From Gore Vidal's satirical novel, Live From Golgotha, 1992.
The Gospel According to Gore Vidal is told mostly from the standpoint of St. Timothy, who tries to make sense out of matters when several TV networks from the 1990s start bending the laws of space-time and compete for exclusive rights to broadcast the Crucifixion...live! But their meddling is having some weird effects on Christian history.
Because of the old doctrine "to the Jews first," Saint [Paul] always made a courtesy call on every synagogue in every town we came to that had one. At first there would be a lot of chuckles and Call-me-Sols, and a bad lunch. Then he'd be invited to say a few words and before you could say "Holy Moses" they would be hitting him over the head with sticks. They never did buy the bad news that the late Jesus ben Nazareth, known to us Greeks as the King or Christ, was really the messiah that the Jews have been hanging around all these years waiting for.
"The point is," Saint would say when I'd be bandaging him up after one of his sessions with his former co-religionists, "you never know when or where you'll make a convert." Yet when Saint started out, he and James agreed that they would more or less divvy up the mission. Saint would look after the foreskin set while James, with some help from Peter the Rock-thick, would sell the good news about Judgment Day to the Jews. Then Peter moved on to Rome where he was a great success socially; he was even something of a favorite of the Emperor Nero, who thought Peter, and I quote the emperor directly, "the funniest act ever booked into the Palatine."
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Little did I realize when I became a Christian and met Saint and his friends, that my body--specifically, my whang--was to be a battleground between two warring factions within the infant Christian Church.
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[Saint] couldn't pass a synagogue without wanting to go in and spread the good news that the messiah had actually entered Jerusalem a few years earlier, on ass-back, where he was promptly denounced by the Jews as a self-hating Jew and by the Romans as a Zionist terrorist. He was then tacked up on a cross.... Then, on the third day, postmortem, Jesus came back to life...where a number of His personal staff...saw Him, thus convincing them that He really was the messiah and that the Day of Judgment and the kingdom of God and so on would take place just as soon as He returned from a few days with His Father, God, in Heaven. Later, we decided He must have meant He'd be back during the present generation. We are still twisting in the breeze, on tenterhooks.
Naturally I preach all of this every Sunday in my cathedral, which needs a new roof, but as our proconsul here in Macedonia says, "Why spend the money when the messiah's coming any minute now and this whole wonderful world of ours gets folded up like a rug?" He's a card, the proconsul.
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It's really and truly a wonderful religion, cash-flow-wise, and I say this now from the heart.
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[T]he smells [of Rome] are not just your familiar human and animal dung and sweat and fish sauce but also the rotting bodies that you see hanging from posts in every quarter with placards round their necks, saying things like I WAS A THIEF. Like the sign they hung on Jesus that said, KING OF THE JEWS, HA HA.
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Then, all nerves atingle, we lay in one another's arms, as the pale tentacles of the dawn clawed at the room's darkness, tearing even the thickest shadows to bright ribbons like a metal comb--or do I mean garden rake? Which is larger?
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[Saint] was at liberty and preaching up a storm all over the city. He was really in orbit there.... By now the whole thing was not only pretty much his invention but it was kept together by his energy and mastery of cross-filing and, of course, the Follow-up Letter.
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"They can also send someone from here back to Golgotha as they plan to do with me, whether I want to go or not. I have seen a Polaroid of myself, taken at the Crucifixion with Mary Baker Eddy."
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Well, Jesus had not checked in again as of 54 A.D. when I was at Rome with Saint, nor again, as of now, 96 A.D., nor as of the 1990s in the future, though Dr. Cutler Two said that since there is now a television-age Jewish state, Jesus will return in the year 2001. Cutler One wants me to believe that Jesus was simply a politician with a lot of demagogic funny-money schemes. But I shall not fall into his trap. No one, thank Moroni, can guide my stylus.
Copyright © by Gore Vidal
Image: St. Timothy, son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek.
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