Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels. Mary Gordon. Pantheon. 240 pages. $24.95.

Fundamentalists hallelujahed The Passion of the Christ, but Mel Gibson's blockbuster reduced the meaning of Jesus' life to the ritualized mayhem of his final hours. In her new book, Mary Gordon observes that the journey from Gethsemane to Golgotha takes up only a fraction of the canonical Gospels. There is more to the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John than the depiction of a Roman-enhanced interrogation technique.

Gordon's selective close reading of the four narratives brings a measure of clarity to their Rashomon-like ambiguities and contradictions. Proselytizing atheists and biblical literalists will have problems with her middle-of-the-road approach. However, her calm, sensible voice is a welcome change from the din of the neverending culture war.

Gordon is ideally suited to the task she set herself. A brilliant novelist, she appreciates the way Jesus, himself ``a creator of fictions,'' used language to convey his message. For instance, she considers the parable of the prodigal son to be ``the perfect story,'' for its formal and thematic simplicity. But then there are the shadows cast by the Light of the World, such as when he calls Jews the children of the devil, a calumny that has provided solace for dozens of generations of anti-Semites.

``We must always read these words with a broken heart,'' sighs Gordon, whose father was a self-hating Jew who converted to Catholicism. Then again, Jesus may have been misquoted. After all, the gospels are as reliable as UFO sightings. They attempt to reconstruct events 30-60 years after the fact. Two of their authors -- Mark and Luke -- never even met the messiah.

Though a believer, Gordon does not treat the gospels as if they were divinely inspired. She rejects the religious right's insistence on inerrancy. Actually, her original intent was to go after the American Taliban for warping Jesus' teachings to justify greed and prejudice. But she decided to put the ax-grinding aside in favor of old-fashioned exegesis.

Her modus operandi is ecumenical. Several versions of the Bible were consulted, including Thomas Jefferson's bowdlerized New Testament, which omits all reference to miracles and the supernatural. Gordon draws upon a rich fund of knowledge as well as personal experience. She provides helpful insights into the temptation in the desert, the beatitudes, the transfiguration, the agony in the garden and the passion.

Reading Jesus arrives at a time when anti-intellectual evangelists and elitist infidels are dominating the religious discourse. This book will appeal to readers who are leery of Rick Warren's pious platitudes and Christopher Hitchens' free thinking smarminess. With Aquinan equilibrium, Gordon reaffirms the notion that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. She proposes no answers; she just raises a lot of interesting questions.

Ariel Gonzalez teaches English at Miami Dade College.

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