Alice Walters gives her purpose in writing BEHIND THE HALO as “set[ting] the trappings of divinity inside” to “see the humanity in Jesus,” and in this she is reasonably successful. The stories she tells are simple, warm and kind and highlight some of the best parts of the Gospels, including a message of love and welcome for all. They are told in clear and accessible language, making them readable and understandable, even for younger children. Characters in the Bible who appear briefly in a story or two, like the lame man let down through the ceiling for healing, are given names (Malachi, in this case), personalities, and reactions to both their situations and to the new message offered to them by this mysterious, generous, and powerful teacher. The figures of Mary and John at the base of the Cross, weeping and heartsick, being asked by Jesus to take care of each other as mother and son from now on, are particularly emotionally powerful and compelling.
Walters doesn’t go much beyond the surface however, so readers looking for substantial political information explaining why Jesus was thought to be a threat to the Roman empire and to the survival of the Jewish nation, or a reason for Judas’s betrayal beyond simple monetary greed, or even the fear that led Peter to deny Jesus three times after the Crucifixion, they won’t find it here. The Romans barely figure in the stories she chooses at all, nor the fear of Roman power that led the Judaean leadership to be understandably nervous about prophets preaching liberation. And Walters is caught in the usual dilemma of the Christian trying to reconcile Jesus’s humanity and his divinity – her human Jesus remains inhumanly perfect, never loses faith or struggles with his mission (it is notable that another of the stories she does not tell is Jesus’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and his prayer to “let this cup pass from me”), and so the effort to make him more relatable and human cannot fully succeed. Still, BEHIND THE HALO might be a valuable useful reference for Sunday schools, for example, in order to help children and young teenagers to get past the more formal language of the Gospels and perceive at least a taste what it might have been like to live in the first century AD, and to experience an encounter with the man known to us as Jesus.
A simple but gentle and loving retelling of various Gospel stories in fictional form, BEHIND THE HALO makes a reasonably successful effort to make the Biblical characters feel like the real people they once were.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader