Even when Jesus was small, the villagers realized there was something unusual about him. Perhaps it was because he showed a certain confidence – bordering on arrogance – in the way he spoke to adults. Or perhaps it was due to the way his parents, Mary and Joseph, treated him: with a respect that at times seemed to verge on anxiety. Or perhaps it was because he killed people.
Jesus was passing through his village when another small boy ran past and bumped him on the shoulder. It may have been an accident; it may not. Either way, Jesus was once again angered and uttered an ominously oblique curse. ‘You shall not go further on your way.’ His meaning became clear a moment later: the little boy fell down dead. These are the words of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
This is the story of very early Christianity, the things it took from to build itself, and the various versions of it that circulated back then. It’s an eye-opener.
…one ancient telling of the Nativity includes a Mary whose vagina can, and at one point does, roast human flesh. The text that contains this tale is in many ways very beautiful. At the moment of the birth of Jesus, the world quite literally stops turning: birds are stilled in mid-air; a shepherd who has raised his arm to strike his sheep becomes frozen, arm aloft; even the stars pause their nightly procession across the sky. Then, shortly after the birth of Jesus, a woman arrives at the familiar Nativity scene, with its ox and its ass, and – in a slightly less familiar twist to this story – inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina to test whether she really is a virgin. The woman’s hand is immediately burned off. ‘Woe,’ says the woman, as well she might.
And it’s that gospel from which we get the ox and the ass present at the Nativity. The gospels, odes and acts that didn’t make it into what we now know as the New Testament are really weird.
I’ve had this in the pile for a while, but, what with the recent missed Rapture and Peter Thiel apparently preaching about the Antichrist in a four-day closed conference the other week, I thought perhaps it was time I picked it up. Christianity had a long and strange journey, its story has been heavily edited over the millennia, and this is a book of what was left on the cutting-room floor.
As Robert Bellarmine, a sixteenth-century cardinal, Jesuit and inquisitor, put it, ‘I myself hardly ever read a book without feeling in the mood to give it a good censoring.’
Nixey is a terrific writer – I started reading her THE DARKENNG AGE years ago, but, honestly, it was so fucking sad I had to put it down again. This is a slightly less harrowing read, a little funnier (if darkly), and endlessly fascinating. Very recommended.
Also, this:
This, then, is a book about heresy and about how beliefs and ideas are violently silenced. But it is also about the ways in which people silence themselves. It is about the far more insidious ways in which things become first unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.
HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
