Just to chime in as it's news today.
Jeffrey Archer has a new book out. It's the story
of Jesus as told by Binyamin Iscariot, the son of
Judas he's decided will serve as a narration vehicle.
He's consulted people in quite a Blatty way, to
ensure that there was no hidden depth in anything
about sorting the sheep from the goats--although
the intestines of either would do at a pinch IIUC.
He has however debunked a few of the myths; and
he has a nice little soundbite-quote to the effect
that no leading Biblical scholar would assert they
were true anyway.
Now, getting past the thinly veiled sugar-daddy
homo-*****ca of Cane and Abel, the snippets of
interview I saw suggested he really felt no affinity
with Biblical figures. You could even say that he
toutpieced Paxman with his insistence on mono-
syllabic negatories and actually did just answer
the questions.
I'm not about to talk about him though, not at any
length, as I fear it may get plagiarised into a dinner
party anecdote in the first-person voice if I said
anything too original about his fictions to date.
It's more that I've heard a few conflicting explanations
of how some of the miracles came to be and, in
the same way as people will argue so about whether
Camelot was actually Colchester or Glastonbury
Tor, or that hill with a house on it at Macclesfield,
they conveniently overlook the fact that a lot of
the legends are actually set on the banks of the
Rhone.
So here are some of those I've heard, with a few
of my own. Now we know they actually never did
happen I feel secure in my hypothesis that I am
somewhat unlikely to miss out on that coveters'
paradise for Blasphemy any more.
THE "REED SEA" HYPOTHESIS
I was quite young when this one was put to me
and indeed some versions of the Gospels do say
there was a reed sea or, at least, a sea of reeds
as well as a red sea. As such the story went that
Jesus actually walked on the reed sea, and they
were intertwined flora that kept him up.
Unfortunately this only works within a context of
written English, which is fine for those who can
rest easy with the concept that actually he did
his teaching in Galloway, or even Galway, rather
than Galilee. Although whether or not any of them
could've understood contem****ary Aromatic is a
somewhat different matter.
THE BY THE RED SEA HYPOTHESIS
Again, some commentators have drawn attention
to the fact that "by" and "on" could've got confused
in translation. This would in fact have been even
more of a miracle as it implies that although water
can change its state from a liquid to a solid quite
easily, land is less renowned for this.
I gather something akin to it appears to be going
on in the Russian Steppes but, again, this is actually
water changing state, rather than land.
And last but not least:
THE THE SEA WAS FROZEN THAT DAY HYPOTHESIS
This could easily have appealed to the early church,
whether Celtic or Angle, at around 600-750AD when
there was a period of syncretism based firmly on
the similar syncretism by way of which the Roman
festivals became incor****ated in the Christian Calendar.
Whether or not the red-eared cattle near Stonehenge
do make it the temple to Apollo that whoever it was
wrote about, it's always worth remembering that the
Greeks tended to view things in Greek terms and
made a point of not listening to people who couldn't
put it to them in those terms--this was what led Paul
to conjecture that Yod-He-Vau-He was the "unknown
god" to which there were altars in Greece.
It is also worth remembering that actually Paul wrote
his letters a good half century before the Gospels
were actually written down in any form and, even by
that point, when they were written they were something
of a committee job. As such Paul was addressing
a purely oral tradition which had already been translated
into Greek, by way of reference to how the Deuteroic
teachings worked in practice within the autonomous, if
oppressed, communities he had grown up in.
WATER INTO WINE
Every publican knows you need mates in the trade for
when you have a rush on and run out of beer. You call
them up and borrow barrels off them. Then you order
extra. You run their barrel off; you give them your
replacement you've ordered. the trick these days is
to make sure everybody gets their original barrel back
empty as it can play havoc with the barcode scanning
and subsequent accountants' bills.
As he was widely slammed for socialising with publicans
and, whatever a public house may have implied in Roman
occupied Palestine or Greece for that matter, it tended
to imply alcohol, it seems to follow that either a stage-
illusion (false bottom) or words in a few people's ears
and a favour here and there could've elicited sufficient
wine from enlightened friends to cater for a wedding.
I thought the point of this one was that either it came
from Herod Antipas' cellars or it was from a Roman
source. Either way, tracing it back to its original Latin
source, any miracle is merely something wonderful,
to be wondered about.
It's whether or not the celebrants could be seen to be
taking gifts from people too far out of their station. It
was reputedly fine wine though, and the early church
tended to meet in catacombs, a tunnel network not
unlike those that road protestors are known to inhabit.
Which is a shame as the M621 is a masterpiece of
civil engineering which allows vehicles to get moving
and stay moving, from Liverpool to London and back
and, IIRC correctly, also at least between London and
Hull.
Which is a shame, as I understand the protestors'
motives but consider the best they can do here is
act by way of analogy on the basis that the minute
someone right-on stops by and drops off a kilo of
top-grade resin in solidarity it has a pretty miraculous
effect, but nobody really pays too much attention to
where it's actually come from originally, not when
there's a planet to save...
CONCLUSION
To suggest that he's spent over a year in tense and
deep theological discussion with world-leading experts
without wondering about anything at all, in order to
co-author a book, is an insult to the literate public.
I agree. It's entirely possible to review a book you'd
not heard of before this morning.
And it is now my hope that he may build upon this
experience to, say, rewrite The Exorcist from the
perspective of the girl. Not that he's renowned for
his female characters, or that Blatty's book's been
entered into any competitions seeking to discover
and promote fresh new writing talent all too eager to
showcase their fantastic new ideas but all too naive
about copyright law and small print.
CONDENSED CONCLUSION
Archer's pulling a fast one, safe in the knowledge
very few Mail readers will bother checking anything
and secure in the precedent his more entertaining
Oxbridge alumni have already set.
There may even be instances of Good Writing in
there, depending what prizes he's judged recently.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
--
|
