Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Raphael Magarik. Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. 264 pp.

Review by Eve Houghton

3 September 2026

Who is speaking in this passage from Genesis? “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (2:24). As Raphael Magarik shows in the opening pages of Fictions of God, the speaker might be “Adam, God, or perhaps the narrator” (p. 1). Magarik’s positing of a narrator in Genesis introduces the book’s central claim: that biblical narration can be understood as self-consciously fictional, unreliable, and elusive. Augustine attributed the utterance to Adam; rabbinic scholars attributed the verse directly to God. For John Calvin, it is Moses who speaks, an interpretation that became central to Reformation exegesis of Genesis. Fictions of God shows biblical commentators engaged in debates about narrative perspective now more commonly associated with literary criticism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel.

The intervention of Fictions of God is to trace “a Reformation genealogy for the ironized, potentially unreliable narrator” (p. 4). This runs counter to what we now understand as the opposition between religious and imaginative literature. But Magarik posits the biblical narrator as an idea that “both resists and helps explain the emergence of these modern, secular categories,” because in his account, Reformation writing shaped both the modern distinction between author and narrator and the emerging, not yet fully naturalized distinction between the Bible and poetry (p. 5). Magarik argues persuasively that, far from disclaiming fictionality in the Bible, Protestant commentators saw unreliable narration as central to spiritual accommodation, in which the fallible perspectives of prophets such as Moses mediated biblical truth in a form intelligible to human readers.

Magarik extends this claim by identifying biblical free indirect discourse, arguing that, in Martin Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1544–54), attributing the words of God to human characters such as Adam and Moses, “we see this prize technique of the novel coming into being in this sixteenth-century Bible commentary" (p. 37). A chapter on Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) locates fictional technique in the biblical narrative’s use of “believable stories no longer soliciting belief,” a formulation that echoes and contests Catherine Gallagher’s argument about the rise of fictionality in the eighteenth century (p. 70). Subsequent chapters on Abraham Cowley’s Davideis (1656), John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder (1679) highlight the unreliable narration of these biblical poems. Magarik reads Adam, Raphael, and Michael as character-narrators whose fallible narration is an essential part of Milton’s project of accommodation. Hutchinson becomes surprisingly central to the story of secularism and its discontents traced in Fictions of God; the tendency to deny ownership of her own writing that frustrated second-wave feminist critics is a rejection of “the implicitly secularizing force of human authorship” (p. 144).

A coda on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) argues for the novel’s roots in Reformation literary practice and in the “theological-literary creativity” that is the subject of Magarik’s study (p. 170). This is an exciting historical claim, characteristic of Fictions of God: a bold, original, and deeply scholarly book that will be of interest to scholars of English literature working across genres and periods.