Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
BIBLICAL AND SCEPTICAL-BIBLICAL NOVELS
It’s no secret that the Bible,
both Old and New Testaments, has been an endless source of inspiration for
poets, dramatists, composers and artists for many centuries, but I am
interested in a current trend in novels based upon Scripture.
Time was, Biblical novels were
works of piety, often dressing up received religion in colourful melodrama. Now
Biblical novels tend to be works of scepticism.
This could simply reflect the transition from a Christian to a
post-Christian age. But it is intriguing how small a stock of ideas the
Sceptical-Biblical genre of novels displays, and how quickly the genre’s
stratagems have become clichés.
I will skate very quickly past
those witty Jewish writers who have taken satirical or otherwise critical
novelistic shots at parts of the Hebrew Bible – what Christians call the Old
Testament. Dan Jacobson’s The Rape of
Tamar (1970) – reviewed elsewhere on this blog - is a sardonic dissection
of events in the reign of King David, which can be closely referenced to
Scripture itself. Howard Jacobson’s The
Very Model of a Man (1992) is his version of the wanderings of Cain, questioning
the justice of the Biblical conception of God. I remember when I was in my
twenties reading and enjoying the German-Jewish novelist Stefan Heym’s The King David Report (1973), which I
passed on to my mother to read. She both chortled in delight and gasped in
shock over it as she checked it against the Books
of Samuel and Books of Kings.
Heym’s is an unflattering account of King David as a devious, untrustworthy
seeker after power, who got his scribes to lie for him in order to whitewash
the nastier things he did on his way to the top. What both exhilarated and
shocked my mother was the fact that Heym tweaked the scriptural accounts only a
very little to make his fictitious case.
Perhaps the best person to
provide a good critique of these Jewish writers would be an expert Jewish
exegete.
What interests me more, however,
is what has been happening to the way the New Testament and early Christianity
are now depicted in novels.
When novels based on New
Testament and early Christian themes began to be written in large numbers in
the nineteenth century, they tended to be either expanded Sunday School tracts,
or arguments for a particular form of Christianity. The bellicose and anti-papist
“Muscular Christian” Charles Kingsley, for example, in his novel Hypatia (1853), managed to be at once
hysterically anti-Catholic and hysterically anti-Semitic in his depiction of
the early Christian community in Alexandria. (Apparently only virile Nordic
types were good enough to be real Christians, according to Kingsley.) In answer
to Kingsley, the following year the Catholic Cardinal Thomas Wiseman wrote his
stilted and now fairly unreadable novel Fabiola
(1854), which presented early Christians, persecuted in pagan Rome, in
completely Catholic terms. Though I give both novels shelf space, they are now
largely forgotten, but they were immensely popular in their day. Hypatia was once regarded as Kingsley’s
best novel. Fabiola was regularly
serialised in Catholic newspapers, and was filmed a number of times in the
silent era.
The big nineteenth century
blockbusters of pietistic Christian novels, with at least some connection to
Scripture, were, however, the American Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and the Pole Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1896).
persecuted in the Rome of Nero. They both sold in their millions. They were both dramatised and filmed a number of times in both silent and sound versions. They were both completely pietistic in tone (even if Wallace set out to write a sceptical story but changed his mind mid-way through his research). And, of course, they are now regarded with something near to contempt by respectable literary critics, who see them as little more than superannuated bestsellers written in a fake “ye olde” style. Perhaps this is to underrate them. I admit that I only ever read a kiddie’s version of Ben Hur when I was quite young (though I have seen both the silent 1925 and talkie 1959 film versions of it). But I did read Quo Vadis? with some pleasure when I was a teenager; and Sienkiewicz was an early Nobel Prize winner.
The problem was, though, that
these two novels set the pattern for Hollywood’s version of Christian origins –
lots of spectacle with a light dusting of religiosity. Later the
likes of Lloyd
C. Douglas produced bestselling novels such as The Robe and The Big
Fisherman (about St Peter) which were duly turned into Hollywood movies in
the 1950s when Cecil B. de Mille and his ilk were churning out bloated things
like Samsom and Delilah and Solomon and Sheba and The Ten Commandments and Kings of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told and re-makes of Quo Vadis? and Ben Hur.
(Those were the Cold War days when the USA cast itself as the God-fearing
democracy facing off against the Godless USSR – pseudo-Biblical movies were
part of this self-image and chimed with the mood of the times.)
But setting aside this tinsel (and
there are still fat pietistic historical novels written for America’s Bible
Belt), it is hard to find intellectually acceptable novels now that present a Christian
view of the early church and of early Christians.
One of the few I know is the
Irishman Niall Williams John (Bloomsbury,
2008) which I reviewed for the Sunday
Star-Times when it first came out. It is, in effect, an account of
Christianity at a crisis point in the late first century, when the messianic
hope of Jesus’ immanent return was gradually being abandoned and when
Gnosticism was nibbling at the edges of Christian orthodoxy. The aged John,
depicted as the “beloved disciple”, realizes that he has to get down the
essential Christian message before he dies and before it is swamped by
heresies. Niall Williams knowingly assumes a few things that most scholars
would now question – such as that the author of the fourth gospel was actually
the “beloved disciple”, or that this was the same person who wrote the
scriptural letters attributed to John. Even so, this is a sophisticated,
intellectually aware novel which accepts Christian orthodoxy and which deals
with it poetically and with great insight.
But there are very few such
novels now.
Which brings me to the
established genre of the Sceptical-Biblical novel.
In the mid-nineteenth century
there were people like David Strauss and Ernest Renan writing their sceptical
“lives” of Jesus, which were then regarded as works of scholarship. Taking
their cue from such works, by the early 20th century some writers of
fiction were imitating their scepticism.
Anatole France’s short story The Procurator of Judea represented
Jesus as an insignificant colonial troublemaker whom Pontius Pilate can barely
remember in after years.
George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) is basically a
sentimental agnostic’s
version of Jesus, drawing heavily on turn-of-the-century
Christology and playing out something like a novelised version of Ernest
Renan’s milk-and-water sweetie of a Jesus in the Vie de Jesus. The story is told by Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus is a
simple Essene shepherd who preaches love and peace. But he has a period of
mental aberration and briefly becomes a crazy fanatic calling himself the “Son
of David”. For being a troublemaker, the Roman authorities crucify him. But
he’s only on the cross for a few hours so he doesn’t die. He revives when friends
take him down and look after him. Chastened by his experience Jesus stops being
a fanatic and goes back to being a peaceful and harmless shepherd. However
years later, a delusional fellow called Paul of Tarsus has worked up this true
crucifixion and revival into a fantastic story of death and resurrection, and
he is going around saying that Jesus is the saviour of the world. When
confronted with the real Jesus, Paul refuses to accept the real Jesus as
anything other than a madman and goes on his way to invent a new religion.
Joseph of Arimathea - presented as a Jew
who admires Roman civilization and scorns the ignorant religious Galilean
peasants – is really a self-portrait of George Moore – an Irishman who admired
British civilization and scorned the ignorant religious Irish peasants.
Paul as the “real” founder and
fabricator of Christianity soon became a familiar trope in the
Sceptical-Biblical genre. If you saw Martin Scorsese’s film version of The Last Temptation of Christ, you might
recall a scene in which Paul, after years of preaching the risen Christ, meets
the real and still living Jesus and simply dismisses him from his mind. In the
1980s there was an historically-shaky bestseller by Hyam Maccoby called The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of
Christianity which presented the same Thesis.
After George Moore’s, the next
significant Sceptical-Biblical novel about Jesus was D.H.Lawrence’s last work The Man Who Died, a.k.a. The Escaped Cock (1929-30). Jesus dies
and rises again, but he decides he won’t go to heaven. He’ll live by his senses
in this world. So he makes love to a goddess of Isis. Ah yes, the cock has
escaped once again, as it does in so much of Lawrence’s fiction. And what does
this tell us but that Lawrence doesn’t believe in an afterlife, and considers
only the material world real? Okay – it can be a valid viewpoint, and this
short book has been praised as a piece of poetic affirmation of the here and
now. But like so much of Lawrence’s work, it overdoes the phallus-worship and
ends up as an adolescent masturbation fantasy. Jesus as D.H.Lawrence, affirmed
by his senses.
Claud Cockburn’s Jericho Road (1978), the next
Sceptical-Biblical novel I’ve read, is mainly an adventure story about first-century
Palestine with a Samaritan as a hero, and making sardonic comments on Roman
imperialism and the complexities of Jewish religion. But in its incidental details, its portrait
of “the Gailiean” is very similar to Moore’s in The Brook Kerith – a nice, peaceable chap much misrepresented by
his followers.
Which brings me to the New
Zealand contribution to this familiar genre. C.K.Stead’s My Name Was Judas (2006) is basically more of the same –Jesus is a
nice chap who says some good things, but he gets carried away and starts
talking nonsense and thinking he’s God. The miracles are just exaggerations of
natural events or outright fictions. The narrator Judas, living peacefully
years later, is the voice of reason and scepticism, who rejects anything
transcendental. All the other disciples, apart from Judas, are undiscerning and
credulous blockheads. In other words, as in Moore’s and Lawrence’s novels, My Name Was Judas contains what amounts
to self-portrait of the author. Sceptical materialist Judas among those thicko
apostles is sceptical materialist C.K.Stead among those thicko Christians.
As a book reviewer, I get sent
many oddities to review, and a year before Stead’s book came out I received
Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas
(2005). It has no connection with Stead’s novel, however. It is one of those
thriller-type things about dark deeds as the Vatican attempts to suppress the “real”
gospel written by Judas. In other words, it’s just a whisker away from the Dan
Brown Da Vinci Code sort of cack; and
whatever the flaws of Stead’s novel, I wouldn’t rate him as low as that.
In their different ways, what Moore,
Lawrence and Stead do is attempt to impose 20th or 21st
century values and perspectives on an ancient historical situation, in order to
reject a religion they dislike. Jesus is recast in their own image (Lawrence)
or as a straw man to be knocked over by the author’s greater intelligence
(Moore, Stead). Of course this sometimes leaves them with characters who are
highly anachronistic. The most extreme case I’ve encountered, as a reviewer, of
Jesus being remodelled to suit an author’s ideology would have to be the
Australian atheist Leslie Cannold’s The
Book of Rachael (2011). It is, in effect, the story of Jesus’ [fictitious] sister,
who just turns out to have all the attitudes and values of an early 21st
century feminist and atheist activist. Gosh. So ham-fistedly is this done,
however, that the novel rapidly becomes raw polemic and its relationship with
anything even vaguely resembling ancient Palestine is highly notional. [I have
not read, and therefore cannot comment upon, Colm Toibin’s recent The Testament of Mary (2012), but I
understand it is somewhere in the same ball-park].
As I have already asserted, this
anti-Christian Sceptical-Biblical type of novel is now a genre of its own, and
its moves have become fairly predictable. A complete rejection of anything
resembling the transcendent or miraculous. The weak Jesus, who is infinitely
less intelligent than the sceptical author or narrator who follows him. The
depiction of Christians as less perceptive and more doltish than that author or
narrator. The assumption that Jesus might have been a nice chap, but anything
Christians have been written about him is grossly exaggerated.
Like any other genre it can be
done well or ill, and between them Moore, Lawrence, Cockburn and Stead, though
generally condescending in their attitudes, at least show some style, deploy
some wit and even provide the occasional insight. (Mawer and Cannold are, by
contrast, merely literary embarrassments.)
But I’m always amused by the more
naïve – and less experienced – newspaper reviewers who think this sort of stuff
is daring, “controversial” and likely to blow people’s socks off. The fact is,
novels taking superior biffs at scripture are at least a century old by now.
The ones I have mentioned here are only a small selection of those that are
available [they are simply the ones I have happened to read]. And their
propositions are now as familiar as the kitsch of religiose blockbusters once
was.
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