Legend has it that those were the dying words of Leonardo da Vinci, master artist, inventor, founding father of human anatomy, and all-around weirdo.
Everyone all over their shit with a certain movie and book involving his name should take his words to heart, 'cos I think they're deep in the middle of a similar exchange. In other words, all y'all, on BOTH sides of the "Da Vinci Code" fence, get over yourselves and go back to living your lives, because you are wasting your fucking hours!
A couple of years ago, novelist Dan Brown came out with a hum-drum little novel that bandied about a few hum-drum ideas from the esoteric side of religious history, and all of a sudden, a bunch of people who normally have never given second thought to anything their faith ever taught them, spontaneously blew their load over the book. Remarkably, the Christian Faithful kept an uncharacteristically low profile on the matter. While the Idiot Winds of mainstream media went ga-ga over the crux of the "Code's" ultimate mystery ("Jesus was married! He had kids! His descendants live today!!!") and whether or not it could be true, churches and evangelical groups remained amazingly staid. They would hold seminars and debates and the occasional lectures, all the while making sure to emphasize their position that their lord and saviour never, EVER had sex (because that would just be too human, and haven't you gotten the idea by now that most dyed-in-the-wool Christians hate the idea that Jesus Christ was a human being, not in any typical way--if someone were to bring up the fact that Jesus probably had to drop a duker once or twice a day, just like everyone else, the Jesus Freaks would either argue that he was never tainted by the original sin of defacation, or, if he did, his doo-doo smelled like honeysuckle), but there were no book burnings, or world-wide rabble rousing protests. It seems they exhausted themselves by boycotting The Last Temptation of Christ and Kevin Smith's ultimately harmless Dogma ("God can't be a woman!! Least of all Alanis Morrisette!")
This week though, the movie came out, and boy-o, now the shit has hit the fan. I'm supposing that the Christians figured they wouldn't make a big stink over the book, since so few actually read anything (unless it's time to proof-text the Bible for reasons it's okay to bash homos!). Now that the illiterati have a movie--with Tom Hanks!--to have the info poured into their brains, now it's time for the Church to get nervous.
The movie just came out today, thus far with mixed reviews. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm figured I'll probably end up going, mostly because everyone, knowing where my interests go, keep expecting me to, and asking if I have (I put up with a lot of that with Brokeback Mountain, and I have no idea what my peeps think about me in those regards).
I've said this in other places, but I for one think Dan Brown's story should have actually benefitted from it transfer to cinema. The Da Vinci Code is a book made for movies. The chapters are short, the language is spare and shrift (mostly because I think Dan Brown is an enormously pedestrian author, and I'm being generous there), and the plot points hit fast. Basically, the whole thing is a murder mystery wrapped up in a puzzle, with a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo as the frying pan on which this instant pancake is cooked upon.
For the record: I didn't think The Da Vinci Code was a very good book. In fact, my two word review has been thus--"Cute and trashy." I didn't even bother reading the thing until this year, because I've read pretty much every other book on the subject that Brown's novel bases its ideas on. What the fuck does someone like me need a formulaically based mystery puzzle fiction story to unveil a bunch of information I already know about--and then some? To add to my disparagement, I think Brown is a hack. It's not just his plots, which pretty much amount to, "Take controversial historical ideas with religious implication, combine with plot point techniques swiped from standard community course novel-writing class, and voila, sell to forty million easily gulled members of the public who probably zoned out through their shoddily instructed Sunday school classes". It's really his style, which he really doesn't have any to mention. His prose is clumsy, his characters as one-dimensional as a geometric line, his storytelling only marginally better than a Harlequin Romance novel--or maybe not even as good; it's been a while since I paged through one of those looking for a reasonably steamy sex chapter. Just to prove that I'm not a literary snob, I've gotten my entertainment nut off of reading the likes of Tom Clancy and Stephen King, neither one exactly Pulitzer material. But they can tell stories, even if their prose isn't at the level of someone like Jonathon Franzen or Michael Chabon.
I think Brown's novel did so well because it was the literary equivalent of a McDonald's value-meal. It was cheap, it was fast, and for a few minutes you were into the idea of consuming it. Then the stomach ache and the McGurgles roll in afterward, and you realize maybe that much starch and fat wasn't so great an idea. Plus, a lot of people genuinely found all this shit in The Da Vinci Code to be ground-breaking stuph.
Truth be told, most of this shit has been kicking around almost as long as Christianity itself. It doesn't mean it's historically true, mind you, it's just been ideas kicked around for a long time. In southern France, there has long been a religious idea known as the Cult of the Black Madonna. Literally, hundreds of churches and shrines focus on icons in black of a Madonna figure. Thing is, the Madonna being revered wasn't the Virgin Mary, but Mary Magdalene.
The idea that Magdalene was Jesus' paramour, or wife, or even mother of his children stems back to gnostic texts, as is mentioned in Brown's novel. The caveat is always how much stock to take in the non-canonical texts. Mind you, I stress not to take much stock in the actual canonical gospels, let alone the ones that existed outside of what was considered "orthodox". In my not so un-educated opinion, all the gospels and texts pertaining to the life of Jesus are, by sheer necessity, a case of good legend-building. Taking a few things that were accepted as legit events in his life, and working their message around them, with a lot of creative license. The gospels were selling an idea, many of those ideas never even brought up by Christ, or even by others during his life. They attempt to make sense of a life that, at the first look, turned out to be a failure.
But enough about that. We're talking about Jesus getting it on with Mary Magdalene. It's often stated bluntly by the supporters of this so-called "heretical" theory that no self-respecting Jewish man would have lived to Jesus' age without getting himself married, and making himself some kids, even if he was a holy man, or a would-be messiah. I'm here to explain to all of you that this is a very limited and ultimately incorrect few of first century Judaism.
Yes, it's true, the mainstream contingent of Jewish Palestinians regarded marriage and progeny as a virtual social and religious duty. Your name, your legacy, your covenant with God, was often considered contingent on your ability to squeeze out future members of Jewish culture. Irish Catholics would understand this sentiment quite well. Jesus was a pretty observant Jew, even though how liberal or conservative he interpreted said observation is often debated. However, the Essenic movement in the 1st century is just one example that marriage and children were the only path in being a proper Jew. The Essenes were largely ascetic, never married, likely remained celibate their entire lives. While the settlement of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea represent their "capital"--a sort of "Second Jerusalem" (or "New Jerusalem" to the most apocalypictally minded), Josephus remarks that Essenes, and so-called "Para-Essenic" movements were scattered across Judea. Many lived in the cities and towns, and so the ultra-ascetic, ultra-radical monks of Qum'ran may be seen as the fully devoted.
John the Baptist was probably an Essene, or former Essene, or some kind of para-Essene. As a result, since Jesus was a former disciple (read your scriptures carefully, all arrows point to Jesus starting out as a follower) of John's chances are, his ideas, at least at the beginning of his ministry, were likely para-Essene. That means he probably was celibate, or at the very least became celibate when he became a disciple of John.
His ideas may have changed as his ministry progressed. One reasonable theologian remarked, "If there was evidence to finally show that Jesus got married, my first guess would be that his wife was Mary Magdalene."
Magdalene is a figure shrouded in a lot of misconception. Many schooled by the Catholics often think of her and the unnamed harlot who Christ spares from stoning as one and the same. It aint the case. All that's ever mentioned about Magdalene in the gospels is that she was once inhabited by "seven devils" that Jesus had cast out of her. She also was one to forego her more "womanly" duties (i.e. her sister Martha is busy cooking and cleaning, while Mary ignores these activities in favor of sitting in on Christ's teachings). Beyond that, you're not going to get much of her until the resurrection depictions.
Apocryphal texts dig a little deeper, and some of them paint the picture of a woman much more active in the goings-on of Jesus' ministry, one whom, perhaps was granted special insight. Unfortunately, there is little to support these ideas. There is even less to really glean a romantic relationship out of all of it. Just a few lines here and there, usually ones rather broadly extrapolated. So, in the end, Dan Brown's characters plumbing the depth of the "greatest cover-up in human history" is rather overblown.
But the fact of the matter is, these are old ideas, ones that scholars have debated here and there, but still usually swept to the fringes of the historical debate. The reasons aren't quite due to "cover-up" but the fact that, too often, there are too many scholars who pay too much credence to the established "orthodox" ideas to suitably debate them.
For the record, I still side with the likelihood that Jesus was a celibate, and had no progeny, mostly because the evidence that we do have still makes sense that way. But I wouldn't necessarily rule out other possibilities. The fact that the church won't ever delve into the debate however is one, certain, undeniable fact. Christianity hasn't changed its theology in any significant way in 500 years. Point blank. The only sectarian developments of import have been in "fringe" groups such as the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses (and take it in mind that the Mormons are one of the fastest growing movements in the world right now, so using the term "fringe" may soon be a misnomer).
Christianity wants it that way. To alter their course of "reasoning" to them means pulling up the anchor of their certainty. To open the door to alternate possibilities means giving up on their so-called claim to an "absolute truth." Heaven forbid that truth ever be considered in a state of evolving discovery, since to many Christians the mere word "evolution" is a blasphemy (just ask the Pennsylvania department of Education).
So when someone popularizes a different interpretation, it seems to be a knee-jerk (or perhaps goose-stepping) reaction by Christian organizations to condemn such actions, even when they haven't learned a thing about them. "Let's boycott The Last Temptation of Christ because it posits the idea that maybe Jesus had a desire to get out of the situation he found himself in at his death," (a rather reasonable desire if you ask me, but die-hard Christians rarely take to anything reasonable). "Let's burn Dan Brown's books!" Because lighting shit on fire doesn't remind anyone with any sense of history about the countless human bodies used as cord-wood during the Inquisition.
A threat to the required stasis that promulgates the further abuses of organized religion is the ultimate threat in the church's eye. Any question of its certainty wrankles the masses who don't feel comfortable when someone comes up with a potentially different paradigm of understanding. If the church had its way, we'd still believe the sun revolved around the earth, and missionaries dashing the infants of American aboriginal pagans upon rocks would still be a "moral" activity (look it up, it's fucked up).
In other words, an institution based upon the teachings of a man hell-bent on dismantling the dominance culture that took advantage of everyday people, has, throughout history, only become yet another dominance culture, taking advantage of everyday people.
I guess one should be grateful that any sort of alternative idea gains popularity among the mass culture. Sadly, taking Brown's novel as a history lesson is a far cry from becoming genuinely informed on the subject, and anyone who does is only making a straw man of themselves, automatically proving how little they really knew to begin with.
In other words, all this Da Vinci Code nonsense is pure trashy entertainment, and nothing more. Both sides have taken things too seriously, and I think both sides need to open their minds to some true, serious learning before they open their yaps. In the meanwhile, Tom Hanks will be busy running from the French authorities on the silver screen, the whole while trying to decipher the meaning of "So Dark the Con of Man."
Oh, and by the way, that "Cryptex" thing? Completely doesn't work.
(Vinegar doesn't dissolve parchment).
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Monday, May 01, 2006
This Dreaming Life...
Originally written in the fall of 2005, this piece explains where the name of the site originated from. In case anyone was ever really curious!
This will be a quick one today. It's saturday afternoon, and while it's not a Hangover Weekend at all, I was still out almost the whole night--once again, trying to fool my body and the world that I can still live some rudimentary example of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle or something....sigh....sad.
And yes, there is another side of me that says "Why are you explaining the title of your new column on your SECOND issue, and not your first?" Well, it's my column, I make the rules, and I break the rules as I deem fit anyway.
"Dreaming Life" is one of those slightly abstract phrases that kinda ran threw my head a few months back, where the words just sound right when they get said or something. You have to understand, while I might devote my energies as a "sort-of" writer now in life, ten years back, I devoted most of my literate energies towards being a singer / lyricist, with emphasis on the lyricist, and so when in you're in the craft, you spend a lot of time thinking about how words SOUND together. "Dreaming Life" happens to be one of those phrases that I will turn around and around, enjoying the sound of it first, THEN deciding what exactly the fuck it's supposed to mean.
The first thing that struck me was its depiction of the vague interpretations of life's reality (in that whole existentialist / Aristotelian / Immanuel Kant "what is reality" type of way I suppose). How is it we determine what is our "Waking Life" and what is our "Dreaming Life". Which one would we rather be in. It's like that line in David Cronenbeg's The Fly : "I was a Fly, who dreamed he was a man...but the dream is over. And now the Fly has awakened." Or Kafka's short story about the guy who wakes up one day and realizes he's a cockroach.
Yeah, I know, these are the things that run through my mind while I'm busy making sure 144 units of weight loss capsules are being shipped to Wal-mart on time at work. It's that dualism that I have to live in order to avoid snapping usually.
And that's another aspect to the phrase "Dreaming Life". More accurately put, it's one of those ideas about "Dreaming OF Life", or how we interpret what our life is in our minds "supposed" to be about. Most of our lives are so profoundly ordinary, that its ordinariness becomes extraordinary. Most of the time, I can break my days down to a list of five or six major facts, and they don't even deviate in order: Woke up, got ready for work, went to work, worked late, came home, wasted time (i.e. watched tv, read e-mail, played "Age of Empires" for three straight hours), went to bed.
Rinse and repeat.
So, as Neil Peart wrote in "Losing It": "Most of us just dream about / The things we'd like to be". Or, to borrow another of his quotes: "It's understood / By every single person / Who'd be elsewhere if they could..."
Most lives are lived with inebriating regularity, only punctuated by moments of true real excitement or uniqueness, and most often, when those moments of genuine difference arise, we don't even like dealing with them. The highlights that exist outside of the normal framework of everyday life initially take on the form of a problem. "I was on my way to work, and I got into a car accident." "At work today, I got repeatedly kicked in the balls by corporate up in Toronto who can't ever get their shit together." "So this fracas breaks out in the bar, and I get blindsided in the back of the head by this beer bottle, even though I didn't have anything to do with it."
The things in life that break up the monotony are usually not that good! Every now and then, you might get one of those bones like "I talked with Vince, and we're going to open for Ron Hawkins on the 29th!" in your lifetime, or "I met this woman who is the first genuinely interesting person I've met in about a year and a half." But most of the time those events get followed up by grisly details that only end up as more fucking issues as well...i.e. "Vince only wants to pay us thirty dollars for the set," or "It also turns out that really interesting girl is on meds for bipolar disorder." You get the idea.
So it's the "Dream of Life" that we still surround ourselves with. We have a tendency to get by imagining what we think our lives could be, or ought to be. Invariably the "Dream of Life" leads to things like existential angst or the more pedestrian mid-life crisis. That whole problem of climbing a ladder only to discover once at the top that you're up against the wrong wall.
Albert Camus once wrote: "I'll tell you a secret about judgement day, my friend. It happens every day."
I used to keep that tacked up on my refrigerator. But the sad fact of the matter is, if we were to stop and judge our lives on a day to day basis, the gross and unforgiving normalcy would leave us feeling very guilty. And even those who live out what we would consider our "Dream Life" find themselves in a litany of regularity all their own (want a hint? Even rock stars live a pretty hum-drum life most of the time. If you ever followed a musician around on tour, you would see their day broken into a routine itinerary that anyone living a "normal" life would identify with--they just live on a bus for 260 days a year). Again, as Neil Peart once wrote (and I've got to stop quoting him in this piece): "Well, you get up, and you go to work." He has found that to be true from the days when he was schlepping tacky souvenirs on Piccadilly Circus all the way to now, when he's making records, writing books, and going on tour with millions in his accounts.
In effect, we are all busy "Dreaming Life" in the verb form, trying to distinguish what that's supposed to be, or what that really is, in its noun form.
Talk Hard,
The Professor
This will be a quick one today. It's saturday afternoon, and while it's not a Hangover Weekend at all, I was still out almost the whole night--once again, trying to fool my body and the world that I can still live some rudimentary example of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle or something....sigh....sad.
And yes, there is another side of me that says "Why are you explaining the title of your new column on your SECOND issue, and not your first?" Well, it's my column, I make the rules, and I break the rules as I deem fit anyway.
"Dreaming Life" is one of those slightly abstract phrases that kinda ran threw my head a few months back, where the words just sound right when they get said or something. You have to understand, while I might devote my energies as a "sort-of" writer now in life, ten years back, I devoted most of my literate energies towards being a singer / lyricist, with emphasis on the lyricist, and so when in you're in the craft, you spend a lot of time thinking about how words SOUND together. "Dreaming Life" happens to be one of those phrases that I will turn around and around, enjoying the sound of it first, THEN deciding what exactly the fuck it's supposed to mean.
The first thing that struck me was its depiction of the vague interpretations of life's reality (in that whole existentialist / Aristotelian / Immanuel Kant "what is reality" type of way I suppose). How is it we determine what is our "Waking Life" and what is our "Dreaming Life". Which one would we rather be in. It's like that line in David Cronenbeg's The Fly : "I was a Fly, who dreamed he was a man...but the dream is over. And now the Fly has awakened." Or Kafka's short story about the guy who wakes up one day and realizes he's a cockroach.
Yeah, I know, these are the things that run through my mind while I'm busy making sure 144 units of weight loss capsules are being shipped to Wal-mart on time at work. It's that dualism that I have to live in order to avoid snapping usually.
And that's another aspect to the phrase "Dreaming Life". More accurately put, it's one of those ideas about "Dreaming OF Life", or how we interpret what our life is in our minds "supposed" to be about. Most of our lives are so profoundly ordinary, that its ordinariness becomes extraordinary. Most of the time, I can break my days down to a list of five or six major facts, and they don't even deviate in order: Woke up, got ready for work, went to work, worked late, came home, wasted time (i.e. watched tv, read e-mail, played "Age of Empires" for three straight hours), went to bed.
Rinse and repeat.
So, as Neil Peart wrote in "Losing It": "Most of us just dream about / The things we'd like to be". Or, to borrow another of his quotes: "It's understood / By every single person / Who'd be elsewhere if they could..."
Most lives are lived with inebriating regularity, only punctuated by moments of true real excitement or uniqueness, and most often, when those moments of genuine difference arise, we don't even like dealing with them. The highlights that exist outside of the normal framework of everyday life initially take on the form of a problem. "I was on my way to work, and I got into a car accident." "At work today, I got repeatedly kicked in the balls by corporate up in Toronto who can't ever get their shit together." "So this fracas breaks out in the bar, and I get blindsided in the back of the head by this beer bottle, even though I didn't have anything to do with it."
The things in life that break up the monotony are usually not that good! Every now and then, you might get one of those bones like "I talked with Vince, and we're going to open for Ron Hawkins on the 29th!" in your lifetime, or "I met this woman who is the first genuinely interesting person I've met in about a year and a half." But most of the time those events get followed up by grisly details that only end up as more fucking issues as well...i.e. "Vince only wants to pay us thirty dollars for the set," or "It also turns out that really interesting girl is on meds for bipolar disorder." You get the idea.
So it's the "Dream of Life" that we still surround ourselves with. We have a tendency to get by imagining what we think our lives could be, or ought to be. Invariably the "Dream of Life" leads to things like existential angst or the more pedestrian mid-life crisis. That whole problem of climbing a ladder only to discover once at the top that you're up against the wrong wall.
Albert Camus once wrote: "I'll tell you a secret about judgement day, my friend. It happens every day."
I used to keep that tacked up on my refrigerator. But the sad fact of the matter is, if we were to stop and judge our lives on a day to day basis, the gross and unforgiving normalcy would leave us feeling very guilty. And even those who live out what we would consider our "Dream Life" find themselves in a litany of regularity all their own (want a hint? Even rock stars live a pretty hum-drum life most of the time. If you ever followed a musician around on tour, you would see their day broken into a routine itinerary that anyone living a "normal" life would identify with--they just live on a bus for 260 days a year). Again, as Neil Peart once wrote (and I've got to stop quoting him in this piece): "Well, you get up, and you go to work." He has found that to be true from the days when he was schlepping tacky souvenirs on Piccadilly Circus all the way to now, when he's making records, writing books, and going on tour with millions in his accounts.
In effect, we are all busy "Dreaming Life" in the verb form, trying to distinguish what that's supposed to be, or what that really is, in its noun form.
Talk Hard,
The Professor
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Class is in Session: Judas, Jesus and Superstar Status
(This post originally was posted a while back at MySpace at http://blog.myspace.com/nevrsilentworld. I chose to post it up here as recent news headlines have resurfaced the debate on the existence and veracity of the Gospel of Judas. The debate, I imagine, will continue for a few more centuries; as long as there are people tenacious enough about their faith to decide the things that fall outside of that box are guilty of heresy)
It came out just like this: "Judas Iscariot would be the greatest interview ever."
And it's true. Argue what you will about whether he was a real guy or not (hardcore biblical literalists aside, the jury is still out among a lot of scholars), the bottom line is, there was someone who probably helped turn the guy now known as Jesus Christ in, and no matter what his real name was, we could call him Judas nowadays.
It's a troubling name, one of those that you figure no one will ever name their kids again, just like no one is likely to ever name their kid Adolph. This, in spite of the fact that in his own time, Judas was, like Jesus's real name (Jesus is a translation from the Hebrew / Aramaic name Yeshu, a sort of nickname for Yehoshua, or Joshua) a very popular one. Both names were ones given by rather proudly nationalistic parentage--it'd be like naming your kids after George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, or in the case of Judas, like just plain naming your kid America. So if there is one thing to say about both Jesus and Judas, they had rather patriotic moms and dads. And that takes a lot o' balls when you're an occupied land. It's like naming your kid Freedom if you lived in 1984's Oceania. Unfortunately, now you hear the name Judas, and the only word that resonates is the word "traitor." That may be unfair, if you ask me.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, and maybe off-track, as usual. The point is, the person we've come to know as Judas Iscariot may well be the single most intriguing, enigmatic, stupefying, stunning figure in all of western history. There's so little we know, and so much we assume about this character, this scapegoat, this pariah of religious history.
This topic got started in my "Personal Classroom" when someone commented on the recent runaway growth of my beard (the topic of a future Dreaming Life column if I go as far up my own ass as I'm planning to write these days). Usually, I'll make a comment that I'm going for the whole Cuban Revolutionary look (and when I wear certain hats, I really do look like one of Che Guevara's associates). One night at the bar, I simply responded that I was planning to audition for the role of Judas for this spring's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The only problem is, I wasn't a looming potent black man, like Carl Anderson, and that's really what people want in the JCS version of Judas. Somewhere along the lines that week, I made it a point that, as a writer, Judas was the man any journalist worth his/her salt would die to get their tape recorder in front of.
It's like holding a seminar with Satan, basically. People would just love to hear his side of the story. And let's be honest, the one thing none of the gospels, or any of the historians of that time (the few that even cared that much about the budding Christian movement) paid any attention to, was Judas' side of the story.
It's easy to just say "So and so was the bad guy in this story, and he did something really bad...." But living in the 21st century, it's not enuph for me to simply dub a guy the bad guy, label him as the villain, and then get on with the story. Even villains and so-called evildoers have motivations, as obscure as they may be to everyone else but themselves. Trust me, the motivations they'd give you wouldn't be "because I'm the bad guy." John Wilkes Boothe thought he'd be praised as a national hero for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was utterly amazed when it didn't pan out that way.
We don't live in a one-dimensional world, and possibly the the biggest problem with the gospels is that, at best, even its protagonist has only two dimensions. The hardest part of believers and non-believers alike when grappling with the mythos and / or history of the Christ is wrapping their brains around a god-figure who was also fundamentally supposed to be human. For Christ's sake (sorry about the pun) one gospel writer (the one we call "John" now) couldn't even fucking portray him in anything remotely human fashioned. Like Robert Powell's portrayal of the Saviour, you can't even imagine John's rendition of JC blinking on camera (I can't imagine the amount of Visine Powell needed to pull that off in Jesus of Nazareth).
And then there was Judas. In the gospels, he's given barely a few lines worth of mentioning. That's rough press for a guy who, according to said texts, is single-handedly responsible for turning his boss, partner, saviour and pal over to the authorities, all for a really dismal price (we'll get into that later). Why so little about the guy? Were the authors and early believers so glum on the fact that one of Jesus' own gang sold him out that they didn't even want to bring him up? You'd think someone would have wanted to figure out what the hell happened.
Trying to find historical perspective in what is first and foremost a spiritual tome is always asking for way too much. Instead, like the best literary characters, we have to take what we're given, and make our own interpretations. And the fact of the matter is, there is an assortment of apocryphal and non-canonical texts, but therein lies as much madness as the gospels themselves (some apocryphal works depict Roman governor Pontius Pilate as an eventual Christian convert, and that's just plain laughable).
So Judas is a puzzle. One of the greatest literary and historical ciphers in the world, which means authors, artists, poets and scribes would have a lot of latitude to work their own ideas out.
Sadly, with Judas, that really isn't the fact. Dante chose to put him in the lowest, final circle of hell, among the other traitors of humanity. Not exactly sparkling company, and still not asking to get the guy's side of the story. Taylor Caldwell did finally publish I, Judas, a sort of Gospel or Testament According to the Traitor in 1977. I haven't read it (yet), so I can't give a lesson on it.
The first time I ever came across any means of coming to grips with understanding what Judas was thinking was the riveting Carl Anderson portrayal in Norman Jewison's film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, based on the concept album and subsequent stage production written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In his opening performance, "Heaven on Their Minds" a disenchanted Judas is left wondering how the hell things got so out of hand, how his friend and fellow social revolutionary could have taken things so far. And it's quickly understood that, in JCS, Judas is as much the protagonist of the story as the title character, if not, perhaps more. This is one of the few times we're given anything at all about his side of the story.
In the annals of Jesus Christ Superstar, Carl Anderson is as immortal as Jesus Christ himself. No one of my generation can think of the character of Judas, and NOT think of Carl Anderson (hence the fixation on the looming potent black man I mentioned earlier). It didn't hurt that the man played the character on stage more than anyone else in the history of the production. He played the role all the way up until his death in 2004, at that point, not just a looming potent black man, but one dreaded out more than fucking Bob Marley, looking even scarier, conflicted, and, well, potent in that social upstart kind of way. Fucking R.I.P. Carl. As angry, tortured and ill-tempered as Carl's Judas was, all accounts of Carl the man were exactly the opposite. That's art, after all.
Carl's rendition was of a man who felt that the hype of his colleague had become dangerous, that the program they once started had lost sight of itself. Basically, that he had to turn his buddy in to keep things from getting out of control, and save everyone's neck. Following Jesus' arrest, he comes to an even more damning realization. He would save no one. His actions would lead only to his death, that he would forever be painted a traitor, a sellout (even though he protested all along how he didn't "want your blood money"). Judas would be damned for all time.
Granted, this was all extrapolated from Tim Rice's 'book', in JSC's own late-sixties, hippie-laden ways--some of which doesn't quite stand the test of time (does anyone really want to watch apostles sing "What's the buzz? / Tell me what's a-happenin'?" in this day and age). But it was also a sign of the times that Judas be personified as a powerful, articulate, tempestuous, impatient African American. How fucking perfect an allegory is that? With Carl came all the imagery of the civil rights and Black Panther movement, the Watts riots, and urban social uprising. Was there not symbolic balance that Judas, like so many African American leaders, would do everything in his power to do what he felt was right, but still wind up villified by it? After all said and done, the white man's Jesus always bleeds truer.
But it was about time somebody finally gave Judas his due, right? Nobody had ever given Judas a reason to do what he did before, right?
Truth is, author Nikos Kazantzakis had them by about ten years, when he wrote the incredibly controversial book, The Last Temptation of Christ. Kazantzakis was a man of deep faith, even if how he envisioned his faith was in a manner that would get him excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. Most of you would recognize the title because of Martin Scorsese's equally, if not more controversial 1988 film based on the book. In both book and film, the apostle Judas Iscariot is not the darting, dwarfish coward that tradition and the Apocryphal works had a tendency to depict him as. Instead, he is a bull of a man, huge in stature and fortitude. He's a dagger weilding zealot (this isn't that outlandish--a few scholars have asserted that the name "Iscariot" was a derivation of sicarii, a faction among latter first century jewish zealots known for illegally carrying daggers), who is originally assigned by his colleagues to kill Jesus (because Jesus, who begins as a carpenter who builds crosses for the Romans, is the real traitor). In time, he decides to follow Jesus on a messianic campaign.
Kazantzakis' Jesus was troublingly human; one full of self-doubt, fear, and, yes, temptation. His awakening to status as saviour is one that comes in incremental steps, ones that don't always make sense at the time, and God's revelations are ones that Jesus often tries his best to deny. At first, his friend Judas refuses to accept the idea that God wants Jesus to die as a means of being the messiah (it wouldn't make sense to any first century zealot, of course).
Here, however, we have a complete turnabout of the whole Judas as traitor depiction. In Kazantzakis' work, it is requested of him. It is the recognition that Judas is the only apostle with the required strength of conviction, the only one with the courage to commit an action which will forever change the course of events; to make a decision that will, in effect damn him in the eyes of the world, for eternity.
This is an incredibly moving juxtaposition, and it's one I subscribe to. If any of you have talked with me personally, or read some of my previous works (ones before I started Dreaming Life here), you'd know I adhere fervently to the Devil's Advocate party, with a certain type of caveat.
Judaeo-Christian faith has always posited the fundamental belief that God performs his work through his action upon history. That's pretty much what the entire Old Testament is about, it's a portrayal of a culture's history through the lens that God works his miracle and his purpose through that narrative.
If we're going to follow that line of thinking, we should be realizing that the "Bad Guys" -- guys like Satan and Judas, are given the most awesomely difficult jobs in the cosmos. They perform God's work by being the asshole. Now imagine if, like I do, they had an idea of that from the start. If you take the story of the Fall from Genesis and more importantly from many of the Apocryphal texts, Satan probably knew what he was in store for the moment God created man, and demanded that the angels bow before them. Among most texts, it is Lucifer's pride that befalls him and many of the other angels; that the rebellion is borne out of a former servant deciding he would no longer be a servant. What if Lucifer was performing the ultimate act of loyalty? "I'm rebelling against you to prove many points, one of which is how much I love you, God. You've forced me to become the essence of everything wrong with your creation, and through an act of rebellion, I'm going to obey. Even though I don't like it. Because it is what must be done." How difficult a proposition is that? Aren't we being a little hard on the old bastard?
Kazantzakis does the same thing with Judas. The ultimate act of love is through his betrayal. He doesn't agree with it, he doesn't like it, but he obeys, because he has faith that his friend understands something he cannot. That God demands this. That it must be done.
Tradition holds that Judas was paid for his betrayal with thirty pieces of silver. This is an exhorbitantly low price for the price of the head of a seditionist (which Jesus would have been in both the eyes of the Roman occupiers, and the quisling Saduccean faction who would have regarded Jesus as a threat to their peacemaking tactics). The thirty pieces isn't likely a real price, it's one of those great literary symbols. Certain scholars (and one of the gospels, in fact) have asserted that thirty pieces of silver is about enuph to procure you a very cheap plot of land--a potter's grave. In effect, what the gospel authors may have been saying was that Judas sold out his rabbi, and all it bought him was his death. And eternal ignominy.
Tradition also has it that Judas committed suicide. Mark says he hangs himself, Luke that he flung himself off a cliff (actually some regard the gospel as portraying it as more of an accident), or both (it's often depicted that he hung himself, then the olive tree on which he dangled broke and he was cast into the ravine--it's also depicted that, when he was dashed upon the rocks below, he was disemboweled, and all of these have varying symbolic importance if you do a lot of research on spiritual metaphor in mythology). Some fringe elements even assert that all this hanging from trees and casting into ravines is a roundabout way of saying that Judas himself was also crucified that day (now THAT would be the ultimate betrayal!), since most often, if the Romans bothered to pull you off the cross at all, they flung you down into the trash pit (it's one of those factoids that's given a lot of trouble to the whole "Jesus died and was buried and on the third day rose again" thing, since it's possible he never even came off the cross).
But let's get down to the biggest point of it all. In keeping with the musical that started this whole diatribe, let's call it Superstar Status. Sometimes people can do awful things, and be awarded celebrity for it. One could argue that's the case with Judas Iscariot. He's famous for being infamous. He's a celebrity for being an asshole. On the other hand, maybe he did all the right things, all the things he had to, and his only reward was said infamy, while his buddy Jesus was awarded all the Superstar status. Judas just may have been given the hardest job of all, next to Jesus'. Yes, Jesus obviously had to bite the big one on the cross, but if the believers are right, he would have known he was coming back three days later. If you know you're not really going to stay dead, just how hard is it to face your death? Then look at Judas. What if he knew all along he was going to do the unpopular thing, the world's hardest fucking job, and his only reward would be that he'd wind up "damned for all time"? That God / Jesus had chosen him for this one awful thing, and he knew it...and he did it anyway? And all he would get for it was death?
If a journalist got to ask him that question, man, that would be the fucking cover of Time Magazine.
It came out just like this: "Judas Iscariot would be the greatest interview ever."
And it's true. Argue what you will about whether he was a real guy or not (hardcore biblical literalists aside, the jury is still out among a lot of scholars), the bottom line is, there was someone who probably helped turn the guy now known as Jesus Christ in, and no matter what his real name was, we could call him Judas nowadays.
It's a troubling name, one of those that you figure no one will ever name their kids again, just like no one is likely to ever name their kid Adolph. This, in spite of the fact that in his own time, Judas was, like Jesus's real name (Jesus is a translation from the Hebrew / Aramaic name Yeshu, a sort of nickname for Yehoshua, or Joshua) a very popular one. Both names were ones given by rather proudly nationalistic parentage--it'd be like naming your kids after George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, or in the case of Judas, like just plain naming your kid America. So if there is one thing to say about both Jesus and Judas, they had rather patriotic moms and dads. And that takes a lot o' balls when you're an occupied land. It's like naming your kid Freedom if you lived in 1984's Oceania. Unfortunately, now you hear the name Judas, and the only word that resonates is the word "traitor." That may be unfair, if you ask me.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, and maybe off-track, as usual. The point is, the person we've come to know as Judas Iscariot may well be the single most intriguing, enigmatic, stupefying, stunning figure in all of western history. There's so little we know, and so much we assume about this character, this scapegoat, this pariah of religious history.
This topic got started in my "Personal Classroom" when someone commented on the recent runaway growth of my beard (the topic of a future Dreaming Life column if I go as far up my own ass as I'm planning to write these days). Usually, I'll make a comment that I'm going for the whole Cuban Revolutionary look (and when I wear certain hats, I really do look like one of Che Guevara's associates). One night at the bar, I simply responded that I was planning to audition for the role of Judas for this spring's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The only problem is, I wasn't a looming potent black man, like Carl Anderson, and that's really what people want in the JCS version of Judas. Somewhere along the lines that week, I made it a point that, as a writer, Judas was the man any journalist worth his/her salt would die to get their tape recorder in front of.
It's like holding a seminar with Satan, basically. People would just love to hear his side of the story. And let's be honest, the one thing none of the gospels, or any of the historians of that time (the few that even cared that much about the budding Christian movement) paid any attention to, was Judas' side of the story.
It's easy to just say "So and so was the bad guy in this story, and he did something really bad...." But living in the 21st century, it's not enuph for me to simply dub a guy the bad guy, label him as the villain, and then get on with the story. Even villains and so-called evildoers have motivations, as obscure as they may be to everyone else but themselves. Trust me, the motivations they'd give you wouldn't be "because I'm the bad guy." John Wilkes Boothe thought he'd be praised as a national hero for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was utterly amazed when it didn't pan out that way.
We don't live in a one-dimensional world, and possibly the the biggest problem with the gospels is that, at best, even its protagonist has only two dimensions. The hardest part of believers and non-believers alike when grappling with the mythos and / or history of the Christ is wrapping their brains around a god-figure who was also fundamentally supposed to be human. For Christ's sake (sorry about the pun) one gospel writer (the one we call "John" now) couldn't even fucking portray him in anything remotely human fashioned. Like Robert Powell's portrayal of the Saviour, you can't even imagine John's rendition of JC blinking on camera (I can't imagine the amount of Visine Powell needed to pull that off in Jesus of Nazareth).
And then there was Judas. In the gospels, he's given barely a few lines worth of mentioning. That's rough press for a guy who, according to said texts, is single-handedly responsible for turning his boss, partner, saviour and pal over to the authorities, all for a really dismal price (we'll get into that later). Why so little about the guy? Were the authors and early believers so glum on the fact that one of Jesus' own gang sold him out that they didn't even want to bring him up? You'd think someone would have wanted to figure out what the hell happened.
Trying to find historical perspective in what is first and foremost a spiritual tome is always asking for way too much. Instead, like the best literary characters, we have to take what we're given, and make our own interpretations. And the fact of the matter is, there is an assortment of apocryphal and non-canonical texts, but therein lies as much madness as the gospels themselves (some apocryphal works depict Roman governor Pontius Pilate as an eventual Christian convert, and that's just plain laughable).
So Judas is a puzzle. One of the greatest literary and historical ciphers in the world, which means authors, artists, poets and scribes would have a lot of latitude to work their own ideas out.
Sadly, with Judas, that really isn't the fact. Dante chose to put him in the lowest, final circle of hell, among the other traitors of humanity. Not exactly sparkling company, and still not asking to get the guy's side of the story. Taylor Caldwell did finally publish I, Judas, a sort of Gospel or Testament According to the Traitor in 1977. I haven't read it (yet), so I can't give a lesson on it.
The first time I ever came across any means of coming to grips with understanding what Judas was thinking was the riveting Carl Anderson portrayal in Norman Jewison's film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, based on the concept album and subsequent stage production written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In his opening performance, "Heaven on Their Minds" a disenchanted Judas is left wondering how the hell things got so out of hand, how his friend and fellow social revolutionary could have taken things so far. And it's quickly understood that, in JCS, Judas is as much the protagonist of the story as the title character, if not, perhaps more. This is one of the few times we're given anything at all about his side of the story.
In the annals of Jesus Christ Superstar, Carl Anderson is as immortal as Jesus Christ himself. No one of my generation can think of the character of Judas, and NOT think of Carl Anderson (hence the fixation on the looming potent black man I mentioned earlier). It didn't hurt that the man played the character on stage more than anyone else in the history of the production. He played the role all the way up until his death in 2004, at that point, not just a looming potent black man, but one dreaded out more than fucking Bob Marley, looking even scarier, conflicted, and, well, potent in that social upstart kind of way. Fucking R.I.P. Carl. As angry, tortured and ill-tempered as Carl's Judas was, all accounts of Carl the man were exactly the opposite. That's art, after all.
Carl's rendition was of a man who felt that the hype of his colleague had become dangerous, that the program they once started had lost sight of itself. Basically, that he had to turn his buddy in to keep things from getting out of control, and save everyone's neck. Following Jesus' arrest, he comes to an even more damning realization. He would save no one. His actions would lead only to his death, that he would forever be painted a traitor, a sellout (even though he protested all along how he didn't "want your blood money"). Judas would be damned for all time.
Granted, this was all extrapolated from Tim Rice's 'book', in JSC's own late-sixties, hippie-laden ways--some of which doesn't quite stand the test of time (does anyone really want to watch apostles sing "What's the buzz? / Tell me what's a-happenin'?" in this day and age). But it was also a sign of the times that Judas be personified as a powerful, articulate, tempestuous, impatient African American. How fucking perfect an allegory is that? With Carl came all the imagery of the civil rights and Black Panther movement, the Watts riots, and urban social uprising. Was there not symbolic balance that Judas, like so many African American leaders, would do everything in his power to do what he felt was right, but still wind up villified by it? After all said and done, the white man's Jesus always bleeds truer.
But it was about time somebody finally gave Judas his due, right? Nobody had ever given Judas a reason to do what he did before, right?
Truth is, author Nikos Kazantzakis had them by about ten years, when he wrote the incredibly controversial book, The Last Temptation of Christ. Kazantzakis was a man of deep faith, even if how he envisioned his faith was in a manner that would get him excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. Most of you would recognize the title because of Martin Scorsese's equally, if not more controversial 1988 film based on the book. In both book and film, the apostle Judas Iscariot is not the darting, dwarfish coward that tradition and the Apocryphal works had a tendency to depict him as. Instead, he is a bull of a man, huge in stature and fortitude. He's a dagger weilding zealot (this isn't that outlandish--a few scholars have asserted that the name "Iscariot" was a derivation of sicarii, a faction among latter first century jewish zealots known for illegally carrying daggers), who is originally assigned by his colleagues to kill Jesus (because Jesus, who begins as a carpenter who builds crosses for the Romans, is the real traitor). In time, he decides to follow Jesus on a messianic campaign.
Kazantzakis' Jesus was troublingly human; one full of self-doubt, fear, and, yes, temptation. His awakening to status as saviour is one that comes in incremental steps, ones that don't always make sense at the time, and God's revelations are ones that Jesus often tries his best to deny. At first, his friend Judas refuses to accept the idea that God wants Jesus to die as a means of being the messiah (it wouldn't make sense to any first century zealot, of course).
Here, however, we have a complete turnabout of the whole Judas as traitor depiction. In Kazantzakis' work, it is requested of him. It is the recognition that Judas is the only apostle with the required strength of conviction, the only one with the courage to commit an action which will forever change the course of events; to make a decision that will, in effect damn him in the eyes of the world, for eternity.
This is an incredibly moving juxtaposition, and it's one I subscribe to. If any of you have talked with me personally, or read some of my previous works (ones before I started Dreaming Life here), you'd know I adhere fervently to the Devil's Advocate party, with a certain type of caveat.
Judaeo-Christian faith has always posited the fundamental belief that God performs his work through his action upon history. That's pretty much what the entire Old Testament is about, it's a portrayal of a culture's history through the lens that God works his miracle and his purpose through that narrative.
If we're going to follow that line of thinking, we should be realizing that the "Bad Guys" -- guys like Satan and Judas, are given the most awesomely difficult jobs in the cosmos. They perform God's work by being the asshole. Now imagine if, like I do, they had an idea of that from the start. If you take the story of the Fall from Genesis and more importantly from many of the Apocryphal texts, Satan probably knew what he was in store for the moment God created man, and demanded that the angels bow before them. Among most texts, it is Lucifer's pride that befalls him and many of the other angels; that the rebellion is borne out of a former servant deciding he would no longer be a servant. What if Lucifer was performing the ultimate act of loyalty? "I'm rebelling against you to prove many points, one of which is how much I love you, God. You've forced me to become the essence of everything wrong with your creation, and through an act of rebellion, I'm going to obey. Even though I don't like it. Because it is what must be done." How difficult a proposition is that? Aren't we being a little hard on the old bastard?
Kazantzakis does the same thing with Judas. The ultimate act of love is through his betrayal. He doesn't agree with it, he doesn't like it, but he obeys, because he has faith that his friend understands something he cannot. That God demands this. That it must be done.
Tradition holds that Judas was paid for his betrayal with thirty pieces of silver. This is an exhorbitantly low price for the price of the head of a seditionist (which Jesus would have been in both the eyes of the Roman occupiers, and the quisling Saduccean faction who would have regarded Jesus as a threat to their peacemaking tactics). The thirty pieces isn't likely a real price, it's one of those great literary symbols. Certain scholars (and one of the gospels, in fact) have asserted that thirty pieces of silver is about enuph to procure you a very cheap plot of land--a potter's grave. In effect, what the gospel authors may have been saying was that Judas sold out his rabbi, and all it bought him was his death. And eternal ignominy.
Tradition also has it that Judas committed suicide. Mark says he hangs himself, Luke that he flung himself off a cliff (actually some regard the gospel as portraying it as more of an accident), or both (it's often depicted that he hung himself, then the olive tree on which he dangled broke and he was cast into the ravine--it's also depicted that, when he was dashed upon the rocks below, he was disemboweled, and all of these have varying symbolic importance if you do a lot of research on spiritual metaphor in mythology). Some fringe elements even assert that all this hanging from trees and casting into ravines is a roundabout way of saying that Judas himself was also crucified that day (now THAT would be the ultimate betrayal!), since most often, if the Romans bothered to pull you off the cross at all, they flung you down into the trash pit (it's one of those factoids that's given a lot of trouble to the whole "Jesus died and was buried and on the third day rose again" thing, since it's possible he never even came off the cross).
But let's get down to the biggest point of it all. In keeping with the musical that started this whole diatribe, let's call it Superstar Status. Sometimes people can do awful things, and be awarded celebrity for it. One could argue that's the case with Judas Iscariot. He's famous for being infamous. He's a celebrity for being an asshole. On the other hand, maybe he did all the right things, all the things he had to, and his only reward was said infamy, while his buddy Jesus was awarded all the Superstar status. Judas just may have been given the hardest job of all, next to Jesus'. Yes, Jesus obviously had to bite the big one on the cross, but if the believers are right, he would have known he was coming back three days later. If you know you're not really going to stay dead, just how hard is it to face your death? Then look at Judas. What if he knew all along he was going to do the unpopular thing, the world's hardest fucking job, and his only reward would be that he'd wind up "damned for all time"? That God / Jesus had chosen him for this one awful thing, and he knew it...and he did it anyway? And all he would get for it was death?
If a journalist got to ask him that question, man, that would be the fucking cover of Time Magazine.
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