ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603120015
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: B-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BRIGGS ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mary Magdalene wept outside the place where Jesus was buried, howling like a small child lost. The tomb was empty, and she did not know where the body of Jesus had been taken.
Then she heard a familiar voice. And she looked up and saw a man with raven black hair and a steadfast golden gaze, and gasped. It was Jesus, telling her that he was ascending to God.
She ran to the upper room where the disciples were gathered, threw her arms around Simon Peter, crying and exclaiming:
``Simon, dance with me! Hug me and spin me around, because I have just seen the Lord. He is alive! Simon, Simon, he has risen from the dead!''
This is not the Bible, but an embellishment of the biblical account as imagined by one of the nation's most respected religious storytellers.
The Rev. Walter Wangerin Jr., a Lutheran minister and author, has interpreted the Bible as a single narrative from Abraham to the birth of Christianity in the most ambitious work of his career ``The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel.''
In the new book from Zondervan Publishing House, Wangerin gives personality and warmth to biblical figures, imagining the feeling and thoughts of many characters at the heart of the biblical stories.
In an age when many scholars minutely deconstruct the Bible, looking for historical, archaeological, literary and other evidence that leaves nearly every passage open to seemingly endless challenge and analysis, Wangerin seeks to recapture the Bible as a story of relationships between an eternal God and ordinary men and women.
``My instinct, and this instinct is worked into the book, is that the power of the story is not in the analysis of the story, but in the telling of the story,'' he said in a telephone interview from Valparaiso University in Indiana, where he is a writer in residence.
In using his own literary imagination, Wangerin gives greater depth to many characters, particularly women, who sometimes are relegated to secondary roles in the Bible.
For example, Jephthah's daughter is barely heard from in the biblical account in Judges of her slaying at her father's hand because of a vow he had made to God that in exchange for a military victory he would offer up as a burnt offering the first thing that greets him upon his return. Jephthah assumed it would be an animal, but it turns out his daughter was the first to greet him.
In Wangerin's book, readers hear what he imagines must have been going through the mind of Jephthah's daughter as she accepts her fate.
``How, then, can a daughter blame her father? He is as sad as she is now. Ah, he was ignorant. He did not know.''
The most dramatic moments of the book occur near the end in his retelling of the biblical accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Wangerin has recorded the book for audio cassettes. On the day he read up to the death of Jesus he was supposed to continue on for an additional 45 minutes, but he could not.
``I have never felt such an overwhelming wave of emotion. It just silenced me,'' he said.
And emotion and a sense of engagement with the action is what Wangerin hopes readers will encounter as they hear his telling of the resurrection.
The issue in his book, Wangerin said, is not, ``Did Jesus really rise or not? But look at that resurrection and, `Wow.'''
LENGTH: Medium: 66 linesby CNB