The Great Mutation

Emmanuel Carrère has become my literary patron saint because he asks the questions I cannot stop asking myself. Of all his books, The Kingdom has lodged itself deepest inside me because it dramatizes the same conflict that has haunted my life: the impossible task of separating myself from Christianity without ever quite escaping its gravitational pull.

In The Kingdom, Carrère intertwines autobiography with the story of Luke, imagining the evangelist as a writer following the missionary adventures of his hero, Paul. Luke becomes more than a biblical figure. He becomes Carrère’s alter ego, a fellow writer trying to make sense of extraordinary events while simultaneously making sense of himself.

That double inquiry is what captivates me.

Carrère interrogates not merely Christianity but his own soul.

One of the most striking subjects of that interrogation is success.

By any worldly standard, Carrère has won the lottery. He is one of France’s most celebrated writers. His opinions carry cultural weight. He serves on prestigious literary juries. Filmmakers seek his advice. Publishers court him. His books travel farther than most people ever will. He stays in elegant hotels, dines with influential people, and inhabits the rarefied atmosphere reserved for intellectual celebrities.

Yet success has not quieted him.

If anything, it has sharpened his discomfort.

Part of him believes that his accomplishments have carried him farther from Jesus than closer to him. Although he long ago emerged from what he calls his “Christian period,” the desire to follow Jesus never entirely disappeared. It lingers like an old melody that refuses to leave his mind.

That desire creates an almost unbearable tension because Jesus demands a way of life that appears to mock nearly every modern definition of success.

Love your enemies.

Bless those who persecute you.

Do not exalt yourself.

Sell your possessions.

Take up your cross.

Act as though this world is passing away.

Measured against that standard, literary fame begins to resemble an embarrassing distraction.

Carrère is fascinated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radicalism. The Gospel asks us to hold our earthly attachments lightly. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Love itself is transformed. Instead of reserving our deepest affection for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus seems to demand an indiscriminate love that embraces everyone equally.

Carrère pauses here.

Can love that is equally distributed still be called love?

Or has it become something so abstract that it evaporates into an ideal rather than a human experience?

He contrasts this vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness unfolds not by fleeing the world but by inhabiting it fully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in family, longevity, generosity, and community. Earth itself becomes the stage upon which covenant is lived.

Christianity, by contrast, often seems suspicious of precisely those satisfactions. Earthly success is fleeting. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Riches become spiritual liabilities. This life is preparation for another kingdom.

Carrère never completely chooses between these competing visions.

My sense is that he is temperamentally drawn toward the Jewish embrace of earthly life. Yet he cannot stop returning to Jesus.

Because no one ever spoke like Jesus.

For Carrère, the singularity of Christ lies not primarily in miracles or doctrine but in language itself. Borrowing the linguistic term hapax legomenon—a word that appears only once in a body of literature—he suggests that Jesus himself is a kind of hapax: an unrepeatable event in human speech.

He recalls the temple guards in John’s Gospel who return empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus.

Their explanation is breathtakingly simple:

“No one ever spoke like this man.”

Carrère believes that even if one stripped away the miracle stories, even if one doubted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and every supernatural claim, the sayings of Jesus would still stand beside those of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and history’s greatest spiritual teachers.

Something unprecedented happened in those words.

The New Testament captivates him for another reason as well.

Some scenes possess the awkward unpredictability of eyewitness memory.

Who invents the young man who flees naked from Gethsemane after slipping out of his linen cloth? Carrère suspects the embarrassed youth may even have been Mark himself, accidentally preserving his own humiliation in the Gospel.

Or consider the paralyzed man whose friends dismantle a roof simply to lower him into a crowded room before Jesus.

These episodes feel too strange, too specific, too gloriously unnecessary to be manufactured.

By contrast, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and other overtly miraculous episodes leave Carrère unconvinced. They strike him as theological architecture erected after the fact.

Yet disbelief has never extinguished fascination.

Quite the opposite.

Carrère remains mesmerized by what he calls “the Great Mutation.”

Within only a few generations, an obscure Jewish movement transformed the imagination of the Western world. Millions—and eventually billions—came to believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, eternal life, and the astonishing claim that God had entered history as a poor Jewish carpenter.

When I encounter Carrère’s phrase, “the Great Mutation,” my own imagination travels somewhere entirely different.

It returns to Saturday evenings in 1978.

I am alone in the living room watching The Incredible Hulk.

Dr. David Banner is gentle, decent, almost saintly. He suffers injustice with Job-like patience until one humiliation too many unleashes something volcanic inside him. Suddenly the transformation begins. Muscles swell. Clothes tear. Humanity gives way to myth.

The catharsis overwhelms me.

I begin to cry.

I don’t merely want to become stronger.

I want to mutate.

I want my own body to erupt into something so magnificent that every weakness, every humiliation, every fear disappears forever.

Then the rage subsides.

The green giant vanishes.

David Banner returns.

And finally comes the sequence that broke my heart every single week.

Banner walks alone down a lonely highway while Joe Harnell’s mournful piano theme, “The Lonely Man,” drifts over the closing credits.

That was the image I carried inside myself.

Not the Hulk.

David Banner.

The solitary wanderer searching for redemption.

As a child, I mistook that identification for purity.

What I could not yet see was the narcissism quietly hiding inside the fantasy. I imagined myself not merely misunderstood but uniquely chosen, destined for some dramatic transformation that would finally justify my existence.

Looking back, I realize I was already rehearsing the emotional architecture of the religious conversion that awaited me only a year later.

Long before I met Jesus, I was already waiting for a Great Mutation.