Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (Paperback)

~ (Author) "IN THE BEGINNING was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine..." (more)
Key Phrases: mop room, conversation pit, older self, Cutler Two, Cutler One, Saint Paul (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Twentieth-century television networks compete murderously for exclusive rights to broadcast the Crucifixion, in an irreverent assault on religious, sexual, and commercial mores by the author of Lincoln. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. NYT.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition. first pb edition (October 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140231196
• ISBN-13: 978-0140231199
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #398,965 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What would Jesus do? "select all" then "delete", September 30, 2005

By	R. McOuat (Winston-Salem, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate In Commercial TV, June 27, 2001

By	Jon G. Jackson "j_dog_jackson" (Santa Rosa, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Most of the other reviewers of this book seem to have approached it as if it was a semi-serious study in the line of "the quest for the historical Jesus." Have they really read it? It's an absurd science fiction comedy that is actually very, *very* funny! Humankind has discovered how to go back in time...albeit only semi-accurately. And so, the race is on! The goal...to send back to the future a LIVE broadcast of the events surrounding the crucifiction of Christ! It takes a while to get there, however...an outrageous romp that insults and mocks everyone and everything along the way, the sacred icons slamming one by two in the dust. Vidal's excellent writing is surpassed only by his vivid and unbridled imagination. (I laughed for days after the scene where Shirley MacClaine briefly appears, having channeled into the past by means of her own!) The story is told by Timothy---you know, the guy that...uh...cavorted with the apostle Paul)---who has his own unique set of priorities. The inevitable result? Well, we all know how sponsors of programs want to get their money's worth, yes? Let's just say that more than a few things manage to compromise themselves in the quest for corporate profit. I'd love to see it, but I doubt this one will ever make it to TV....

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny encore to Jvlian, January 9, 2001

By	"freethoughtmecca" (Great Shaytan al-Hayy, USA) - See all my reviews

Though a work of fiction, this is one of the funniest books I've ever read. I'd have to say that this book is much more of an insult to Christianity than the Satanic Verses was to Islam. Gore Vidal, a self-proclaimed "very strong Atheist," is a brilliant writer. I especially enjoyed his work Julian (JVLIAN), which was about Julian the Apostate, the only Roman emporer to leave Christianity in favor of the pre-Nicean pagan temples of Rome and their respective gods. Live from Golgotha, like Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," takes the basic characters and story line from a major religion, and alters it to make it comedy, making a sort of mockery of that respective faith.

The author makes fun of Jesus, his disciples, and the apostle Paul. Jesus is badly overweight; a big fatty with an eating disorder. Paul is a notorious homosexual, and possibley even a child molester, not to mention a former hitman for Mossad. The early disciples and church fathers are either greedy Jewish gangsters or bisexual Greek converts. Both Jesus and Paul, the founders of Christianity who never met each other, have a tendency to lie and rewrite Christian history in order to make themselves look good (as Jesus gets older, he keeps lying about his age; at 40 he tells people he's only 33).

The story is a wonderful read, and though Vidal makes a mockery of the story of Christianity, he is thoroughly familiar with its tenets. The story touches on the possible troubles between James' Jewish church, and Paul's gentile church, and how both had different interpretations of the message brought by the most subversive self-hating Jew of them all, Fat Jesus. As a teaser, I'll leave you with Paul's account of when he met Jesus post-crucifixion, which is found both on the back of the book, as well as in the fourth chapter:

"So there I was. A hot day. Palm trees. A mirage shivering in the middle distance. A camel. A pyramid. Your average Middle Eastern landscape... Suddenly, HE WAS THERE... Wide as he was tall, Jesus waddled toward me... That face. Those luminous eyes hidden somewhere in all that golden fat. That ineffable smile like the first slice from a honeydw melon. Oh delight! He held up a hand, a tiny starfish cunningly fashioned of lard. He spoke, His voice so high, so shrill that only the odd canine ever got the whole message... 'Why,' shrilled the Son of the One God, 'dost thou persecuteth me-th?'"