Rich Hall, Stewart Lee, Louis CK, Diogenes and Two Jesuses

The American comedian, Rich Hall, had a show in 2009 called “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy”. I mention it because, hell no, I ain’t happy. In fact, I find it hard to believe I’ll ever be happy and, up until this point at which, as I write, I am approaching the age of one half century old, I never have been happy as a settled state. I’ve been concentrating on trying to stay sane although I’m not sure why as being insane would at least relieve me of the burden of being concerned about it either way. In fact, were it not for brief moments of happiness that had strayed way off course and found themselves populating my hellhole of an existence, I would easily be able to believe that happiness is a myth told to to keep us compliant and hopeful.

The British comedian, Stewart Lee, likes to play a character on stage that he refers to in mock interviews and real ones as “the comedian Stewart Lee” and this character is a version of Stewart Lee himself yet, in Lee’s mind, at least, a rhetorically distinguishable version. This version of Lee does comedy exclusively for “an insular cadre of socially challenged, middle aged men” although, as Lee notes as part of his act, to laughter, not as exclusively as he’d like. Indeed, in a more recent show than the one from which this anecdote is taken, the comedian Stewart Lee goes on to say that his ideal room is a completely sold out empty room. He’s got the money, because people have bought the tickets, but he doesn’t have to do the work of bringing them round or appealing to their comedy sensitivities.

I wonder how the American comedian, Louis CK, feels about this. CK is now most famous for deciding it would be a good idea to masturbate in front of women, sometimes asking permission and sometimes not. It seems it never occurred to him to say that it was “the comedian Louis CK” doing these things. As I write, he recently made what is being reported as a come back appearance at a New York comedy venue only for lots of women to complain in public on the Internet that the disgraced Mexican-American should actually have just disappeared forever. These women, it seems, do not believe that CK has yet suffered enough for the crime of exposing a few inches of flesh in the wrong circumstances. The thought begins to dawn on me that, perhaps, they wish he would just go and hide in a corner and, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist as a public individual.

One wonders how the fourth century BCE Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, would feel about this. Diogenes, so we learn from historical anecdotes, would masturbate openly in public and then remark that he wished it was so easy to fulfill l the desire of hunger as it was to fulfill the sexual desire. A little rub and its gone away until next time. Yet Diogenes would be in jail if he were here today, a pariah and a target of outraged feminist critique, and all because he was dealing as simply as possible with the sexual urge where someone else might see it. But what else could he do, masturbate furiously in his barrel? Diogenes, of course, might have replied to the effect that it is no big deal. Sex is natural and not shameful. Seeing an animal ejaculate is nothing to be frightened of or outraged about just like when your dog licks its embarrassing erection yet, strangely, does not appear remotely embarrassed. At best, it is perhaps something to laugh at, dismissively. Diogenes was a Cynic which means that he thought nothing natural could be a source of shame. His enemy was culture, the artificiality of human beings who codify and make rules for things that take human society away from living “according to nature” in general.

And now, in my fifth paragraph, I come to my fifth man. That man is Jesus, alternatively known as Christ, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Lord, Jesus of Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus H Christ and Jesus, the carpenter’s son. There is no record of the King of Kings ever having masturbated in public, although it seems he did get heckled from time to time, and there is that one saying about chopping your balls off if you are up to it. Yet he did not speak about “the religious figure, Jesus Christ” and neither did he ever say he was happy. But this, it turns out, is not something he could have done anyway because Jesus was not a writer. He did not write and perhaps, most likely, could not have written if he had wanted to anyway. Jesus was almost certainly illiterate. When we bring together the notions of Jesus and writing it is always someone else’s writing about Jesus and never Jesus’ writing about Jesus. Jesus, most likely, did not have the ability or the will to present himself in writing and so it was left up to others, often people Jesus didn’t even know, to write about him instead. Which of us would be happy with that? The religious figure, Jesus Christ, might be happy with that. He has gone on to have the biggest career of all time. But what about Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean?

I strikes me that Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean might be mortified by the career that the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is having. He would, it seems to me, more than likely be banging his head against the wall of his carpenter’s shop shouting “Make it stop!” if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that he is dead. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, did not ask to be brought into the White House, the seat of American presidential power, and used as a totem or a proxy for policies of any kind of modern partisanship. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, did not share some bread and fish with some people so that guys wearing pillow cases on their heads could express their hatred for Jews. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was a Jew, unlike the religious figure, Jesus Christ, who was a white European-looking fellow and so obviously not a Jew. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, was more the Jesus who would be happy to be at a right wing rally where the supremacy of the white race could be reasonably discussed. As the whitest person in history, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, fits right in there. But not Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. Stupid Jew. Literally.

Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was not a modern, white, evangelical businessman. He did not have family values. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean said, “The person who does not hate father and mother cannot become a disciple of mine.” He also said, “If you have money, do not give it at interest. Instead, give it to someone from whom you won’t get it back.” He said that people have nowhere to lay their heads and that people should “Become passersby”. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was fucking insane. He would not have been accepted into your cosy, well-funded church on Sunday. He would have been chased from the door had he even showed up. He had literally nothing to say about homosexuality, abortion clinics or making America great, either again or at all. He would wonder why there were bishops who had thrones in cathedrals and lived in palaces. But not the religious figure, Jesus Christ. He gets that. In fact, he wants you to hang his portrait up in the palace and have a statue of him in the cathedral. And please use his name as much as possible to justify whatever it is you want to do today.

At this point I should apologise to any female readers because even though Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean may have recommended chopping off your balls for the kingdom of God he was still a man. Very much a man. You don’t see any female carpenters now do you? And the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is basically a huge, shiny penis being waved in your face, Louis CK stylee. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, is the very appendage of life. He wants you to eat him. He insists. So this is a very man-centred essay about a very manly subject. God is not a woman, Ok? That’s just a fact you’ll have to get used to down at the Women’s Rights Centre as you discuss the tax on tampons and misogyny in the computer games industry. So, ladies, if you please, the men are talking about men here. It would serve you well to watch, listen, learn and, fundamentally, know your place. Oh, I know that some churches have female priests and even bishops now but, come on, all the proper churches don’t, the ones that actually have eaten the big, shiny dick of the religious figure, Jesus Christ.

Now Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, was a poor man. I mean really poor. Destitute, in fact. And he really disliked people who weren’t poor. He would have hated rich men in suits crowdfunding their campaigns to be congressmen and senators whilst greedily snuffling at the trough of corporate endorsement. (You may wonder why I keep referring this essay to American things when I am British but this is obviously because America is the most important country in the world in every respect…. For those reading this who are unaware of the British comedian, Stewart Lee, I don’t think that. I think the opposite of that.) He would have despised CEOs of multi-national companies outsourcing their work to some third world cesspool where people work knee deep in their own excrement for 22 hours a day, not allowed to even go and relieve themselves elsewhere because it might slow down production and reduce the profit margin by 0.0000000000001%. So, this being true, isn’t it somewhat perverse that the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is exactly a friend of all the slimy sons of bitches that Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean never would be? How the hell did that happen?

It turns out that this is what happens when Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean does not write his own PR material. Then what happens is that bozos turn up later who don’t particularly see the advantages of Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, who likes the poor and encourages everyone else to become it by giving all their money away, but do see the advantages of someone called the religious figure, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, as British motoring buffoon, Jeremy Clarkson, likes to call himself (shouldn’t that be “JC”?) is many times more preferable because, since he never actually ever existed, much like “the comedian, Stewart Lee,” you can actually say pretty much anything you like about him. He is what feminists like to call “a rhetorical construct” and so is very much like “toxic masculinity”. The best thing about being a rhetorical construct is that you can get away with saying anything because you will always be able to fall back on the notion that what you are talking about never really existed. Of course, you should never actually say that because the whole point of the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is that you maintain to the utmost of your ability that he does exist. But, of course, he doesn't really. Just never say that out loud.

All this would have flown over the head of Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean though. He was not up on feminist discourse. He wasn’t interested in corporate endorsements. He couldn’t even write his name. And he didn’t want to. He just got his hammer and chisel and chopped at bits of wood. Sometimes he wandered about and ate food with people. Like a mug. He talked about the kingdom of God and said it was like a weed that infests your garden and draws in birds who will eat all your seed. Then he said it was like mould you put in bread that infects all the bread and makes it rise. Was he off his nut? What is this gibberish? No wonder you never find his picture in palaces or his statue in cathedrals. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, is much more suitable to the task of being our cultural battering ram for all the things that we think but that we can say that he really stood for. Rhetorical construct, remember that.

The religious figure, Jesus Christ, does not mind this because he gets a throne at God’s right hand and he appreciates that kinda thing. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, said he had nowhere to lay his head and, apparently, wandered about the countryside like some kind of tramp. That message will not play well with the upwardly mobile demographic that we are aiming for as they try to not default on their mortgages and upgrade to the next model of car whilst saving for the newest iPhone. We do not want people to find nobility and blessing in their pathetic lives, much less meaning. We want them to imagine that they can have something better… but not right now. After death. Right now you have to give us all of your money and suffer. Suffering is good. Look, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, suffered. He was crucified, for God’s sake. (Yes, literally.) But he has a throne now. Geddit? Suffer now, throne later. Right now you have to hate homos, baby killers, people who vote left and anyone who hasn’t got a gun. Its what the religious figure, Jesus Christ, would have wanted. You know he’s in charge upstairs, right? How do you think things will work out for you if you get there and you have all the wrong views? “No one comes to the Father except through me,” Ok?

So forget this dope Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. Forget the poor. Forget giving all your money away, hating mom and dad, loving your enemies, being merciful, not judging, taking the log out of your own eye, and that parable where the king invites everyone to the banquet, “both good and bad alike”. As if! That is all terrible stuff, literally the opposite of the good life in today’s world. If you want a good life then you need the religious figure, Jesus Christ. He hates immoral people and is going to burn them all… and you need never look in the mirror with him. He only cares about the bad people and not us good ones. And remember, Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was a vagrant and can you trust vagrants? No, you can’t. We arrest vagrants. Just for being vagrants! Vagrants are morally culpable simply for their vagrancy which is a kind of social marker for immorality. Any decent person has their own home. Diogenes was a vagrant and he masturbated in public. Like Louis CK. But the religious figure, Jesus Christ, never once so much as touched his own penis. In fact, he was asexual. Never had a single sexual thought. His mind was pure. He never even had an erection because he was too busy thinking about being good and burning the immoral who have far too many erections. And that’s just the feminist lesbians! So would you really choose Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean over the religious figure, Jesus Christ? Its your ass on the line here.

You never realised all this was at stake really, did you? But there is a reason that God speaks through the religious figure, Jesus Christ, and not the leftist conspiracy fabrication that is Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. That reason is that God has moral values. God, who is white, knows the value and righteousness of good, white values, of making money, looking after yourself, your family and friends to the detriment of all others whilst bearing arms as a God-given right. That’s why we know that the Jews who killed Jesus are not going to heaven, because the religious figure, Jesus Christ, says so. Remember, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is alive. He rose from the dead on the third day just like the four holy gospels (who were written by four trustworthy white men) say. But this Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, he died. He died like a dog on a cross and no one knows what they did to him. Probably eaten by dogs or dumped in a pile of bodies with his face in someone’s ass. Do you want to be associated with that? Do you want to follow assface and wonder around like a tramp spouting parables about seeds or do you want a throne in heaven whilst all the bad people get the hellfire they deserve?

Hell no, you ain’t happy now, are you? Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean isn’t looking so good now. He’s almost a masturbator, that vagrant bastard. You can’t trust anyone who hasn’t got a home, right. They are dangerous. Their vagrancy might be catching. Do you know, he even advised his followers to go knocking on doors so that they might get food? This is why the religious figure, Jesus Christ, asks us to live in gated communities so that we can keep scum like that out. You never know where the hand that knocks on your door might have been. Best to see them stopped at the gate. By the security guard. Let them wipe the dust from their feet. See if I care. We don’t need your fake news kingdom of God communist Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, who is white unlike you, has our thrones ready for us in heaven. Which is also white. What’s that? “Everyone who glorifies himself will be humiliated, and the one who humbles himself will be praised?” Listen, Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. I am white, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is white and God is white. If you think I’m living like a tramp in the dirt, relying on whatever I can find to eat and mixing with those who can, at best, be described as immoral undesirables, then you are much mistaken.

Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean made a mistake. He left his PR to other people and now other people prefer the religious figure, Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean is now fake news, a commie Christ, a socialist masturbator’s wet dream. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean wishes now that he had learnt to write as he lies, mouldering, in an unmarked grave with his denuded face in someone’s bony ass. He cannot believe that he left the job to the four white guys, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They seemed trustworthy at the time but instead of repeating what he said they made up stories and sexed it up until they had the religious figure, Jesus Christ, instead. Weren’t they listening? Which bit of “blessed are the poor” did they not get? Instead, they went with the whole “son of God” angle as if Jesus was a white guy. They went chasing after Roman approval as if pleasing those in charge was what mattered most. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean never said that big organisations should be created with people living in palaces. He never endorsed telethons to fund churches or expected the pastor to live in a mansion. Which bit of “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you must become slave of all” did they not get? Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean hunkered down in his unmarked grave, depressed. He wished he had learnt to write.

Demythologizing

"The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators' ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say." - Friedrich Nietzsche

It is now, for those who live according to a Western, Christian calendar, almost Easter. Easter is the time when Christians remember the death of Jesus of Nazareth (on Good Friday) and his resurrection (on Easter Sunday). The source documents for these occasions are, in documentary terms, the four gospels of the Christian New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is a startling fact, should one read these gospels side by side in parallel rather than in linear fashion from Matthew through to John, that by far the most agreements between them in terms of timing and a coincidence of their story-telling is precisely in the last four or five days of Jesus' life before he is apparently crucified. For the majority of what is often called the ministry of Jesus these same gospels are often at variance about what took place and even when or if it took place. After Jesus' reported resurrection we get differing tales in differing places in ways that seem not to match up but to contradict. But for Jesus' last few days the gospels are at their most parallel.

A question that immediately comes to mind for any intelligent reader is if this is because here we have a historical bedrock of indisputable events. Christian believers, especially the more dogmatic types, will tell you that it is all true - even where the accounts themselves naturally give contradictory reports. Of course, there is a whole apologetic army of people more than ready to tell you that things that can't all be true actually are. If you'd like an example compare John's gospel with the other three. They don't agree about which day Jesus died on. They can't all be right and so that must introduce a lack of factuality into the gospel record in one way or another. Perhaps you think that three witnesses beat out the one. But then you need to remember that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a documentary source. So its not really 3 against 1. Its 1 against 1. In fact, when you start to think about it, who says that any of these books or their writers knew anything about what happened? Is the apparent history in them anchored to, and confirmed by, a non-Christian recitation of events? Well, no, it isn't because for the rest of the world of the time Jesus of Nazareth was singularly unimportant. No non-Christians were writing down reports of what happened to him. The only history we have, if we have any, is a believer's history.

So here in the gospels we have a story that is claimed to be of universal significance. It involves a person dying and then, three days later if we count inclusively, rising again from the dead which, in the myth it is a part of, means that, somehow, we human beings have the means to escape the sin and corruption of creation that we were formerly a part of by means of this activity accomplished through Jesus. It sounds, frankly, incredible. I first heard this myth when I was ten years old and I remember thinking how good it would be if it was true. Primarily, this was because I didn't feel particularly loved and didn't have lots of people who I thought might be that interested in me. But this God fella seemed mightily concerned with everyone and that was good enough for me. When I was ten I also remember that I read Homer's The Odyssey for the first time. I was a big fan of Odysseus because he was the smart one unlike Heracles and Achilles who used their strength. I felt that I was the smart one amongst my peers and so I naturally oriented myself to the king from Ithaca. In The Odyssey all manner of events occur. They blind a Cyclops, Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon no less, they meet the witch Circe, they must avoid perils such as the Sirens, whose songs send sailors mad. The Odyssey is a very engaging fantasy tale much like the other stories of Greek heroes such as the Twelve Labours of Heracles, for example, or The Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy and its capture via the Trojan Horse (an idea Odysseus had!). 

I am now almost four decades older than my ten year old self and I have read many such stories since. In an academic phase of my life I studied the gospels, and the history of Jesus, if there was such a thing, in more depth. I came to the conclusion that it was literature just as much as The Odyssey or the Twelve Labours of Heracles. Heracles too, of course, is claimed to be the son of a god, a god no less than Zeus, in fact. I began to ask why anyone believes the gospels as history and I noted that most of those who do come to it reading it as history as a presupposition but without any demonstration. If I read the Twelve Labours of Heracles I might come to the section where Heracles fights the Hydra. When he chops off one of its heads two grow back in its place. Hold on, is this a true story or is it mere entertainment? How would I be able to establish the difference? Just because someone writes something in a book does this therefore mean that I am expected to believe it happened and is true? This is the conundrum that faces us with the Christian gospels for, in reality, we are being asked to believe things just because someone wrote them down and, being charitable, we may concede that they did so sincerely. But so what?

You will labour in vain to find non-Christian corroboration of the vast majority of the story of Jesus as presented in the gospels of the New Testament. The bald truth is that almost nobody except those who would be called Christians ever cared enough about this character to write about him. It was only they who wrote narratives about him at anything like a time contemporaneous with his supposed life. It was only they who ever bothered to preserve sayings they would claim were his actual words. But when we look at the gospels, products of such activity, we find them claiming to know things any intelligent reader would wonder how they could have known. For example, as I write it is Maundy Thursday, the night of Jesus' imagined arrest when, so the gospels tell us, all his followers ran away. But this doesn't stop the gospels reporting what happened to Jesus after he had been arrested. Who told these writers what happened? How do they know what the Jewish leaders said inside a closed building where no followers of Jesus would have been accepted or inside a Roman court before the Governor? I ask these questions not because I have some need to discredit the documents of Christianity but simply because such questions are apparent from any sane reading of these texts. The Christian scholar John Dominic Crossan has a nifty saying about events like these in the gospels. He says "Those who knew (what happened) didn't care and those who cared didn't know." Which makes a lot of sense to this reader. But it does come with the corollary that these stories must be pious fictions.

I have written two decent sized books about Jesus which total 160,000 words when added together. Writing them involved a fair amount of hard work. One thing I highlighted in them is that Jesus himself never wrote a single word. Or, if we are being pedantic, no documentation that has ever been discovered is arguably from the hand of the person Jesus. In fact, most of it, including the Christian gospels of the New Testament, is written by people who, in writing, do so because they believe things about him. I find it quite natural at this point to wonder what he would say about that and to wonder what, if anything, he would say about the books that have been circulated in his name since that time. I think by analogy to modern biographies. These may be written with or without the agreement of their subject and sometimes they provoke a reaction from the one being written about. My point is that someone else's view about a person may not be the same as that person's views about themselves. It also means we must question any words put in their mouths and especially their meaning. Historical claims require historical verification. But how much historical verification of the story of Jesus have YOU ever done? Does it seem to you, even from the gospels, that Jesus intended to found a religion in his name? It honestly doesn't to me. Yet one was anyway and Jesus was claimed as the source. Unfortunately, we do not have any words from him on this that are not put there by those who would entirely agree with the idea.

The stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus in general I do not believe. I do not believe the stories of his death because I wonder how they could ever be verified as true and I wonder how these people who claim to know what they know actually know it. This is important because, as said above, it is important we don't just believe things because someone bothered to write them down. Especially in our current age, the age of "fake news," this would be regarded as madness. Historical claims require historical verification and in the case of the (hi)story of Jesus this is unlikely to be anything that is ever available. (This is something many biblical scholars will never admit to. They are basically swapping opinions because actual hard evidence is lacking and likely always will be.) So what we are left with is an unverifiable account that is there as literature because it is a meaningful story and as part of a greater myth. When it comes to the resurrection we are up against even greater problems. Resurrection, really? I will simply note here that I'm hardly the first person to note that when the gospels talk about the resurrection of Jesus and its immediate aftermath their former parallel nature before his death disappears. Each go their own way and say different things happened, different people saw different things, some even "didn't believe". I think this scattergun approach to these events is right and I think it points to one thing: Jesus never rose from the dead as a man with a body walking out of a tomb at a definitive point in time. If he rose anywhere it was in the thoughts and dreams and hopes of any followers he had left. Christianity exists today so something must be responsible for it. But it wasn't Jesus because a much more likely historical outcome, one in line with standard Roman crucifixion practices, was that no one who cared about Jesus ever knew where he was buried in the first place. But how would they know, they all ran away according to the gospels themselves!

In closing let me say that I have no problem with anyone's religious faith. Many in today's world do but I have as much disgust for dogmatic, egotistical atheists as I do for the most apologetic Christian or anyone else. People, in my view, may believe anything "live enough to tempt their will," in the words of William James. But any faith that is a closed box, that is not open to question, is, in my view, not much of a faith. Of course, if you want to practice it in silence and in private then I won't disturb you. But if that faith is public in nature and universal in its claims then that becomes a different matter. Questions about Jesus, for example, are public and open to question by anyone as matters of fact not just as cherished private beliefs. You cannot believe Jesus said this or that or meant something else if, in fact, it never occurred. You can say Jesus "rose from the dead" and lives today in your heart through faith but if it turns out that no one ever knew where the tomb was or even, as some still maintain, that there never even was a Jesus to begin with, then these are relevant questions for anyone interested in them and not just believers. Faith is how many human beings attempt to bridge the divide between themselves as limited, conditioned beings and that which is beyond them, the ineffable, the endless and the unconditioned. I don't for myself find anything wrong with this. But it not necessarily just a private matter. Just as Wittgenstein argued there is no such thing as a private language I wonder if there can ever be such a thing as a private faith either.