ARAMAIC WATCH - Aramaic figures importantly in a new novel about the discovery of a lost eyewitness life of Jesus:
The Fire Gospel by Michel Faber
The [London] Times review by Tom Gatti
The Fire Gospel is a titanic work - not in size (it's a slim 213 pages), but in source. Its protagonist, Prometheus, is a Titan; a member of the race of deities who, in Greek myth, were usurped by Zeus and his Olympian gods. Prometheus is famous for stealing fire for mankind, and suffering for it: Zeus had him bound to a rock and arranged for an eagle to tear out his liver. Overnight the liver would regenerate, and the next day the eagle would return. Prometheus underwent this hellish beak-hole surgery every day for 3,000 years.
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In The Fire Gospel, Prometheus takes the unlikely form of a Canadian academic called Theo Griepenkerl. Theo is inspecting a ravaged museum in Iraq, hoping to borrow some treasures for his university, when a bomb goes off. It kills the curator and destroys a statue, releasing nine scrolls of Aramaic text that had been hidden inside. Theo rushes back to Toronto, the papyri burning a hole in his briefcase “like a stash of pornography he'd been forced to delay getting to grips with”. They turn out to be the memoir of Malchus, a 1st-century Christian convert and witness to the Crucifixion. Theo, an atheist, is unmoved by the prose but dizzy with dollar signs at the potential of his translation.
Malchus is named in the Gospel of John as the servant who assisted the High Priest Caiaphas in the arrest of Jesus, and had his ear cut off by Peter - but in Malchus's own account Jesus does not work a miracle to heal the ear; it remains hanging from his head “like a woman's adornment” for the rest of his life. More significantly, in Malchus's description of the Crucifixion, Christ's life ends not with a noble “It is finished” but with an evacuation of bowels and a desperate “Please finish me”. As for the tomb and the Resurrection - Malchus paints an altogether grittier picture of Jesus's “afterlife”.
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And from the
review in the
Financial Times:
Although a trifle tasteless, and written in a style that occasionally slips towards cliché, The Fire Gospel is an entertaining story, with a vein of playful symbolism running throughout. The religious resonance of the name Theo is significant, for Theo Griepenkerl's discovery allows him to play God. Less obviously, the choice of his surname is no accident; Faber is recalling Christian Griepenkerl, a German artist noted for his paintings of Prometheus. Moreover, Theo's favourite music is by the saxophonist John Coltrane, whose fixation with measuring his Christian faith against other spiritual codes led him to renounce the dogma of organised religion. Theo's favourite Coltrane recording is Stellar Regions , which, as jazz aficionados will know, was discovered by his widow some years after Coltrane's death and published in a form he had not approved. Again, the esoteric detail is carefully calculated.
