The book is first and foremost a lampoon of Christianity, more specifically, the early years of the church. St. Timothy is a first hand observer St. Paul's effort to expand the market for Christianity. Other Vidal books have documented his cynicism of Christianity and the religious right, but "Live from Golgotha" clearly sets out to satire Christianity from its source: St. Paul.
St. Timothy (blue-eyed, hyacinth curls, glutton for the older powerful ladies) is the main narrator for the story. St. Paul is the great fund raiser and dogma developer for the Christian church. While fighting off St. Paul's homosexual advances, St. Timothy experiences the charismatic St. Paul and his miraculous stage show from up close. The business interests from the future, namely NBC and its parent company General Electric, plan to utilize their time travel technology to allow them to transport a television crew back to the time of the Crucifixion at Golgotha. With the intent of sweeping the TV ratings, studio executives are transported to 96 AD in the form of holograms. St. Timothy is their main contact; the executives spare no expense to help St. Timothy prepare his Gospel. Apparently, a mysterious hacker has accessed history at its core and is erasing all other historical documentations of Jesus and his early church. So, St. Timothy must negotiate with self-serving holograms from the future. At times, he will have two holograms of the same person in his room, sent back from the future, but from ten years apart, so their holograms will be of varying quality.
Gore Vidal takes a cynical and heretical view of religion and emphasizes Christianity's objectives as self-promotion in pursuit of the all mighty dollar. St. Paul is a charismatic marketer who rolls into a town with his dog-and-pony show. Sometimes, he is taken in and provided large sums of money, other times; he is nearly stoned to death. Vidal makes references to Saint Paul's Holy Rolodex of names used for fundraising and of Jesus' attempt to lower the Prime Rate as the real reason for Jesus' ousting of the money-lenders from the temple.
With the aid of worldly knowledge he gains from a television that is transported back through time, St. Timothy transforms from an innocent apostle's assistant to an aggressive deal maker. If you can pardon the blasphemy, you will laugh and gain a new perspective of the early church. My favorite parts are the Yiddish speaking disciples, St. Timothy's gradual habituation towards "holograms" from the future, and Vidal's greatest invention; the juggling, soft-shoe dancing, seizure-prone St. Paul. Vidal seems to have an interesting response to the mantra "What would Jesus do?" According to Vidal, Jesus would erase all the material that refers to him that is today's lexicon of "Christianity."
