THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARTHA

A New Age prophet takes on organized religion in Kushnir’s novel.

Martha, a 45-year-old accountant and former wartime field nurse in New York, sets out to prove that God is found in mercy, which flows not from heaven but from human hands. A “barefoot theologian,” she gives sermons in New York parks, making claims that challenge the very foundations of Christian faith. According to Martha, Jesus Christ was not crucified; she posits that the narrative about his crucifixion was modeled after the Egyptian god Osiris, who rose from the dead. (“He did not come to suffer. He came to heal suffering,” she says.) Her ideas threaten those in the religious establishment, especially one Pastor Smith, who grips his copy of the Bible like a sword. Martha questions centuries of dogma, not out of malice but out of love, wanting to help people appreciate the living Jesus. She finds an ally in Lucas, a New Testament professor at a seminary in Massachusetts, who helps her set up a temple in an abandoned warehouse to propagate her theology. There, she struggles to arouse a thirst for “freedom from the dictatorship of appetite” in the people who brand her as “a Christian Taliban”; how will she respond to allegations of blasphemy, homophobia, and transphobia? Kushnir’s conceit—telling this story as a “modern parable written in the language of the 21st century”—is an inspired approach, as Jesus Christ frequently employed the parable form in his teachings. The book’s framing of the body as sacred rather than sinful is convincing, but the plea for sexual restraint might seem outdated to readers who advocate for sex-positivity (Martha believes that sex is meant only for procreation, not pleasure). The book’s length and tendency toward repetition somewhat blunt the impact of the message and risk losing the reader’s attention.

A powerful story of faith that celebrates love and rejects fear.