Pullman had already ruffled plenty of feathers in the Church, long before Fr O’Collins decided to take him on.  The Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials was widely interpreted as anti-Christian, and the film based on one of the three books – The Golden Compass – was criticised for promoting atheism, and condemned by the Vatican for its portrayal of ‘a cold and hopeless world without God.’  

Then came a new book – The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ – in which a couple named Mary and Joseph give birth to twin boys.  Jesus is a charismatic social teacher and visionary; Christ is a calculated, tormented character who eventually establishes the Church.  For Fr O’Collins, the gloves were off.

Pullman’s book is far more about Pullman than it is about Jesus ChristThe central core of Pullman’s book is that the Gospel message is just ‘a story’: a story of a Jewish teacher whose heart was in the right place, and whose tragic end was distorted and misrepresented by the architects of the early Church, who used it as a basis to set up what became a self-serving institution.  For Fr O’Collins, of course, this view could not be more misguided: and yet, he believes, it has to be taken seriously by believers, and Pullman’s charges must be answered.

His answer comes with the publication next month of his book Philip Pullman’s Jesus: and on a recent visit to London, he took time out to meet Faith Today to talk about what shape his riposte will take.  ‘First up’, says Fr O’Collins – a friendly, sprightly 78-year-old who still hops around the world from one theological conference to the next – ‘is that Pullman’s book is far more about Pullman than it is about Jesus Christ. ‘ Pullman tells us that ‘he is throwing new light on who Jesus really was.  But what I think he’s doing is to distort the history of Jesus, in the interests of what he sees as higher truths.  So it’s not so much about fresh light as Pullman’s personal ideology..and it throws fresh light not so much on who Jesus was, but on who Pullman is,’ he says.

One of the things that’s clear about Pullman, from a reading of his book, is – according to Fr O’Collins - that he simply doesn’t like God very much.  And what he’s noticed is a new kind of atheism around which Pullman rather seems to embody – an atheism that the elderly Jesuit doesn’t much go for.  ‘One of the biggest influences on my life was an atheist academic when I was at university.  He didn’t believe in God, but he was always extraordinarily respectful, and I appreciated that enormously.  

‘I dislike the snideness of some of the current atheists around today.  And their arrogance.  If you’re going to be an atheist, be courteous, and have a certain humility about you.

‘This courteousness and humility,’ he suggests, ‘aren’t much in evidence in Pullman’s work’.  One of the aspects of his work that most irks Fr O’Collins is the extent to which his adversary  ‘falsifies the record.  He adjusts things, adds things, in the interests of changing the words and deeds of Jesus. ‘

For Fr O’Collins, Pullman doesn’t retell the story of Jesus, he rewrites it. ‘What’s more’, he says, ‘there’s that certain merging...of Christ and Pullman...in its pages.’

Like many Fr O’Collins found the very book itself distasteful, even before he’d looked into the words on its pages.  ‘It’s deliberately designed to look like a religious book,’ he says.  ‘Gold lettering embossed on a white background...a fabric place-marker as in a prayer-book.’

But as well as what he sees as a level of ambiguity and deliberate confusion about what Pullman’s book actually is, there’s the fact of how he uses the Gospel stories and manipulates them to his own advantage.  ‘He plays fast and loose with the documents,’ says Fr O’Collins.  ‘He doesn’t tackle crucial issues, such as people who were raised from the dead.  And the people who were cured he calls faith healing...’

The point is, though, does any of what Pullman thinks actually matter?  Is it a good idea, even, to give him the credibility of a rejoiner – wouldn’t the more sensible thing be to ignore what he has to say altogether? ‘The fact is,’ says Fr O’Collins, ‘that even in this day and age, people continue to say that they believe things because they read them in a book.  There’s something about the printed word that brings with it a ring of authority – we may be inclined to challenge the spoken word, to not necessarily believe something because we’ve heard it, but we do tend to believe it if we’ve read it in a book.

‘He plays fast and loose with the documents ... He doesn’t tackle crucial issues, such as people who were raised from the dead’‘The other point’, he says, ‘is that believers understandably and often become upset by attacks on their faith – and the Church needs to give a lead to help them formulate how they’re going to deal with those who challenge them.’  And helping us defend our faith against these attacks, that have come from artists as well as writers down through the years, has become very much the stock-in-trade of Fr O’Collins. He is himself clearly a walking encyclopedia of every attempt there’s ever been to mock or distort the gospel story through film, books and music.  ‘I’d put Pullman together with someone like DH Lawrence who wrote a book called The Man Who Died...but in the book Jesus doesn’t die, he’s taken down alive from the cross.’  ‘But Pullman’s offering’, he says, ‘isn’t as good as Lawrence’s...and in fact, he thinks anyone who wants to pull off a retelling of the story of Christ is taking on a lot.  The fact is, Jesus lived so long ago and his story is so well known and has been so much written-about that it’s hard for anyone to take it and do something really new and different on it.’

All the same, Fr O’Collins himself clearly relishes the chance to get his terrier-like teeth into the latest attempt to denigrate the Gospels – and he’s a formidable intellectual foe.  After university in Melbourne and then Cambridge, he moved to Rome and was professor of theology at the Gregorian University for more than 30 years.  At one point during his time there, he lived in the same block as the future Pope Benedict XVI – and recalls, that the then Cardinal Ratzinger was often accompanied on his walks by his various dachshunds, which fellow walkers had to be careful not to step on.  He also remembers him as someone who was always early to bed and early to rise, and a serious intellectual.

In that, the two men clearly had much in common.

Philip Pullman’s Jesus by Gerald O’Collins will be published by Darton, Longman and Todd on August 24, £7.95