Nonsense Doesn't Matter Except That It's Everywhere

I wouldn't care much about Reza Aslan or his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazarethexcept that, imitating Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, Aslan's book was propelled to nationwide-#1-bestseller status in the wake of a stupid Fox News interviewer asking him how dare he, a Muslim, write about Jeebus. History has repeated itself as farce: Rushdie, a brilliant writer,was lifted to superstardom because religious fanatics were under orders to assassinate him; Aslan, a mediocre writer, has become a superstar because a Fox talking head said something hilariously stupid even by the standards of Fox. Aslan isn't stupid, but he's very, very far from writing as well as Rushdie, and his book is the 7-bazillionth example of the Jesus-as-Rorschach-test genre: we're all pretty much familiar with the New Testament Jesus; New Testament scholars, from Albert Schweitzer through John Dominic Crossan to Aslan, expand upon and/or depart from the basic familiar narrative and incorrectly label their work nonfiction. Not only did Nikos Kazantzakis write a much better Jesus story than those other three, he also called his version what it is, a novel.

I wouldn't care much about the assertions that the entire story of Jesus is copied from other myths, except that it's everywhere and it's proponents are every bit as resistant to discussion as any religious fanatic. List a dozen or so substantial variations from the myth of Oedipus, or Dionysis, or Hercules, or Perseus, or Osiris, or Theseus, or Prometheus, or Romulus, or Lucifer -- if you know any of those myths it's not hard to come up with a dozen ways in which the story of Jesus varies from each one of them -- and ask the turnip smugly smiling as he says that the Jesus story is 100% copied to respond to your objections to his thesis, and he'll respond as if he didn't hear your challenge at all, and chide you for not having read his favorite mouth-breathing author's book-length rant about how they did too steal it, and conclude that obviously your faith (doesn't matter a lick to him if you're an atheist) is obviously threatened by having come into the truth he's layin' down, and -- well, I'm sure you've met idiots yourself and know what they're like. The ones claiming that Jesus' story is 100% STOLEN -- they like to use the word "stolen" -- and that the Bible is a game of Telephone, these morons wouldn't matter much except that there are so many of them. (The story of the fictitious manuscript in the the preface to Umberto Eco's Il Nome Della Rosa --now THAT is a tale of a game of Telephone, which, although fictitious, will surely delight anyone who actually knows anything about the transmission of texts originating in the Middle Ages or earlier.)

Dan Brown wouldn't matter to me a bit if he hadn't sold hundreds of millions of copies of his silly books crammed with factual errors often taken for facts, in part because Brown insists they are facts when he isn't covering his ass by pleading that his books are just fiction.

Idiots who don't get that humans are warming the climate or who don't care wouldn't bother me if they weren't numerous enough to elect public servants.

My Indoctrinations in Myth

I suppose the first myths to which I was exposed must have been the Christianones my family heard and read about every week at Sunday school and church services, and occasionally on a Wednesday as well, and sometimes on still other days of the week, for example during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter, the myths of God and Jesus and Satan, of angels and Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Moses. I believed what I heard in church for a while, and as far as I can tell, my mother and father still do. Our church's version of things was correct, of course, and so I started to notice early that there were other Christians who were getting a lot of things wrong. For example, they referred to the fruit which Eve ate in the Garden of Eden at Satan's urging, the one that got her and Adam banished from Paradise, as an apple. Clearly, though, the Bible did not specify what type of fruit it was. In our church we knew nobody knew what kind of fruit it was. We speculated that it might have been a pomegranate.

More serious than this, but symptomatic of the same sort of error, the same inattention to the Bible, which was not unambiguous about these and many other matters, was that fact that many Christians served in the military. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Jesus clearly taught that Christians were supposed to be pacifists. The men in our church were conscientious objectors. One of my uncles, one of my Dad's brothers, had broken with the family and with the church and joined the Navy. We were all quite shocked by this. We still loved him, of course, but what he had done was very strange. We seldom saw him any more; we were in the Midwest and after his Navy hitch he had settled in California.

But it wasn't only people outside of our denomination who didn't seem to always be paying attention. I remember once there was a business meeting of the church, all and sundry welcome to attend, where the issue of buying a new organ was debated. The earnest little pain in the ass that I was, I stood up in this meeting and angrily lectured everybody for even considering such a thing, because in the Bible Jesus clearly said to give everything to the poor and follow him, and last I checked there were still poor people in the world. Quite an angry ten-year-old, I was that afternoon. Nobody contradicted me at the business meeting. But they still bought that new organ.

As a child the only mythologies to which I was exposed in-depth were Christianty and the American mythology which featured tales such as overcoming the dangers of Indiansand the treacherous English,of George Washingtonchopping down that cherry tree, for some reason, and then refusing to lie about it, and then, for some reason, throwing a dollar across the Potomac River. When I was eight or ten my family went to Washington, DC and environs for vacation, and we saw the spot where George, as a teenager or very young man, had allegedly thrown that dollar. The river looked very wide at that spot to me. Too wide by far, in my young judgement, for anybody to have thrown a coin across it. I think it was there and then, on the bank of the Potomac, that I began to wonder if I had been lied to about certain events in our nation's history.

I wasn't reading ancient Latin and Greek as a first grader like Steven Runciamn.However, about the time I started kindergarten or a little before, I was a faithful watcher of a TV show about Hercules. I remember very little about the show: Hercules was a big muscleman who vanquished all and sundry, and if I remember correctly, part of the theme song went something like this: "Hercules!/DadadaDaaa-da-da-da, Hercules!/With the strength of ten/Ordinary men/Hercules!" For many years after that, as I began hear and there to learn little snippets of Graeco-Roman pagan mythology, Hercules remained the character on the TV show who ten times as strong as normal, and I was quite surprised to learn of his connections with Zeus/Jupiter and the Oracle of Delphi and that whole bunch.

My interest in Classical literature didn't become very pronounced until after I was full-grown. In my early adolescence, after I had stopped believing in Christianity, the closest thing I had to a religion was rock 'n roll, as expounded bu such rock 'n roll theologians as Dave Marsh, Greil Marcusand Robert Christgau.It was very important to refer to it as "rock 'n roll" and not "rock," which might refer to this or that wimpy heresy. In retrospect it all seems very silly and embarrassing. Especially Marsh. Bruce Springsteen definitely replaced Jesus in my mind for a while. Not only did I buy Springsteen's records and go to his concerts, I also bought Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story,the biography written by Dave Marsh, and read it very carefully several times. Yes. When I was starting to read Pynchonand Gaddis,I was also reading Marsh.

The interest in Marsh gradually passed, and, to a lesser degree, the interest in Springsteen, as punk rock and new wave became more interesting. My interest in Bob Dylan, with quasi-religious beliefs in the revelatory qualities of his work, was more tenacious. There was a biography of Bobas there had been a biography of Bruce.

The aforementioned growing interest in Classical mythology is not of a part with these other interests of mine, in that I do not believe in the Olympians. Never have I thought that Hermes or Athena was going to solve some problem for me.

I cannot claim that my political interests have remained equally free of such superstition. For some reason, before he took office as POTUS I thought Barack Obamawas a reforming firebrand who was going to be as forceful in his us of the Presidential office as Theodore Rooseveltor his cousin Franklin Delano,and not the cautious centrist he clearly is. (Not that I'm one of the those leftists who regrets voting for Obama, who wishes he had instead wasted his vote on someone like Nader and helped the Republicans stay in power. What are those guys thinking? Anyhoo --)

Come to think of it, my image of the Roosevelts may also be significantly colored by the same Messianic longing.

The literal belief in salvation through Jesus Christ vanished from my mind long before I was full-grown, but it seems that mental habits associated with that belief, learned along with that belief, have persisted, and continued to cloud my perception of reality. What were Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie really talking about in that NYC hospital room, shortly before Woody died and Bob got his first record contract? Was it all business and image? Was "Dylan" Woody's idea? Was that Newsweek cover story about Bruce in the fall of '75 right all along? Was FDR's wheelchair a prop? Did Teddy intentionally throw the Presidency to Wilson? Did Hercules have pec implants? Did Hermes take the subway like that woman who cheated in the Boston Marathon? Am I nothing but one continual lifelong chump?