The Passion of G: on my own suffering and the weirdness of the Matthew Gospel

Features a Joyce pastiche, some Ancient Greek and a bit about Pontius Pilate's wife

I may not have been nailed to a cross – at least not this weekend – but I did, on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, undergo my own form of physical excruciations at the hands of a man it seems, like Judeans taxed to pay for Governors, Centurions and the whole military-penal cross-over industry, I pay to inflict them upon me.

There are (I think, trying to distract myself from the fact that my PT has undercounted the number of reps I have done) lots of Easter-themed exercises in my gym: what is more apt for a Good Friday workout than a stint on the “pendulum” (“…iuxta crucem, lacrimosa, dum pendebat filius”), a few sets of “skullcrushers” (“They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”)”) and, as if it weren’t already sufficiently on the nose, “crucifix shoulder raises”: no Simon of Cyrene to help me with this.

Spiritually moved – all religiosity is a response to suffering I suppose – I went to the crap coffee place just by the gym: “but after tasting it, he refused to drink it” (Matt: 27:54).

There I was, the Leopold Bloom of Good Friday. But unlike him, unlike Odysseus, unlike the sacrificed Christ, I was able to get the 12:12 out of Moorgate to my in-laws’ for round after round of hot cross buns, original flavour only. How might Joyce have written of that:

What buttery bloodprice this! Special offer Kerrygold from the Green Dragon Waitrose wherein I believe, I believe it is butter. Masticated in reverent irreverence, incense-memory-taste-guilt-pleasure-sin, burnt bits, all whirling and dervishing, rattling round my agnost-raised cortex, handsome man-nephews now feigning protest. Spice-Christ in Hindu heaven. Different deaths, same resurrection in my mouth.

The maternal zamoreine observes her son’s not-husband's performative consumption. The Body of Christ given Eastern burial. Alleluia begob! The hot-cross bun's death-rebirth narrative continues its ancient-modern transmigration. Old world, new family, time becoming breadcrumbs on Formica.

Anyway, the reward of sin is death. And so back to the gym on Saturday. This time (what else?) deadlifts, full body raises, tombstones. Was I quick or was I dead?

The famous God obituarist Nietzsche said “It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author, and that he did not learn it better.” So much the better for the amateur learner: easier to read the Word of God than of Sophocles. None-natives, centuries after Alexander, spoke a simplified franca of the classical idiom and, presumably, the evangelists did so for accessibility. Moreover, the koine gospels are full of ideas, passages and even phrases (coinages if you will) you’re familiar with from primary school: it should read easily.

And it does, save that Matthew (the Gospel I alighted on trying to read this Easter) is full of weird stuff I don’t think I knew anything about; the effect is to make you doubt your translation. Let me give some examples:

• I knew about Judas. I knew about the thirty pieces of silver. When he felt remorse for what he had done, he tried to return them to the “chief priests and elders”. Then this at 27:6:

οἱ δὲ ἀρχιερεῖς λαβόντες τὰ ἀργύρια εἶπαν· Οὐκ ἔξεστιν βαλεῖν αὐτὰ εἰς τὸν κορβανᾶν, ἐπεὶ τιμὴ αἵματός ἐστιν. συμβούλιον δὲ λαβόντες ἠγόρασαν ἐξ αὐτῶν τὸν Ἀγρὸν τοῦ Κεραμέως εἰς ταφὴν τοῖς ξένοις. διὸ ἐκλήθη ὁ ἀγρὸς ἐκεῖνος Ἀγρὸς Αἵματος ἕως τῆς σήμερον

Taking the silver, the chief priests said “it is not unlawful to return this to the treasury, since it is the price of blood”. So they used it to buy the Field of the Potters in which to bury foreigners; to this day it is still called the “Field of Blood”.

I had never once heard of this “Field of Blood” story and worry that the accursed Judas’s silver may now form the basis of a new Dan Brown novel.

• If you think that that Jesus was the only figure to slip the bonds of death this weekend, or even the first, you’re wrong. Thus Matt. 27:52-53:

καὶ τὰ μνημεῖα ἀνεῴχθησαν καὶ πολλὰ σώματα τῶν κεκοιμημένων ἁγίων ἠγέρθησαν, καὶ ἐξελθόντες ἐκ τῶν μνημείων μετὰ τὴν ἔγερσιν αὐτοῦ εἰσῆλθον εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν πόλιν καὶ ἐνεφανίσθησαν πολλοῖς.

KJV: And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints that slept were raised. And came out of the graves after His resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

So not only do you get a great earthquake, an eclipse and the tearing of the Temple’s sacred veil at the moment Christ gives up the ghost, but saints’ tombs open (a full 48 hours before Jesus’s); but perhaps more unnervingly, they just wait there until Sunday when zombie-like they start walking around. What do they get up to? Who do they see? What do they eat?!

I made a little joke about Dan Brown above, but one of the things I love most about the Indian sacred literary tradition is that, being ancient and demotic, it is open to all to tell all sorts of side stories riffing on the main story. There is so much riff-fodder in the western canon that we don’t riff off or at least have not developed a lasting tradition of riffing around.

By way of example, I would love to know what on earth was going on in Pontius Pilate’s wife’s dream. She bursts in (I imagine) to her overworked husband’s audience chamber, raving about her bad dream. (Pausing there, I feel a lot of fellow-feeling for the much-maligned Pilate. He was doing a difficult no-doubt thanklessly bureaucratic job in a tough corner of the Empire; he had a lot to get on with and did not need multiple visits from a rabble of zealots who wanted him to do their dirty work.) Even in the gospel itself, no-one responds to Uxor Pilati’s interjection, though we can imagine her being shuffled offstage by cooing ladies. She deserves a voice two thousand years later.

And what sort of mischief does can’t-believe-his-luck Barabbas get up to? Does he feel some sort of awkward guilt when he slips the executioner’s hammer and nail? I know there are individual literary gems on these themes (Pär Lagerkvist wrote a novel about Barabbas in 1950) but what I mean is we don’t seem to have a lasting tradition of democratic story percolation in which the laity can take the clay of the bible and make toys from it. I imagine the Greeks did with their clay what the Indians do with theirs and that’s why the Greek myths are so confusing, mad, multi-layered, contradictory and rich.

That’s the sort of thing I wish would come back to life. That and decent Easter Eggs.

Happy Easter everyone!