The Gospel of Salome
As a recovering evangelical Christian who was born and raised on biblical texts written by male authors (and more devastatingly, the idea of a solely male God), I was thrilled by this novel’s title. Structured in complex, Matryoska doll–style nesting narratives, the story follows Salome (also called Lyra), a Greek physician and the biological mother of the Christ Child, and the lives of Mari, Yosef, and Yeshua. The very notion of a fictional text, coupled with a genre that connects the biographical and theological, raises a provocative question about the nature of truth and how it might be most often found in stories.
Though Yeshua’s life is a major and luminous thread running through The Gospel of Salome, it is not the epicenter of this weaving. Like Salome herself, Yeshua is and is becoming, constantly assembled, erased, reimagined and retold, a spiral folding and unfolding into and away from itself. “We say ‘a mother gives a child life’ as though it happens once,” Salome says of her son. “But . . . a mother pushes her child into life again and again and again.”
The scaffolding of the novel is as intricate as it is delicate: Salome, a brilliant physician in her 60s, is struggling with dementia, and her first-person narration unfurls at times in a fragmented and nonlinear manner, which not only suggests her state but also introduces a nondiscursive approach to meaning-making through the stacking of impressionistic reflections, intuitive leaps, and symbolic gestures. She orates her story in large part to John Mark, a disappointed and doubtful follower of Yeshua during the early days of the grassroots Christian movement. John Mark harbors intricate questions about the Messiah’s life, death, and resurrection, which is one of the central mysteries of the novel.
