a fever. A dream shows him his own funeral, which he interprets as an indication of his imminent death. Neith is entrusted with the preparations for the burial and is given the task of initiating and supervising the construction of the rock tomb - until everything is finished, she should not return to the house and not speak to anyone except Phylakos, the servant.

Neith fears that the Lord has discovered her early pregnancy and wants to send her out of the house. At the Agora in Jerusalem she recruits four day laborers - Joseph, Dymas, Gemas and a "fourth" - and leads them to the place designated for the grave, an old quarry near the place of execution, Golgotha , opposite the western city wall. When passing the back of Golgotha, the “fourth” discovers a skull at the foot of the hill; The following night he dreams that a primal human rises at that point, climbs up to the graves and seeks entry at that point on the rock from which the grave is to be carved.

When the men start digging and a snake appears, the “fourth” tries to leave; the rest of them were also attacked by fear. Calming only sets in when Gemas learns that the respected Jewish councilor Joseph of Arimathäa is the commissioner of the tomb. Neith, who loves her master and fears for his death, wants to drag out the work that Joseph estimates at three to four months. So she decides to weave the shroud that she is supposed to buy. Gemas receives the order to set up the loom next to a tree below the grave: work on the grave and work on the shroud run in parallel.

One day, after a thunderstorm, Neith and her workers witness the crucifixion of a man. Gemas reports in the type of pondoscopy what happens in pouring rain on the place of execution opposite. When he has finished his detailed report and the young man has been crucified, Joseph lies dead on the floor of the burial chamber. On the third day of his agony , Neith has a dream of her sitting at the loom, weaving a pattern in the ratio of three to four, with the fourth thread being handed to her by Joseph's finger.

The next morning she begins to weave the shroud in the shade of the tree in that dream pattern, the herringbone pattern ; Joseph has her placed next to him on her left. As she raises and lowers the strings and speaks to her what she has seen in the dream, Joseph wakes up. Having become able to see and speak, he tells Neith the dream that dreamed him. In it he saw himself stepping out of the rock tomb, while a voice described the tomb as the "mountain" that had been shown to it by Joseph's "sacrifice". Joseph, so the voice, has now reached his goal.

The moment under the weaving tree is the moment when Joseph Neith begins to tell his story: how everything began on the way home from Sepphoris to Nazareth and led him to the Jordan, where he stood opposite James. Listening to Joseph's words, Neith weaves Joseph's words into the cloth and makes a wonderful discovery in the process. In his report she recognizes herself as the girl who survived the massacre in the cave and who testified for Joseph a little later. She realizes that it was she who put Joseph's burning hair out when he fell from the stake. She becomes aware that she is included in Joseph's story from the beginning and that her life is intertwined with his. When the shroud is finished, the grave is almost finished too. In his dream Joseph sees the last, as yet uncut, boulder breaking from the ceiling of the chamber, sees himself being carried out of the grave by the massive cube.

The following day the servant Phylakos appears and reports of Esther's return. She hurried ahead of the prophet to make arrangements for the Passover feast. The gentleman was well with her arrival, Neith should finish the work on the grave and return to the house. Finally Phylakos recognizes Gemas and Dymas as members of the band of robbers of the cave massacre and flees from the scene in horror. Neith fears Phylakos' complaint and urges Gemas and Dymas to cash out and move on. The last work is on the rolling stone that is supposed to close the grave; Neith's labor pains. On the sixth day before Passover in AD 30, she comes down with twins. Joseph helps her, relieving her pain by singing the Psalm of Birth.

The birth scene in the grave turns into a vision of a communion that is also a wedding . Joseph sees a huge, festively decorated table that extends far beyond the grave. Sitting on him are the forefathers whom Joseph once descended from - in a dream on the run from Nazareth - to smash the crucible at the bottom of the temple. Joseph walks around the “table of generations” and sits down next to Mary; Neith is also sitting at the table when the "groom" joins the last of the guests. Neith closes her story with the word "Arrived".

Narrative form

The novel is built on the principle of the frame narration : a narrator addresses a group of listeners. An oral narrative situation prevails and the event unfolds on several narrative levels.

"SUNRISE. The Book of Joseph “has a double frame. The first narrative location is given in the prologue , which takes place in AD 70; The narrator is Monoimos, who reports that he has written a script that he hands over to a "hiding place" the morning after it has been made. This is happening in parallel with the destruction of Jerusalem - the Romans have penetrated through the walls. In just a few lines, the prologue establishes an editor's fiction, a device that allows the author to step back behind his characters and give the novel the appearance of an authentic historical document that survived the fall of Jerusalem to be returned to us as an ancient document two thousand years later come - similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls . The subtitle "The Book of Joseph" reinforces the impression of an Apocryphal script.

The second frame is the scenery in the Neith house at the beginning of the plot; it takes place a few days before the writing is written, the Romans are still outside the walls. The house of the Neith is the actual storytelling place where Monoimos and Balthazar hear what they learned from Joseph. From the “night hut”, the third narrative level opens up, which encompasses the actual story of Joseph of Nazareth. It begins in the fifth chapter of the first book in order - apart from a few brief interventions by the narrator - to be carried through to the end of the fifth book.

In the sixth book, frame and internal history are intertwined in so far as the narrator becomes a character in the story she tells. With Neith's entry into the plot, the novel takes on a self-referential character. The authenticity of the report is repeatedly questioned and checked. The equation of weaving and storytelling in the person of Neith illuminates the extent to which storytelling becomes the subject of storytelling: the Egyptian maid is also the weaver who brings together the unconnected threads of Joseph's life into a text and finally, immediately before its fall, handed down to posterity.

The internal narrative embedded in the frame - the actual story of Joseph of Nazareth - shows a linear development that is arranged according to the model of the journey through the underworld : the descent into the 'Valley of Shadows' (books one to three) follows at the lowest point, Moment of symbolic death, the "ascent" (books four to six) back to the day. The journey itself takes place in a sequence of stations with the topography of Palestine as the underlying plan.

The cities, villages and landscapes passed on Joseph's path are holy places that are closely linked to the biblical myth. They trigger narratives that go into the depths of history and myth : biblical stories, legends, dreams and visions. Their inclusion in the plot creates a second, archetypal layer that lies behind the external events of the plot. The enrichment and deepening of the plot with parallel narratives turns the novel into a complex fabric of correspondence and references. The result is a dense network of meanings in which the center of the novel - Joseph's conflict with God - is broken into a multitude of facets.

reception

Features criticism

The novel received a positive reception in the major newspaper and radio columns. Particular attention was paid to a. the non-everyday language, based on the style of the Bible and the ancient Greek syntax. “The music and rhythm of the text are splendid, an antiquarian alienation. It fits with what he is talking about, the cruel, the sublime, the divine. "

The assessment of Patrick Roth as “the solitaire of the German-speaking literary landscape” is linked to the special language and the “radical seriousness” of the presentation.

The exceptional position of the novel can be seen to be due to its outdated language and its cinematic power of images. “How is it possible to write such a text in the fully digitized, fully commercialized, cynically enlightened and enlightened 21st century? A text glowing with holy seriousness, archaic violence and beauty. ” In the foreign-archaic style of the speech, existential questions are raised:“ Questions about guilt and redemption, death and resurrection, about transcendence ”.

In addition to the language, the type of dramatization of the material catches the eye: “The craftsmanship of the form-conscious dream writer also consists in the fact that he constructs his exciting plot according to all the rules of oriental master storytellers. It then pulls through like a thriller. ” The art of linking and the consistent symbolic structure give the novel a philosophical depth even on the formal level:“ But what is most impressive is the narrative fabric, the texture, to which the consistency in the implementation The motifs and the use of symbols include: the hand, the eye, the knife, the rope, the stone, the cloth, the dress, the well, the mountain. Thing and image, physics and metaphysics are still one. "

The question in which the novel stands out most clearly from the trends of contemporary literature is answered with the "allowance of the transcendent". The novel succeeds in the difficult art of making the numinous , the "singular reality of the 'completely different'" visible, which lies behind the world of everyday life.

The theologically influenced literary criticism places the emphasis on the redesign of the biblical myth, which could open up new access paths to the imagery of the Bible: "Roth's texts have the potential to arouse the reader's interest in the Bible again and again and for him to raise awareness of the peculiar language of the Torah and Gospels. Maybe books like 'Sunrise' can act as a bridge and arouse curiosity to decipher the ciphers, metaphors and symbols of the ancient biblical scriptures. "

In his pictures and scenes of bloody violence, murder, sacrifice and physical tearing, a dark, raw side of religion becomes visible: “Roth's book [...] shows the other side. […] Perhaps religion is not just about faith and trust, but also horror - and maybe this horror is often much closer to us than we think, closer than that trust. "

Scientific criticism

The volume for the conference in the Marbach Literature Archive The rediscovery of the Bible by Patrick Roth (2014) defines Roth's handling of the Bible in general as a “continuation and rewriting” of traditional images and constellations with the aim of “the foreign numinous as well as the familiar to make the Judeo-Christian myth tangible ”. This fundamental concern becomes particularly clear in the Sunrise novel, which detaches the Christian narrative from its dogmatically frozen contexts: “ Sunrise gives important impetus not to put up with all too easy reading of the New Testament. [...] We are led into the process of uncertainty, in which the sediments of long-serving certainties, polished interpretation routines and rock-hard interpretations are dissolved - up to the question of the free death of Jesus. We are led to the bottom of the open question about ourselves. "

Another important finding at the center of the Sunrise novel is the relationship of the individual to the divine, which is reciprocal. The representation is the “overwhelming reality” of the human-God relationship with all the consequences for the individual and for the divine. Joseph, who is endowed with a highly differentiated consciousness, represents in this constellation the modern subject who falls out of all order and is forced to relate to the center anew. "As if through a dark mirror, Sunrise negotiates the religious problem of the present, which Joseph, as it were, carries out on behalf of today's people."

The fact that the Sunrise novel can essentially be read as an answer to the lack of transcendence and mythlessness of modernity is also the view of the author: “My Joseph, like us today, is experiencing a religious upheaval. […] We live, as TS Eliot put it in his great poem in 1922, in Waste Land , a picture for a landscape of 'broken images'. Against this background of shattered images, I see Sunrise and its protagonists. […] Seen in this way, Joseph is a very contemporary figure. It is historical in its dress, but actually it is rich in universally valid experiences - like the Gospels, the Apocrypha, or the holy writings of other peoples and times. "

output

  • Patrick Roth, SUNRISE. The book Joseph , Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012.

literature

  • Michaela Kopp-Marx, Georg Langenhorst (Hrsg.): The rediscovery of the Bible with Patrick Roth. From the “Christ Trilogy” to “Sunrise. The Book of Joseph ” . Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1452-8 .
  • Joseph's trust. Patrick Roth in conversation with Michaela Kopp-Marx , in: Journal für Religionsphilosophie, 3/2014, pp. 95-105.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from August 15, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.deutscher-buchpreis.de
  2. SWR2 “To be continued” , accessed on November 15, 2012
  3. Eckhard Nordhofen: "Before the script came the dreams". In: The time of June 6, 2012.
  4. Anja Hirsch: "It is not knowledge that purifies experience". In: FAZ from May 18, 2012. See also Uwe Schütte: Expeditions in our soul. In: Wiener Zeitung from 26./27. May 2012, which Roth describes as an "erratic solitaire in contemporary literature".
  5. ^ Carsten Hueck: Deutschlandradio. Book magazine from May 27, 2012
  6. ^ Carsten Hueck: Deutschlandradio. Book magazine from May 27, 2012
  7. Eckhard Nordhofen: "Before the script came the dreams". In: The time of June 6, 2012.
  8. Samuel Moser: "Joseph, the Shard Man". In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 12, 2012.
  9. Anja Hirsch: "It is not knowledge that purifies experience". In: FAZ of May 18, 2012.
  10. Eckhard Nordhofen: "Before the script came the dreams". In: The time of June 6, 2012.
  11. Christoph Schulte: "Joseph's refused sacrifice". In: Christ in the present from May 13, 2012.
  12. Daniel Weidner : "Tell spells and sacrifices horror" literaturkritik.de 11/2012
  13. Michaela Kopp-Marx, Georg Langenhorst (Hrsg.): The rediscovery of the Bible with Patrick Roth. From the “Christ Trilogy” to “Sunrise. The Book of Joseph ”. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. pp. 9–10.
  14. Eckhart Reinmuth: The god of horror. New Testament voices in Patrick Roth's novel Sunrise. The Book of Joseph , in: The Rediscovery of the Bible by Patrick Roth , pp. 189–208, p. 205.
  15. Michaela Kopp-Marx: "Because he tears his Geritz in my heart". The image of God in Sunrise. The Book of Joseph , in: The Rediscovery of the Bible by Patrick Roth , pp. 209–236, p. 211.
  16. The Trust of Joseph. Patrick Roth in conversation with Michaela Kopp-Marx , in: Journal für Religionsphilosophie, 3/2014, pp. 95–105, pp. 95, 96, 104.