C K Stead
Books
Stead and the heretics
by Philip Matthews
The godless gospel of C K Stead.
We shouldn’t be surprised to find C K Stead among the heretics and not just because of a general position as an antagonist or contrarian, but because he has written satires of Christianity before. In a poem called “Lucifer Dictates His Reply”, Stead as Lucifer mocks God, author of the Bible, within a kind of divine literary spat (“No one ever wrote/A longer novel/Or a worse one”). In “Even Newer English Bible” and its sequel, Psalm 23 and the Lord’s Prayer are rewritten in banal contemporary language (“The Lord is my caregiver so I’m OK …”).
So, it seemed inevitable that if Stead were to write his own gospel, he would write it as Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus while, the Bible says, occupied by the spirit of Satan. But My Name Was Judas is a revisionist retelling. There’s no God here, no Satan, no divinity, no betrayal, no kiss, no miracles, no suicide. Like the daydreaming Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Stead’s Judas lives long enough to be bemused to see the Christian religion grow up around him. In 70CE, the elderly Judas is about the same age as Stead (“One consequence of reaching seventy is that many of the people you dream about are dead”) and, again like Last Temptation, the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70CE is in the background – Stead uses it to make a powerful comparison between starvation during the siege (people are eating rats, snakes, birds) and the impossible bounty of the loaves-and-fishes story that he hears from an itinerant preacher.
In Stead’s account, Judas and Jesus knew each other from childhood. Stories of Jesus as a boy were popular in apochrypal and Gnostic gospels; like a young Superman, he performs awkward magic tricks with his shaky new powers. Stead the atheist doesn’t have any of that: his Jesus and Judas are bright, competitive philosophy students, with Judas from a rich family and Jesus from a poor one (a Holy Family who enjoy fart jokes, apparently). Some of the alternative versions of the Jesus story are touched on here – we get the rumour that Jesus’ father may really have been a Roman soldier; this Jesus studies with the Dead Sea cult, the Essenes – but Stead keeps Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. Why? Even the Vatican has abandoned that position, so it’s weird to see a contemporary novelist keep it.
In the gospels’ symbolic drama, what is the role of Judas? Apart from his betrayal of Jesus and subsequent suicide, his big scene is to protest when one of the women called Mary pours expensive oil on Jesus; the money would be better used, he says, if we gave it to the poor (prompting Jesus to say that the poor are always with us). From that scene, you get the popular idea that Judas held on to revolutionary ideas that Jesus abandoned. Bafflingly, Stead has other disciples do that rebuking and Judas is merely a bystander.
But the betrayal scene is Judas’s defining moment (without it, is he really Judas any more?). The philosophical problem has always been that, if Jesus had to die according to God’s established plan for humanity – if it was all “preordained fact”, as Jorge Luis Borges put it – then Judas is not a villain, but a saviour, another redeemer (that’s the thrust of Borges’s short story “Three Versions of Judas”, in which Judas acted with “enormous humility”). That’s tougher material to think through than the story that Stead presents, which does little more than say that none of this God stuff really happened anyway. This kind of miracle-debunking is pretty old hat, though, and it can feel deflating as fiction: Lazarus wasn’t dead, this Judas says, just really, really sick, hence the easy mistake, and Judas/Stead goes through the loaves-and-fishes story like a nagging fact-checker (“Where had the baskets come from? Who had brought them and for what purpose?”).
There are some strong moments here – the crucifixion scene and the beheading of John the Baptist are suitably ghastly – but you might think that an anti-religious religious story such as this is only going to work if it has a vicious and lively sense of humour; the kind of humour, in fact, that you find in Stead’s poems on the subject. Or, as the elderly Judas says of himself near the end of this interesting but oddly mundane book, “The old man has learned to curb his tongue and keep his best jokes to himself.”
MY NAME WAS JUDAS, by C K Stead (Vintage, $27.99)
