The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

In this retelling of the gospel story (which is also a fascinating exploration of how and why such stories come to be written) "Jesus" and "Christ" are two separate characters: twins, who embody different kinds of religious faith and have very different ideas about how to do God's work.  I remember being very impressed a few years ago by David Boulton's "Who on Earth Was Jesus?", which emphasises the distinction between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith", and I liked the way that this idea was humanised and explored in this story, as Jesus simply speaks from his beliefs, while Christ, the chronicler of these events, is persuaded by a mysterious stranger that the Kingdom of God can be brought about by "writing about things as they should have been" and "letting truth into history".  This leads to reversals such as Jesus's encounter with Mary and Martha, where he actually tells Mary to "go and help your sister", but Christ feels that this was "another of those sayings of Jesus that would be better as truth than as history".  The way that events are embellished into myths is also nicely illustrated by Christ's encounter with Thomas after Jesus's death, where the people present are persuaded of the resurrection without seeing wounds from the crucifixion, but soon the "vivid and unforgettable" story of Thomas touching the wounds becomes widespread.  I was also struck by Christ's final thoughts on the allure of storytelling, as he reflects on the morality of the newly formed church and his part in its creation, and concludes that he still wants to be involved in creating a record of Jesus's life so that he can "knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story for no other reason than to make a better story".