Customer Reviews

Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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."

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....

Fans of Gore Vidal's novels Kalki, Myra Breckinridge, Myron, and The Smithsonian Institution will love Live From Golgotha. This novel is charged with the same biting critique of religion and religious institutions as we find in Kalki, and it incorporates the playfully sci-fi elements found in The Smithsonian Institution. In short, for Vidal fans, this novel is a must.

For those poor souls who have yet to discover Gore Vidal, this is a good introduction. Vidal writes what he calls "inventions" from time to time. These are his metafictional/experimental novels that break from his more famous, and more mainstream, historical novels such as Lincoln and The Golden Age (both of which are wonderful novels). In these inventions, Vidal allows himself to be more playful and unusual. Live From Golgotha reads like a collaborative effort between Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Despite the apt comparison to other pop-experimental novelists, Vidal writes originally and, I feel, quite a bit better than Vonnegut, Pynchon, T. C. Boyle, and Tom Robbins.

Perhaps it is most impressive that Vidal can write anything, including these "inventions," while the aforementioned authors are limited to that style. It is clear that Vidal knows exactly what he is doing, and that he does well.

In this case, he has chosen to tell an alternate story of the Gospels through the point of view of Saint Timothy. Timothy is being bombarded by characters from the future(s) who are trying to coerce him into re-writing scripture with their political and financial concerns in mind. What we end up with is a romp-in-the-sand of a novel that makes you laugh out loud at times and grimace with knowing pain at the cut-throat attitudes present in media, politics, and religion.

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?'"

Take a tap-dancing St. Paul ("Solly"), an enormously fat Jesus, a rather mercenary St. Timothy, and a whole lot of Time-Travel, and you get this hysterical book.'

I agree with soem of the previous reviewers: this book is indeed a bit confusing, but really, only if you don't follow it all the way to the end. If you pay close attention--this is totally one of those books that you have to think about all the way through--you won't get lost, and you will definately enjoy this little cyberpunk-mmets-early Christianity romp.

Largely pilloried by the mainstream critics, Live from Golgotha remains one of the finest pieces of satirical blasphemy to come along in the past two decades. A wickedly hilarious story of real imagination from an important, perceptive writer.

At some point, Vidal must have started with refreshingly plausible Jesus, Pilate, and Paul figures, and where he could have written a good but fairly ordinary novel from that beginning, he went out on several precarious limbs, made some highly original creative leaps, threw in computer technology, time travel, Zionists, Mormons, Christian Scientists, capitalists, sensualists, etc., etc., and provided us with a superior, wildly imaginative book. It's not for everyone, though. This is an iconoclastic novel to say the very least (its basis in historical research would give fundamentalists no comfort in any case), and there are a lot of lingering, graphic descriptions of male anatomy and sexual activity that squeamish readers might not appreciate. The language is fluid and the wit is sharp--this is the daring novel Norman Mailer didn't manage to write. "Live From Golgotha" may send you running to find Vidal's earlier novel, "Julian."

Vidal effortlessly dismantles Christianity's pompous and often trite traditions and beliefs in this most enjoyable of iconoclastic romps. Ironically, he puts religion per se into a perspective that most non-believers can have some kind of faith in. Religious believers will condemn him for his blasphemy, which one can only assume would be the most satisfying aspect of the book for him. The language is smooth, the innovation compelling and the overall effect satisfying on every level. Not a classic but a great two-fingered salute to the hypocritical, conservative and wholly irreligious Church Establishment. Blue-rinsed church wardens and dubiously motivated church council members will hate it, which I am sure will make Mr. Vidal very happy.

This book had me laughing from the time I started until I put it down. If you are not insecure or uptight about your Christian beliefs this book will put a smile on your face that will last all day. This would make a great movie - SciFi Network.

A great book! I'm sure a lot of people would find it blasphemous and insulting, but I have never seen such a clever satire of all religions taken together. The only drawback is that sometimes it's hard to follow the story. Other than that, I loved the unexpected twists and turns and mockery of the religious Establishment.