By ALAN WALL.
◊

Yehoshua of Nazareth, renamed by our culture Jesus Christ (a name he would not have answered to), was a contrarian. Whenever he saw a legalistic statement, he tended to reverse it. The last would be first, the poorest (the anawim) were in truth the richest; you know that you must hate your enemies, well listen up and love them instead. On this last one, it is uttered without demur every Sunday in countless churches and chapels across the world, but how do you do it exactly, how do I love my enemy? When faced with the Nazis we did not love them to bits; we blew them to bits with explosives, and were in no doubt that God was on our side as we did so. This is one of my longest struggles with Christianity: How are you meant to love your enemies? I want to kill mine. Slowly, while they form their appropriate apologies.

The contrarian sees oppositions where others see none. Others glide by, insouciant.

The contrarian sees oppositions where others see none. Others glide by, insouciant. Once one has learnt the trick, it is not difficult to create your own catechism of contrarian beliefs. This is what Blake did in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Stare hard at abstract words, particularly those packed with virtue, and they have a tendency to flip. Did Job’s wife say Curse God and Die, or Bless God and Die? The scholars are still debating this one. And we should always remember that the most significant happening might be the one that doesn’t happen. Sherlock Holmes noticed that the dog did not bark in the night—but it should have done. Mendeleev noticed gaps in the periodic table he was assembling. Those gaps bespoke missing elements. Elements were subsequently found in the spaces he had indicated. Vacant lots until his suppositions filled them.

One of Dmitri Mendeleev’s hand drawn periodic tables.

So what is this that has prompted Yehoshua to the one moment in his life when he can say Ego Scriptor?

Jehoshua writes only once in the Gospels, then what he has written is immediately erased by the feet of passers-by. This is after the woman has been taken in adultery. The zealous young men, who did not receive her favours, but obviously spotted someone else getting them instead, wanted her stoned to death. (I think it might be appropriate to wonder just how long they have been observing her.) It’s only right after all: that is what it says in the Law, and we must not go around contradicting that now, must we? Jesus appears to be acting on the adulterous woman’s behalf, but he can’t be seen to be contradicting the Law, can he? That would get him stoned to death pretty quickly himself. So he does something extraordinary, and unique in the Gospels. He writes in the dust, presumably on the outside of the temple wall, for there would have been no dust so thick on the inside. The would-be stoners-to-death peer down at what he writes. One by one they go away, and the writing is erased. So what is this that has prompted Yehoshua to the one moment in his life when he can say Ego Scriptor? There is a Russian tradition (the Lord knows where it came from) which says that what he wrote there in the dirt were the sins of the accusers. One of them has been having sex with the rabbi’s son, which would have had his life put in forfeit pretty sharpish. One by one they read what is written; one by one they walk away. This is the only time this happens in the Gospels. So the only time Yehoshua writes, he writes the Law, then he leaves it to be erased. All so that a woman who is no better than she should be can walk away unharmed, instead of getting lynched. Ego Scriptor. I am the writer; I am also the eraser. So what has finally prompted me into writing?

Somewhere in the precincts of the Temple a man is holding a makeshift seminar. Sundry individuals gather round. He is preaching scandalous stuff. All about love overcoming everything. All you need is love. It is as though some anarchist had set up his table on the pavement outside the Bank of England and he is preaching the death of money. His contrarian words produce equal portions of bafflement and delight in his shifting audiences. Being a contrarian is not all that difficult in itself. Oscar Wilde turned it into a party trick. Work, he said, is the curse of the drinking classes. Ho ho ho. I do it myself sometimes. Somewhat tired of a fellow in holy orders who was a bit too glibly on-message about this, that and the other, I remarked: ‘I don’t quite see the reverence, your relevance.’ Not bad. It must have had a certain force, as he has not brought himself to speak to me since.

But the reversals of this man outside the Temple precincts were not whimsical; they were apocalyptic. He lived in apocalyptic times, so he was far from lonely in that respect. What does it mean, apocalypse? It has two meanings now. One a grand and catastrophic finale; and two, an opening-up or revelation. The two meanings often connect. If you think the times are closing down on you, telling you that you’re in the last drink saloon, then you can get pretty frantic searching round for any meanings that might redeem you. Astrology is usually a good bet. The stars are accommodating to human meaning. We can interpret them into infinity.

Their scriptures inform them, in the contradictory way that scriptures have, that they shall overthrow their Godless oppressors, if only they do the will of the Almighty.

The people he has found himself among are zealous for laws and signs. Their legalisms can border on insanity, and they have all convinced themselves that the end cannot be too far off. They live under the occupation of foreign rulers, although they regard themselves as chosen by God. Their scriptures inform them, in the contradictory way that scriptures have, that they shall overthrow their Godless oppressors, if only they do the will of the Almighty. How can they do that? By fathoming what is meant exactly by these scriptures they read every day.

This preacher fellow intrigues the poor, because he tells them they are going to be the richest folk of all. How? By entering the Kingdom of Heaven. And where is that? Here. Right now. It’s inside you and you didn’t even notice. Mmmm. Might have to go to the second show here, and listen all over again to his words. He keeps insisting he is bringing good news, and bringing it to the anawim. I think I qualify here, for I possess bugger-all in this world.

The story appears only in John’s Gospel, and there is another oddity: it is not in the earliest versions we have recovered. So either it was left out, or someone put it in later. Why would they do that? Well, here is one reason they might have left it out: it suggests that Jehoshua is soft on adultery. And that might upset far too many people. He got her off the stoning, that woman, but they did not want to give the impression that he had sent her off into the tunnel of love with a blessing on her head. He tells her to sin no more, but after all, even if she does she will only receive a mild rebuke. That’s one reason why it might have been left out.

So why might it have been put in? It was one of the vitriolic libels against Jehoshua in the early days of the Christian community that he was an illiterate bastard. The circumstances of his birth cannot help but create a certain amount of bemusement. As the Irish jingle has it:

I am the strangest little chap
Of which you ever heard
For my mother was a virgin
And my father was a bird.

And that, remember, was composed in a deeply Roman Catholic country. So what precisely are those outside the faith meant to make of it all?

So the story could have been inserted into later versions of John to show that our man could write. So if he could write, where’s the evidence? Well, funny you should ask that, because he actually wrote in the dust, just outside the temple, and—as is the way with dust—it all got kicked over almost immediately after. So, no text survived him, not even a palimpsest. Handy that.

The Law condemns them in their own eyes, but no one else sees it.

There is it seems to me a problem with this latter tale. The interpellator must have been someone of equivalent brilliance to Jehoshua. For his superb reply to the accusers, Let him who is without sin throw the first stone, is a formulation of genius. He is not denying the Law—that would get him killed—but he is putting under scrutiny those who would enact the Law. And the burden of the Law suddenly becomes more than they can take. So what he writes in the dust, on the one occasion that he writes at all, is the Law. The Law condemns them in their own eyes, but no one else sees it. Then they walk away without the pleasure of stoning an adulteress, and the Law is blown to the winds.

And the Lord is briefly left to his own devices. He can see the reversals in all things. So he goes off to talk to the Father. He normally addresses him as Abba, which is a palindrome. Comes out the same way, however you reverse it.

♦

ALAN WALL was born in Bradford, studied English at Oxford, and lives in North Wales. He has published six novels and three collections of poetry, including Doctor Placebo. Jacob, a book written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize. His work has been translated into ten languages. He has published essays and reviews in many different periodicals including the Guardian, Spectator, The Times, Jewish Quarterly, Leonardo, PN Review, London Magazine, The Reader and Agenda. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Writing at Warwick University and Liverpool John Moores and is currently Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester and a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. His book Endtimes was published by Shearsman in 2013, and Badmouth, a novel, was published by Harbour Books in 2014. A collection of his essays was issued by Odd Volumes, The Fortnightly Review’s publishing imprint, also in 2014. A second collection, of his Fortnightly reflections on Walter Benjamin, followed in 2018, and a third collection, Midnight of the Sublime, has just been published. An archive of Alan Wall’s Fortnightly work is here.