Abstract:

This essay reads the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus from the gospels intertextually with China Miéville’s contemporary “young adult” fantasy novel, Un Lun Dun, as supplemented by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. In this reading, John becomes the “chosen one” and Jesus remains the unchosen, who chooses to carry on John’s work after he fails as messiah. Just as Miéville’s story challenges “messianic” thinking and locates this-worldly salvation in the collective actions of ordinary people, so in the “ungospel” of the failed messiah, John the Baptist, Jesus saves people not by dying but by “giving his life” to them. The ungospel is manifest as an unsaid, a lurking, disturbing thought that even though little is said about John the Baptist, he still makes a better messiah than Jesus does.

Author: George Aichele