by Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan
This article contains affiliate links, as YCWI is an affiliate of Bookshop.org. We will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. See the full list of books we’ve reviewed here.
In seminary, a professor once asked us students that if there was definitive scientific evidence that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, would we still preach the Gospel? They argued there was no wrong answer to this, but I knew immediately in my bones that yes, I would still preach about clinging to, searching out, and becoming the possibility of new life in the midst of this broken world. Kaethe Schwehn’s Salome in her novel The Gospel of Salome might agree with me, and she invites us all to uncover what really matters to us in our lives of faith.
Salome, though named as one of the women in the Biblical Gospels as a follower of Jesus, is not presented by Schwehn as such. She is not Jewish and has rejected Greek and Roman gods as well. Her faith is in medicine, in healing. However, at the end of the novel, she realizes that sharing her story can be part of that healing too, both for herself and perhaps for the young follower of Jesus named John Mark.
John Mark comes to Salome asking about the truth of Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) parentage. This truth John Mark seeks, he seeks so that he can properly understand what has happened on Easter. But what he finds instead are more questions, and more stories to thread his own story through. His interview of Salome takes us around the ancient Mediterranean world, revealing the rot of Empire from the point of view of both peasants and the enslaved. Salome details how she became a doctor, teaching us about ancient remedies she discovers in Rome and Alexandria. She critiques Judaism and Greek mythology and relies on herself, but she also finds and makes community in strange and beautiful ways. John Mark also critiques her choices, and yet finds himself also making community in strange and beautiful ways.
Healing is central to Salome’s gospel, just as it is in the Biblical gospels, but rather than centering on healing by faith, Salome’s story talks about ancient medicinal practices and trying to heal bodies without modern science. The healing in her story is about trying to survive in a world defined by patriarchy, colonialism, and antisemitism. She lives in a world like ours, in which ethnic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries are porous until politicians or someone with power wants to exploit differences for violent purposes. The main stage for this novel is largely not first century Palestine, but instead the Riots of Alexandria of 38. These riots were pogroms against the Jews, and Schwehn wove a fascinating tale of a horrible history I did not know.
I was drawn into this novel by the fascinating characters, well-researched historical setting, and the haunting writing, but I still wondered for much of the novel why Schwehn included Jesus in this story at all. Why make her novel Biblical historical fiction instead of just historical fiction? I am skeptical of novels about Jesus, as I’ve written about before, especially ones that make big claims within the story that differ dramatically from scripture or tradition, and only picked this one up to support a friend who is a bookseller! My skepticism is not because I myself am very traditional- it is because I find Jesus in fiction to be mostly boring. Jesus in the Gospels can be funny and generous, weird and interesting, angry and compassionate, but too many novelizations of the Gospels that I have read (and too many TV shows) make him so nice and aloof that it is like reading about a cardboard cutout of a person. Even when Jesus himself is described as charismatic by way of the other characters’ devotion to him, that charisma does not translate to the reader’s understanding.
When the story is changed dramatically from the Gospels’ plotlines, the shock value seems to me to be a way to mask how otherwise boring Jesus can be. Yet, that is not true of Schwehn’s Jesus in The Gospel of Salome. Though deeply loved by the main characters in the novel, Schwehn interprets Yeshua as struggling between his own deeply held beliefs shaped by Mari and his aptitude and interest in being a doctor as taught by Salome. There are times in the novel when you wonder if he is delusional, even, and that tension contributes to the overall attempt to uncover what really matters to our lives of faith.
Jesus is a relatively small character in this novel, but Salome’s life follows the pattern of women’s stories in the Bible in general: survival. She survives violence, pain, hunger, poverty, and underestimation of her gifts time and again. She is not necessarily a character for us to emulate; instead, she is one who makes us think about what can give us life in the midst of struggles and violence, and about how we can move from surviving to not just thriving by ourselves but helping our community to thrive.
But the real reason why Salome’s is a Gospel that should intertwine with Jesus’ Good News is because of her relationship with John Mark and how it changes him. John Mark weaves all the seemingly disparate threads of the story– healing, community, parenting, faith, survival– into a story about what really matters to change this broken world. Salome helps John Mark to be real about the truth about the struggles. The Gospel of Mark, after all, is known for the most depressing original ending to the Gospels, ending in fear and silence. John Mark knows well that fear and silence, but he learns to persist anyway. Like Salome. Like those first followers of Jesus. Hopefully, like us.
What stories do you need to tell about life that can heal someone, that can help a community survive violence, that can be honest about mystery and not having all the answers? Maybe Salome can help you tell your story, too.
Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan (she/her/hers) is a life-long feminist and United Methodist currently serving the community of Frederick, Maryland, as the senior pastor of Trinity UMC. She is a graduate of Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. She is married to Aaron Harrington, her high school sweetheart, who is a pilot and all around aviation geek. They have two living children who they are raising in a house cluttered by books and airplane parts. Shannon is a proud former Managing Editor of Fidelia, and more of her writing can be found through Fidelia and at shannonesullivan.com.
