JESUS WAS A BAG OF BONES and guts covered in skin. He was just like us, nothing more. So concludes a new gospel brought to light by atheist academic Theo Griepenkerl in Michel Faber’s weirdly touching novel The Fire Gospel. Theo is an eminent authority on Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. In a bombed-out museum in Iraq, he stumbles across the oldest surviving piece of Christian literature: nine scrolls describing Jesus’s last days on Earth. Theo steals the scrolls, translates them, and publishes them as The Fifth Gospel. But, as Revelation warns, he who adds to the Bible is bound to get burned.

Michel Faber digs up gems when mining his imagination. He’s brought us eerie man-eating aliens (Under the Skin), an asexual brother and sister duo isolated in the Arctic (The Fahrenheit Twins), and a nineteenth-century hooker named Sugar (The Crimson Petal and the White). His newest novel—part of Knopf’s series exploring myths—supposedly retells the story of Prometheus, the fellow who gave fire to humanity and got chained to a rock. But the real story here is about the fellow who gave Christianity to humanity and got nailed to a cross.

The author of the nine scrolls is Malchus, a bit player in the New Testament. He’s that lowly servant whose ear is sliced off during Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Malchus is a kvetcher. He’s yellow from cirrhosis, losing his hair, and a constant farter—but the guy has heart. He also loves Jesus, whom he portrays as more human than divine. For example, as Jesus hangs from the cross, the son of man screams in agony, accidentally pees on his followers below, and pleads for them to finish him off. When he finally dies, birds peck out his eyes and entrails. By this time, Jesus has few followers remaining; they were waiting for a miracle and are miffed when none occurs. Little Malchus, his faith still miraculously intact, is left to bury Jesus and foot the funeral bill.

Malchus’s grotesque account horrifies present-day Christians. During Theo’s book tour to promote The Fifth Gospel, the academic is met by “freaked-out people who look as though they’ve had their souls ripped out.” One reader tells Theo that despite heated arguments with atheists, the light of her faith burned brightly till Malchus’s story finally snuffed it out. Did Theo spare any thought for people like her? Theo ignores her question. Instead he claims that Malchus’s story has revealed “Jesus’s humanity,” a roundabout way of saying that Jesus was merely human, and flawed at that. When Theo faces death in the clutches of a pair of religious nutbars, the atheist must confront his own flaws: his lack of empathy, his egotism, his naivety, and his petty obsessions. With The Fire Gospel, Michel Faber has created a wicked satire that holds a magnifying glass over Christianity — and sets it aflame.

Neil Smith, an atheist, is writing a novel about heaven. His first book, Bang Crunch, was called “a rare fusion of thematic boldness, humour, gravity, empathy, maturity and first-rate prose” by Michel Faber.