Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Quasi-Biblical Musings - And A Slammer Of A Novel/Movie Idea!

Those gnostic gospels are a riot! One of them (Gospel of Thomas?) has all these great stories about Jesus as a kid, travelling around turning stuff into flowers, bringing statues to life with a clap of his hands, basically performing nonsense miracles hither and yon all over Galilee (or was it Judea?). Ironic that the incredulous Thomas would pen such yarns! There's also a second gnostic gospel of Thomas, completely different, by an unrelated evangelist (or more accurately, re-vangelist).

Crypto-theologians love these things. They especially love conflating theories from disparate and conflicting traditions, without regard to whether they mesh. They take whatever fringe tidbits they can find to support their pet scenario, discarding the absolutely central elements that don't fit.

Perfect example: using gnostic gospels to support your view of Mary Magdalene as Jesus's consort is well and good, if you regard the gnostic tradition as reliable. But how can you regard that tradition as reliable when your other central contention is that Jesus was not divine? That would be anathema to the gnostic tradition, which if anything would be more likely to deny Jesus' humanity than his divinity!

It's that 'postmodern' school of scholarship via collage. I mean, I love a novel that overlays a ripping tale with a light pseudo-historical gloss as much as the next guy. But poor scholarship like this - seriously, even stridently presented - just leaves you feeling duped when you take the trouble to dig a little deeper. You end up feeling dubious about any scholarship that seeks to draw real-world historical conclusions from gnostic apocrypha.

Somebody needs to write a novel (or hell, just skip the novel and go straight to the screenplay) along these same lines, except instead of endorsing all this fanciful dreck, they would be exposing these shoddy, spurious theoreticians for the incoherent pastiche merchants that they are. The hero could be Fr. Theo Desmondos, Jesuit Ninja and Mystery Archaeologist! He works for the Vatican, helping them hoard their secret truth by travelling the world, stealing faked artifacts and thwarting myth-chasing new age propagandists! Expounding thick reams of exposition all the way, he points out the deficiencies of this or that particular myth to his sexy new sidekick/audience stand-in/travelling companion/implied love interest (totally chaste, now, totally chaste - not only because he's a serious priest, but also because Fr. Theo sports a truly unfortunate haircut that's hard to describe...sort of...sculpted, yet...bushy). Each mission would feature a different neophyte sidekick "caught up in the mystery" (handily allowing Fr. Theo to expound to his heart's content every damn adventure, since if he kept the same sidekick each time out, longtime readers would begin to think she must be an idiot to keep so wide-eyed incredulous about it all). And in-between missions (which Fr. Theo calls "my little pilgrimages"), he holds breezy conversations with Jesus Christ at his secret Tuscan villa!

I'll call it The Michaelangelo Principle, or The Raphael Files, or The Donatello Conspiracy. Or some similar crap like that. You know. Exploiting the Teenage-Mutant-Turtle tie-in.

By the way, that's Fr. Theo's secret Tuscan villa - not Jesus Christ's secret Tuscan villa. Although that might be even cooler. The real hidden truth about Jesus is, he never left! He's been taking it easy, living high on the hog at his secret Tuscan villa.

Seriously. How Cool Would That Be.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

My friend apparently links to your blog. Just so you know, the earliest gnostic gospels were probably written around 125 AD, a good 75 years after Paul's letters and about 50 years afters the Gospels were written. More reason to doubt them.

dogimo said...

Thanks, rajiv!

Those gnostics. They had some zany ways, but they left their mark on us all somehow! Just imagine the X-Files or the War of 1812 in a world where there had never been any gnostics.

Okay, the War of 1812 may be a bad example.

Anonymous said...

U are gay. You write too much

dogimo said...

Thanks for your comment! I am indeed gay; very perceptive.

Mind you: as always, that's old-school gay.