As biblical scholarship goes, this seems fairly iffy. As art, on the other hand, it’s pretty wonderful ... His evenhanded pace of four small panels on each page keeps the tone understated, and he gets a lot of comedic mileage out of rendering biblical dialogue into modern vernacular ... But Brown zeros in on the human drama in each story — his images of David silently regarding Bathsheba make very clear the way power flows between them — and his visual craftsmanship is as sharp as it’s ever been.
...this graphic interpretation of tales of sex and personal politics from the Bible is revelatory and brilliant. That Brown is an excellent artist is a given, but the research and documentation here is scholarly and insightful. Might not be for everyone, but for those who can get past their piety into the human aspects of the Bible and history, it’s a deep dive well worth taking.
This book of lay Biblical scholarship is simultaneously idiosyncratic, meticulous, imaginative and heretical. It's also deeply emotional, which may come as a surprise to readers of Brown's last book, Paying For It ... he makes compelling cases for a whole gamut of unconventional claims. Regarding prostitution, he asserts that Mary, Jesus' mother, was a prostitute, that the early Christians practiced prostitution, and that stories like the Parable of the Talents were pro-prostitute. Equally absorbing is Brown's contention that the Bible lends itself to a 'mystical,' rather than legalistic, interpretation.
...if, like me, you don’t know your Bathshebas from your bathtubs, the de-contextualized vignettes might leave you feeling lost. Here is another woman who happens to sell sex, and here is another man who spent all his master’s money on sex workers and was rewarded. At a certain point, a reader might want to ask, So what? It is only in the Afterword that Brown draws a clear “connection between all these stories of whores and whoremongers”. Here, and in his copious notes (which make up a third of the book), Brown does the real heavy lifting of his argument. As well as laying out the reasoning behind his headline positions, he describes the schism in the early Church over prostitution and offers up fascinating details that reveal the depth of his knowledge. The notes are rich with this sort of detail, a welcome contrast to the sparseness of the comic itself.
Brown returns to the style of his early work, Louis Riel, which featured larger-than-life characters rendered with exaggerated features, most notably very enlarged hands ... Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is not lewd or meant in any way to diminish its source material, much as more conventional Christians may hate it. Nor is it a cynical entertainment, like The Da Vinci Code, which dabbles in similar material. Brown’s ability to meld honesty with argument might be unique, and his gifts in the medium have not weakened. This book is surely not for everyone, and it will convince few, but it sure is a special graphic novel.
