Dead Voices, page 9
Larry bounced back onto the stage to keep the audience in the flow. He told a few religious jokes. The priest, rabbi, and minister enter a bar . . .
After the commercial break, they all saw and heard the more extended story about their guest. The monitors showed maps of his journeys, religious paintings and statues and mosaics of his visage, the old Roman roads he travelled on, the old ruins at Ephesus and Antioch and Corinth and Thessalonica, depictions of the Second Temple where he was arrested, images of Nero and the persecution of the Christians, all the while flashing his very words as subtitles.
At the end Bruce made the formal intro in his throaty baritone voice.
“Prime Time Challenge welcomes one of the most controversial figures in recorded history. A man who many claim is the actual founder of Christianity, while others claim he radically changed the original message of Jesus and even betrayed his own people. A man of many contradictions, who himself said he was all things to all men. A man who could be a mystic one minute and a practical administrator the next, who was a Pharisee and a Hellenized urbanite. A man who travelled over ten thousand miles in his lifetime, suffered through much physical affliction and abuse, and was as fanatical as he was learned and cosmopolitan. A man who could feel at home in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — and yet claimed he had no real home. His few letters arguably changed the course of world history. These letters, most scholars claim, are the earliest written records of what later would be called Christianity. To know the real time-line, therefore, one would have to read the New Testament backwards. Please welcome the author of those letters, Paul of Tarsus.”
The audience gave him a big hand. Today, however, Bruce didn’t identify the celebrity actor-director playing the role. Wes heard in his earphone to play along and not divulge the identity. They would see how far they could go and not tamper with the audience’s disbelief. The challenger had already done an amazing job of staying in character.
During the close-up of the challenger in the blue and white tunic sitting on the swivel chair, Wes could see the audience was clearly puzzled over his identity.
“Welcome to the show, Paul,” Wes said in his best smile.
“Thank you. Actually I was born as Shaul, but you can call me Saul or Paul, whatever you like. As a traveller and messenger, I am who I am according to where I am.”
“As you can tell by now, folks,” Wes said into the camera, not losing his smile, “we are going to let Saul or Paul stay in character. And I’m sure I speak for most of our audience when I say we’re anxious to learn more about him.”
He was informed on his earphone that even makeup didn’t know the identity of the celebrity actor-director. He had been done up by his own people. After a slight pause in which he shifted his notes, Wes looked back at the challenger.
“Anyway, let’s get down to the Q & A because I can see our panellists are anxiously waiting to question you. Are you ready, Paul?”
“Before we begin,” the challenger said, looking into the camera, “I must tender greetings to all the faithful out there who are groaning under the strains of the present age. Brothers and sisters, stand firm in your beliefs. Don’t be fooled by the authority of the beast coming out of the air-waves. Don’t be fooled by appearances. Keep true to the message strong in your hearts and minds. And be aware that I’m leaving myself and the message open to denigration under the glare of these false lights. But we all have to face the challenge, don’t we? Whether in the Temple or synagogue or marketplace. At work or at play. In Rome or Corinth or Antioch.”
The audience looked on with blank faces. The challenger spoke in a calm and deliberate manner, his voice low and modulated, his eyes firmly fixed on the monitor and the studio audience at the same time.
“OK,” Wes said, smiling into the camera, seeing that the panel was amused by the opening comments.
The first few questions, from Walter and Marcel, were what many people would be curious about. How could Paul make the flip-flop — from being a persecutor of the Christians to a fervent leader of their cause? What changes did he make in the ethical message of Jesus in the Gospels? Did he actually repudiate his Jewish roots? Which of his letters were authentically his words and which were written by his followers? Which of the historical events in Acts were accurate and which were fabrications? He was clearly a man of contradictions. Who was the real person behind all the masks?
The challenger did a creditable job, Wes had to admit. Though he could use the help of Plutarch through his earphone, it appeared he was speaking on his own. And without hesitation or equivocation. Wes could tell, with his own working knowledge of the letters, when the challenger was quoting directly and when he was ad-libbing — and it was clear that he had memorized all thirteen. What impressed Wes the most, however, was how the challenger spoke about himself with complete humility. As if he were able to go into the context of Paul’s time when his words were not considered Scripture and he himself wasn’t regarded the figure he came to be. Of all the factors that went into suspending the disbelief in the audience, Wes felt, this was the most important — although he well knew it could cause a problem with believers.
First, the challenger set them straight about a few facts. It wasn’t the Christians he had been persecuting. It was the Jewish followers of the Mashiah, Yeshua. Second, he couldn’t comment on Acts, since it was written after him. And, third, he couldn’t comment on the Gospels either since they had also been written after him — though the oral stories and the words of Yeshua were definitely in circulation. For him, the word gospel was the evangelion, the good news — the death and resurrection of Yeshua, the Mashiah.
“Do you see yourself as Jewish or Christian?” Walter said with a big grin.
The challenger shook his head and smiled. “You’re not listening. We were followers of the Way, the Way of Yeshua the Mashiah. Some of us were Jewish and some were Gentiles. I was born a Jew and remained a Jew all my life.”
“Some would claim, however,” Walter said, “that you betrayed your Jewish faith by repudiating the Torah and starting an entirely new religion.”
“And I would say I fulfilled my Jewish faith by proclaiming the good news of the Mashiah who taught us that we can all die to the flesh in order to live in the spirit.”
Wes heard in his earphone to get them off the topic.
“It’s a thorny issue, to be sure,” he cut in. “And we can’t resolve it here, but let’s continue in another vein. Walter, do you have any other questions?”
“Not right now,” Walter said, looking unflappably at the camera. “But we’re just trying to establish the historical truth here. And if the historical truth, as a modern believer once said, is not in the service of faith, faith will degenerate into superstition.”
The challenger gave him a little smile. “The faith I speak about, however, can make us rise above all history and superstition. And even the physical world as we see it. Like Abraham. As we know ourselves, so we will be known, as aliens in the physical world.”
“Let’s try to stay focused on the facts, shall we?” Ellen said. “And use our rational faculties. Or we won’t agree on anything.”
Quoting from Acts, she got the challenger to agree that there were inconsistencies between his own words in the letters, or the ones he deemed authentically his, and the words in Acts. And that Luke, who had reputedly written Acts, had more of a theological agenda than a historical one.
“If there’s an inconsistency,” Paul said, “you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“But aren’t there inconsistencies in your own theological agenda as well?” Ellen said, smiling at him. “Didn’t you proclaim the physical resurrection of the body one time and the impossibility of the physical resurrection of the body another time?”
Wes observed the challenger for the visual. He well knew that the camera was a meticulous and unforgiving eye. The challenger, however, entirely at ease, looked in command of the situation.
“As a Pharisee,” he said, “whenever I used the word resurrection it could only mean the resuscitation of the soma, the body. According to the Scriptures, there is no consciousness, no ruach, apart from the body. In Alpha Corinthians, therefore, I say that the Mashiah died and was buried, then was raised on the third day and appeared to Cephas and the twelve. As an apostle of the good news, however, I later say that the psychikos, the sensual person, doesn’t accept the things of the pneuma, the spirit. In the good news, we are sown a physical body, which is perishable, but raised a spiritual body, which is imperishable. The physical is first . . . and then the spiritual. The words are only the menu, however. Faith is the meal. We can’t understand the words unless we eat of the meal.”
Wes was listening and trying the gage the reaction of the audience. He had to moderate a fine line between the historical integrity of the show and not boring the audience. And the mention of Greek words was a killer. With no instruction from the control room, however, all he could do was let the situation play out.
“Spoken like a true Pharisee,” Jake said in his quiet conviction. “But let’s continue to stick to the facts, shall we? Besides being educated under Gamaliel, the Pharisee, weren’t you also schooled in the Greek rhetoric, with a working knowledge of the Stoics and the Greek thinkers? Weren’t you even a boxer, besides a tentmaker? According to Acts, you were so zealous in the traditions of your fathers in Judaism that you hounded the believers in the Jesus movement and even oversaw their deaths. According to Acts, on the road to Damascus you were blinded by a light and heard the voice from the risen Christ. Pardon my scepticism, but your very words in your letters don’t even mention the road to Damascus. Instead, you said you received, let’s say, divine authority for your mission directly from the source itself. Is that the case?”
“Yes.”
“What I find so suspicious, however, is that because you got your mission not from the actual apostles but from the risen Christ, you were able to make of the message whatever you wanted. In other words, you needed some sort of validation, a validation that could’ve been entirely fabricated.”
The camera quickly panned over the reactions of the studio audience. Some were openly offended, shaking their heads, as if their own beliefs were being questioned, while others seemed curious as to where it was all heading.
Wes heard Dave in his earphone giving him a Five-O.
“If I can interrupt,” Wes said. “What Jake is asking is what we’d all like to know. What was it like to experience such a conversion? According to one report, you were struck down, for example. You were blinded for three days. That must’ve been quite an experience.”
The challenger paused, looked into the camera, and took a few breaths. Under the glare of the lights, Wes could detect signs of his heavy makeup.
“As I mentioned, I can’t comment on how others interpret my words,” the challenger said. “All I can say is that nothing was fabricated. A call or revelation can happen to anyone at any time when they find out, in a flash, the real purpose of their lives. With me, it was when I was born a second time — to the spirit instead of the flesh. My circumstances, I admit, were a little unusual in that I made such a radical turnaround. But you have to know I was zealous in my observance of the Torah, in fasting and meditation, in living in the words on the outside and the inside. And one day I had a vision that changed my life completely around. An apokalypsis. The presence of the light and the feel of the breath. And it was as if I became the light and the breath. Of the Mashiah. And it was revealed to me that the death of a man hanging on a tree was actually the great triumph if our Lord and saviour — and a sign for all of us. That we were to exchange our bodies for the true light and breath within, the spirit, and be born a second time. And I saw that I was called by the spirit of the risen Lord to preach the good news to Gentile as well as Jew.”
The studio audience was hushed.
“Did you actually see something?” Jake said. “Did you hear a voice? Were you blinded? Or was it simply an hallucination in the desert?”
“As I said, it was a vision.”
“What do you mean by a vision?”
Paul regarded him without answering. The pause stretched. Wes heard instruction in his ear to stay silent.
“Only those who know can understand,” Paul said. “You, as historians, may think you know, but you only know the outward facts. I speak as one who felt the call of the spirit of the Mashiah, a call so powerful that I lost my old self to my new self. You have to remember, however, that on the outside we were living in apocalyptic times. The Holy City had been captured by the Romans and we were scattered throughout the Hellenized world. We spoke the lingua franca and used the Septuagint, where the divine breath, the ruach is the pneuma, and the Mashiah is the Christos. And we were in high expectation to be delivered from our oppressors, both physical and otherwise. And in my vision I saw that the Christos was not our enemy, but the saviour who had turned everything inside out by proclaiming the power of the mind and the heart, of the inner person, the pneuma. That we could start with the visible, the covenant of works, but we had to progress to the invisible, the spiritual, the covenant of faith.”
Dave had been instructing him to do another Five-O on Paul’s monologue, but Wes couldn’t bring himself to cut in. The more Paul spoke the more his words came out with fervour and conviction.
“I’m sure I speak for all of us, Paul,” Wes said, “when I say it must’ve been a life-changing experience.” He turned to the panel and saw Marcel’s hand. “Yes, Marcel.”
“With all due respect to what you represent to many people,” Marcel said, “we as historians still have to be concerned with the facts, with what’s rational, and try to separate reality from fantasy and myth. We constantly see how everyone re-writes the past to suit the present. And with Jesus it seems we always make of him whatever we desperately need of him. You never met the real flesh and blood Jesus, as the apostles did. To get back to Jake’s point, some scholars claim you were never interested in the flesh and blood Jesus, that in order to validate your zeal, as you call it, you had to meet him as a spirit. That way you could make of him whatever you needed to make of him; that is, a saviour and supernatural being.”
Paul’s lips curled up. “You see what you see, with all the cleverness of the dispassionate eye. But the dispassionate eye is blind to the spirit of the Mashiah. And as Isaiah says, the Lord will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever.”
The monitor switched to Ellen Plimpton’s sly smile.
“I’m impressed,” she said, her smile tightening. “You’ve managed to either convince or confuse the audience with the word spirit. But let me bring in another perspective, that of the Gnostic Gospels from Nag Hammadi. Are you acquainted with the Gnostic Gospels?”
The challenger shook his head.
“Of course not,” she went on, “since they were written after you. But the Gnostics call you the Apostle, the real Apostle, since underneath your surface message what you really preach is the liberation of the spirit, the divine spark, from the flesh. There are some scholars who claim you were actually a pneumatic, a Gnostic, preaching a literal message for the many and an esoteric and hidden message for the few initiates. How do you respond to that?”
Wes saw the little curl on Ellen’s smile, a smile he had seen before when she was ready to reveal the trap she had set. Some in the studio audience were getting restless, however, as if the panellists were crossing a line that they were unwilling to follow.
“My words in the letter to Timothy,” Paul said, “flatly deny that the speculations of the so-called gnosis are a substitute for the divine training that is called faith.”
“But you just claimed you weren’t aware of the Gnostic Gospels.”
“Not as they were written, true. But many things were not in written form during my time. We lived in an oral tradition, with many things passed on by word of mouth.”
“Right. And it’s also possible that your own written words may have been edited, added to, or changed by the early Church, is it not?”
Paul paused as if he were listening to his earphone. “They’re under my name.”
“But the words could always be redacted under your name,” Ellen said in a cutting tone. “The question is: Who was the real Paul? The Pharisee dedicated to the Torah? The convert to the new Christ movement that was in opposition to the Jesus movement? Or the secret Gnostic messenger to the Hellenistic Gentiles?”
“The words of the good news speak for themselves. The Mashiah came to redeem us all through faith, Gentile and Jew alike.”
“But you could only proclaim that message if you were all three in one. Only in that way could you convert fidelity to the law into faith in the messiah so that the Gentiles didn’t have to be circumcised or observe the dietary rules?”
“It wasn’t me as an individual. It was the spirit of the Mashiah who had taken over me. It was the Lord whose death and resurrection proved we are saved by faith and not by works.”
“True, but it all depends on what you meant by faith. And it could’ve meant two things, as was later interpreted. As pistis, or blind faith, for the uninitiated. And as gnosis, or divine knowledge, for the initiated.”
“You’re reading what’s not there,” Paul said.
Ellen looked directly into the camera. “I have to remind the audience that one of the major reasons that Gnosticism was considered a heresy, besides its outrageous mythical infrastructure, was for its claim that anyone could attain the gnosis or knowledge of the divine mysteries, not just Jesus.”
She turned her eyes back to Paul.
“Marcel has already established that you were never concerned with the flesh and blood Jesus of Nazareth, the actual historical person. The only things you mention about him are the Eucharistic meal, his death, and his resurrection. Wasn’t that because you weren’t interested in what he preached as much as who he was?”
