My empty life, and other fables

I really don't like The Road. It's the epitome of American navel-gazing, the peak of a long hill which offers such notable vistas as Six Feet Under, Heroes, Buffy, and, well, pretty much everything except for Knight Rider*. Most American drama justifies itself on one, flimsy premise**: it's about the emotional journey of the character(s). In other words, it's a one-way trip to Narcissism Village, pop: you, the most specialist person in the wholest worldz. The Road is one such 'journey', only because Cormac McCarthy doesn't want to leave it to chance that the reader might not understand this, he's made it a literal journey as well.

Woo hoo, road trip!

Except not, of course. Because this is a trip through a dying Earth, which has no hope, no life and only fear and the inevitable knowledge of death pressing down upon us. A world in which children are a burden, or a curse, or objects of pity. It's rubbish. It's rubbish because it has to go so far to set up its misery-lit premise that it tells you straight away that its concerns are nothing to do with human experience. It's a cynic's mud bath, sure, but bears no relation to real trauma, with its ocurrence in a complex, dynamic world where torture happens down the road from family dinners. It's the worst kind of navel-gazing 'ooh isn't everything really terrible, when you get right down to it, there's no point doing my homework or anything even 'cos it's all so pointless' teenage bollocks. Grow the fuck up.

Sorry, saw it the other night and it reminded me of how much I hated the book. Anyway, made a change from the election, didn't it?

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*At least Buffy killed vampires and had the world's sexiest GBF. Six Feet Under had miserable talking corpses. Jesus, get over yourselves, it's only life for fuck's sake, and you're all missing it!

** [picks almost at random] Oi! The Good Wife! I'm looking at you! No one cares about you or your husband. Or your dangerously perfect kids. The only thing anyone cares about is how Cybil Shepherd's best mate from Cybil is suddenly a high-powered lawyer. Now fuck off.

What to do in a Recession

Official unemployment is at 7.1% and rising. As of 12th May, that's 2.22 million people out of work.

I myself am about to be unemployed, and therefore the concern is: what to do when there's no work to be had and no money to spend?

Well, did I mention that Newcastle's just opened it's brand spanking new library?

Gosh it's lovely. That's me sorted until the revolution then.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

I thought I'd do a review of a book I've been reading over the past couple of days, fitting neatly as it does with all my recent boning up on Christianity. Plus I'm a huge fan of Jose Saramago and would highly recommend The Cave and Death at Intervals to anyone who has yet to discover him.

Hopefully the fact that it's about Jesus can be overcome and what readers I may have will find it at least vaguely interesting. Usual caveats: I'm not a Christian and I have only recently started taking an interest in it as a religion. My familiarity with the texts is somewhat limited - if I miss something that's in Corinthians or Acts, it's because I haven't read them.

Also, as I've gone to the bother of checking out some genuine sources and stuff, I've gone to the poncy effort of doing references. Check me out!

So, what's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ all about then? Well, it's an novel purporting to be an account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who Douglas Adams rather neatly summed up as being 'nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.' You've probably heard of him.

As I said in previous posts, the real gospels aren't meant to be historically accurate documents. They do, after all, feature a central character who returns from the dead (not that this is unknown, but in my experience those who return from the dead have an insatiable hunger for braaaiins. Seriously, I've seen films about it and everything). They are, however, thematically vital. For all the inconsistencies, those documents have survived the evolution and argument within the early Church and become the bedrock of the religion. Their conceptual space is important. Jesus' message has broad universal themes and the parables often have clear, if uncomfortable messages - and certain parables are repeated across the canon, such as the prodigal son.

Saramago therefore seeks to illuminate the life of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels. Key events are either replicated or woven into the new situations he creates. 'Father, why have you forsaken me' for example comes not on the cross but when a young Jesus sees his father crucified by the Romans.

This is important because the Gospels have certain major historical inconsistencies. As Chris Harman notes in A People's History of the World,

It claims his birth was in Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea, where his family had gone for a census during the time of Augustus. But there was no census at the time stated and Judaea was not a Roman province at the time. When a census was held in 7 AD it did not require anyone to leave their place of residence. Similarly, the New Testament locates Jesus's birth as in the time of King Herod, who died in 4 BC. Roman and Greek writers of he time make no mention of Jesus

(2008:87)

Nevertheless, Saramago has Jesus born in a cave in Bethlehem after an arduous journey for the Roman census. It reminds me in a way of something David Harvey has to say about Capital, that Marx is taking the suppositions of classical economists as true in order to show that by their own lights they fail to produce the outcome they expect (Reading Marx's Capital Lecture 1).

And Saramago's Gospel is definitely heretical and blasphemous. Jesus has a prolonged, though monogamous, physical relationship with former prostitute Mary Magdalene, he spends much of the novel unaware of his divine status, and even equivocates nicely on the Trinity: 'you won't be dead in the absolute sense of the word, for as my son you'll be with Me, or in Me, I still haven't finally decided' says God at one point (2008:283). Jesus' brother James also gets short shrift, coming off as a petulant adolescent who wants nothing to do with his grandiose elder sibling. In contrast, James is generally held to have 'emerged as generally acknowledged head of the comunity at Jerusalem. Side by side with him were the 'apostles'' (Chadwick 1992:22)

The most interesting relationship in the book is probably the triumvirate of God, Jesus and the Devil. Jesus spends considerable time with both, and the Devil is a far more likeable presence than God.

I simply took what God didn't want, the flesh with all it's joys and sorrows, youth and senility, bloom and decay, but it isn't true that fear is one of my weapons, I don't recall having invented sin and punishment or the terror they inspire

(Saramago 2008:295)

he says, whilst in contrast God is made to spend over four pages detailing the gruesome deaths of various Christian martyrs, and comes across as every inch the God of the Old Testament: vain, patriarchal, arrogant and full of bloodlust.

Sympathy for the devil is an old theme of course, and criticism of God's character runs from Bertrand Russell to Terry Pratchett. Saramago's novel stands out in my eyes through bringing his usual sense of civility even to his outrage. Jesus, in particular, comes out fairly unblemished, relieved of responsibility for many of his more dubious teachings, a sensitive, intelligent man doomed by powers far beyond his or anyone else's ability to be saved from, a neat inversion of the traditional role of Jesus, that he is seen not as a deliverer from sin but a bringer of division and death.

Additionally, Saramago is very aware of just how Jewish Christianity is. Jesus inhabits an intensely religious Jewish land, and God himself is frequently concerned with his legacy as God of the Jews as much as his hope to change how he is seen (and hence who he is?) with his new idea of the Messiah.

Finally, he intelligently explores the big themes of justice, salvation, poverty, destiny, patriarchy, the nature of evil, the role of women and even love that fill the Gospels so. He has brought out a fantastic interpretation of the life of Jesus, and created from a story that has such mixed moral messages a firmly ethical interpretation of the story, in which God and justice are firmly separate and frequently opposing things. This is the greatest triumph of the book, that he has taken the life story of one who is supposedly one of the great moral teachers of all time, and shown that even if you grant him his story, a plausible interpretation is quite the reverse of what it is commonly assumed to be. Take Saramago's version of the Sermon on the Mount (warning - Saramago doesn't use speech marks to indicate when someone is talking so you have to work it out from the commas):

Blessed be you poor, Jesus told them, for yours is the kingdom of heaven ... but just then God became aware of what was happening and although too late to retract what Jesus had said, he forced him to speak other words which turned those tears of happiness into grim foreboding of the black future ahead, Blessed are you when men shall hate you

(ibid.: 309)

thus forcing the divisive elements of Jesus's philosophy squarely onto God's shoulders, leaving Jesus himself a far more enlightened figure than the Deity.

In conclusion then, if you'd like to see a coherent and humanitarian take on the life of Jesus Christ, one which captures many of the key ideas and underlying ethical implications of the New Testament, you could do far worse than pick up this book.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Fraser, Giles (ed.) 2007. The Gospels (Revolutions Series). Verso.
Gaiman, Neil and Pratchett, Terry 1991. Good Omens. Corgi.
Moorcock, Michael 1999. Behold the Man. Gollancz.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 2000. The Antichrist Prometheus
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1998. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future Dover Thrift.
Plato, 380 BCE. Euthyphro Internet Classics Archive.
Pratchett, Terry 1993. Small Gods Corgi.
Russell, Bertrand 2004.Why I am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. Routledge.

REFERENCES
Chadwick, Henry 1992. The Early Christian Community in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, McManners J (Ed.) OUP 1992.
Harman, Chris 2008. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso.
Harvey, David Reading Marx's Capital - Class 1, Introduction, available at http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/
Saramago, Jose 2008. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Vintage.

John the Baptist

I've been making my way through the Gospels for some time now, and I've finally finished them (it was for work, in case you were wondering).

I'd like to make it clear, I'm definitely not a Biblical scholar. Any comments I make here are purely a reaction to the text, and an attempt to comment on what is by any standards an extremely complex piece of literature (as a short illustration: there is not one Jesus in the Gospels but four, each markedly different from the others in temperament and action).

As a lifelong atheist, I'd never seen the point in reading the Bible before, especially since the copy I was given for my Christening was KJV, which is virtually impossible to read without slipping into a coma. However the NRSV translation is very good and readable, and the introduction by Terry Eagleton is very spiffing.

What interests me, naturally, are the political aspects of the text. Of course religions are inherently political, and founding documents incredibly so; and equally obviously Jesus was a politically significant figure in the Gospels: for a start, crucifixion was a punishment only the Romans were allowed to mete out, a secular sentence of tortureporn-and-death by the occupying military authority. Jesus' symbol is inherently political. What particularly interested me though was a different character entirely: John the Baptist.

First, some background. The Gospels were written between approximately 60 and 100 AD, several decades after the events which are supposed to take place in them, and the 'authors' (assuming there was only one for each book, which is debatable) were writing at a time when Christians were just one more Jewish splinter sect trying to establish itself and attract supporters (Christians as a label is also a fairly late development - it comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning saviour). Each Gospel is written for particular audiences. Luke is very keen to stress the miracles aspect, all evangelical, definitely aimed at the gentiles. Matthew, by contrast, is keen to push the Jewish angle ('Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.' 5:17).

John is a fascinating character. He turns up in all four gospels (although, natch, occupying different thematic roles each time), and he seems to be of both thematic and political importance. Some stress his miraculous birth, others his baptismal activities. But they seem to agree that Jesus has himself baptised by John. This may be part of 'paving the way', of which more later, but politically seems to be a clear act of submission or at least of acknowledgement of the importance of the John cult.

The other part of John's role, paving the way, is much more theological. It is important to remember that it is central to the writers' case that Jesus MUST have returned from the dead, because otherwise he has failed to fulfil the Old Testament prophecies that would qualify him as the Messiah. John's presence is much the same: Matthew lifts his raison d'etre straight from Isiah 40:3

1In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea 2and saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." 3This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah:
"A voice of one calling in the desert,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.' "

By having someone to pave the way, Jesus' appearance is strictly in line with Jewish expectations. As Terry Eagleton notes:

Not much of what Jesus does or says in these writings is original. For the most part, he does and says things we know to be fairly typical of first-century Jewish prophets.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that there are at least two Messiah cults here, that of Jesus and that of John. Jesus' cult is keen to portray John as one who believes he is 'paving the way' for Jesus to come later, so he can surrender his role and anoint Jesus as the real Messiah. From my personal, perhaps not terribly well-informed, perspective, the theological angle reads like classic 'face-saving' politics. It's the public line you take when realpolitik dictates your actions. There is a reason you can give for this from the Law, but you can't disguise that it's a written olive branch.

I have no idea the extent to which John is a genuine historical figure, but the subtexts within the Gospels themselves are fascinating, and I think they easily support a reading of a very politically savvy cult – which probably goes some way to explaining its later success.

Sweet Christ Have You Seen Newsnight Review?

The recession through literature:
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (swivel-eyed hate literature for the more mentalist sections of the ruling class)
Vince Cable's Booky Wook (pointless and point-missing 'neutral' analysis of a crisis that makes us all partisans).

What the fuck? Is this really the best choice that Newsnight wants to present us with?

Here's a few alternatives:

The Great Crash, 1929 - JK Galbraith

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx - Alex Callinicos

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell

The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels

Armed Madhouse - Greg Palast

The Fountain at the Centre of the World - Robert Newman

A People's History of the World - Chris Harman

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond

And if you must indulge in swivel-eyed cult leaders with a Messiah complex, try this one...
Matthew 19:16-28
Mark 6:24

Maybe someone reads this and would like to put a few recommendations of their own? What would you recommend to help get a grip on this blasted crisis?