John: A Novel

John: A Novel (by Niall Williams, Bloomsbury, 2008) is about the last years of John the Apostle, exiled on the Island of Patmos and then, after the persecution by the Emperor Domination, at Ephesus where he died aged a hundred, or thereabouts. I’d been given the book by a friend with a warning: I can’t think of who else I could recommend this to. Why me, I asked. Well you’re a Catholic, she replied, as though that self evidently explained all. Yeeees, I said – that always helps. Used to be, by the way...used to be. She was right, of course - being herself a Once-a-Catholic-Always-a-Catholic, and therefore congenitally responsive to the kind of cosmic drama that suffuses such spectacles as High Mass or the Sacrament of Ordination ... "You are a Priest forever, according to the order of Melchisidech"... It took me a while to get into it - to find my Once-a-Catholic feet - but, OMG! when I did …. I was so moved by the experience that I actually went to the Good Friday service a few days later. And who knows....

I have always loved to imagine the New Testament world and realised after about twenty pages that though I had followed the authors of the Synoptic Gospels around Palestine and Paul around the Roman Empire, I’d never paid attention to John. You know, the one who bangs on for page after page about stuff like vines and branches – like a Zen Master on steroids. The Johannine language put me off when I was a kid, and even when I was a monk I preferred the simpler language of Mark. So, initially, did Williams’ language put me off in places – until I realised that every now and then, when he breaks out in Gerard Manley Hopkinesque word pyrotechnics, it is for a reason! Words, you see…In the beginning was the Word … Ah! Bright things! And JtA also wrote the Apocalypse, whose effect is due as much to the language as the message. So Williams draws on all Johannine sources, breaking out occasionally into neo-apocalyptic language when he wants the reader to feel spooked by what’s going on at that moment in the story. Once I caught on I started looking forward to the next outbreak and would pause to read such passages over and over, ruminating, savouring the texture and flavour, and yes, swallowing – or is it inhaling? The effect is the same.

What follows are matters arising… you know, the Ah haa!’s that resulted when I recognised my own world in the story.

The first issue that jumped off the page is the presumed imminence of the Second Coming, not only then, but now and at many times in between. We are all too familiar with a particularly toxic version of the Second Coming in our own times. Fundamentalists salivate at the expectation that there will be global catastrophe any time soon as the prelude to their being gathered up by their returning Lord and taken to their eternal reward while the rest of us slog it out until there is no last man standing. This is a sick parody of the expectation of those who were the first to wait – those who had every reason (not just a self-serving excuse) to believe that Jesus would come again in their own life time as he said he would. Those who were the first to wait hoped to save the world, not to witness divine retribution, and for this they endured ridicule, contempt, persecution and the unending repudiation of their own expectations and understanding. They waited not only in physical exile, but mental exile for most of their life times, and felt useless as they chafed at the bit, anxious to do their Lord’s work. Half of them stood firm as half their number, seduced by their own self-interest and preferring belief in the One to fidelity to Jesus, imagined that they could take things into their own hands and left the island. When the exile of the remnant ended they left what might be compared with a monastic existence for what might be called “The Original Byron Bay” – a world in which beliefs were the social currency, with an inflation rate of Zimbabwean proportions, in which belief in humanity must have seemed the ultimate futility. There was never any triumph in what they did in Ephesus – just a resolute fidelity to the sense of mission arising out of (one of them) having known Jesus. When Jesus did come again, it was in such an unexpected way that no one observing from the outside would have noticed. Many who have heard about it in the two millennia since, simply haven’t got it; and not getting it as it actually happened, have attempted to conjure his coming again on their own terms – and will continue to do so until … well, you know … the second coming.

I can’t remember ever being so deeply moved by an idea from a novel. Two millennia after the event it is easy to lose sight of the fact that that those who were the first to wait really suffered as the anticipated return of Jesus became less and less imminent. John was probably a teenager when he met Jesus; probably not yet twenty when Jesus died. Eighty years is a long time to wait for something that you anticipated would happen next month – next year at the latest. I once waited two years (in my early twenties) for someone to do what he promised, and eventually gave up. Can I imagine what it would be like to wait for eighty years? I’ll answer that with another question to which I cannot presume to have an answer. What sort of man was Jesus, that someone persevered for so long waiting for him to come again?

A second point is that faith is not belief – were it so there would no Christians beyond the first generation. The beliefs of those who were the first to wait were continually challenged from their first encounter with Jesus until their deaths. This is illustrated by the contrasting accounts of those who believed in the One and did not know Jesus; and those who knew Jesus and withstood the impact of his not coming in the way they believed he would. Papias believed that he could restore the life two children and drive the devil out of the mother who killed them. His faith was not shattered when he failed and he could no longer believe as he had. Believing that Jesus cured lepers did not result in loss of faith when their prayers failed to cure the disease that took two of their number. Papias, one of the diseased, experienced something like to his own crucifixion, feeling utterly abandoned when, having allowed Matthias to show him “evidence” that John was not who he claimed to be, was thrown into the street when his disease was noticed. Feeling unable to return to his community (for fear of infecting them) he never saw John alive again, and languished in a squat in the care of a mute who’d joined them on their way to Ephesus and disappeared shortly after their arrival – until he realised that he’d been healed and sought out the community again. Though the author doesn’t say so, it is reasonable to conclude that, in the imagined world that emanates from this novel, Papias played a definitive role in the Johannine tradition(1). Matthias, on the other hand, the leader of those who affected belief in the One, concocted a fraudulent miracle involving Papias, to demonstrate the authenticity of his claim to have replaced Jesus as the one who witnesses to the One. Belief in the One did not require fidelity to truth. And when their paths later crossed in Ephesus, Matthias again resorted to fraudulent behaviour in an attempt to seduce Papias, approaching the nadir of vulnerability, into belief in the One. Belief is portrayed, in this novel, as the source of toxic behaviour – as what we have in the absence of knowledge. Faith is portrayed as knowledge of The Truth, and stands in stark contrast to the menagerie of believing that was Ephesus on their arrival – as previously noted, “The original Byron Bay”.

This raises the issue of the nature of Apostolic faith. It is received from others who have an authentic connection with the source of faith. It does not bestow unassailable confidence, as contemporary fundamentalists would have themselves believe. Rather it challenges the assumptions of “common sense” living and requires a gradual growth in new habits of thought and action. It accepts failure and is enriched by the humility of making a new beginning. Papias wrote a Gospel: Judas did not.

A third issue is that people misunderstood the faith that drove them and had to learn through patience and disappointment what Jesus’ mission was about. People had, and still have, expectations shaped by their circumstances. The only prospect of transcending their circumstances, in the ancient world, was divine intervention. They imagined gods that decided their collective and individual fates. The Hebrews imagined one God who would send a Messiah. Despite what the prophets said about the role of a chosen people, most Jews expected the Messiah to deliver them to temporal power and prosperity. If Jesus came to think of himself as the Messiah – the Gospels say that he did – it was not as his people’s liberator but as the Suffering Servant, as ‘foretold’ by Isaiah. As a faithful Jew, Jesus could not have imagined himself to be God. But he didn’t baulk at claiming to be The Truth. It was the experience of living in the presence of The Truth that emerged as the imperative of mission. The Muslim word for mission is jihad. Both words mean changing the way one lives and hoping for and doing whatever one can to help others to change too: to change from what we are (and from thinking we cannot be otherwise) to what we can become. People did not, and still do not, want to think that the way to the fullness of what they can be is suffering. The exiles could not understand how not-doing was doing their Lord’s work. Some repudiated mission/jihad and made themselves the centre of their world. But through suffering eventually came the insight that dissolved appearances and overcame necessity. He is risen. He is come again. It has always been thus. It will always be so. Though I am slain I am not harmed (cf Psalm 23). But that is not the same as saying if I have faith, I will not suffer. And it certainly is not the same as saying If I am innocent I don’t deserve to suffer.

Waiting for something that was never going to happen the way people expected produced an enduring outcome of radically transformed expectations. Gay Christians waiting for acceptance and recognition within their churches; women waiting to be ordained as priests in the Catholic church – quo vadis?(2)

The final matter arising out of my first reading is the significance of the Gnostics – those who thought they knew better because they were misled and seduced by their own self-interest. Though the author doesn’t specifically say so, it seems pretty clear that those who preferred belief in the One to knowledge of Jesus represent the Gnostics. From our perspective, they seem not to have been very significant historically, but in their time they were regarded as a substantial threat to the early communities of Christians – who were themselves regarded as threatening to synagogue communities. Gnostics’ beliefs were often superficially similar to Christianity and readily appropriated the name of Jesus, (why not, they snatched at everything else) but they differed substantially in their preference for esoteric knowledge and ritual over communal knowledge and prayer, and emphasised their exclusivity, in much the same way that modern fundamentalists imagine themselves to be God’s insiders. The Gnostic disposition(3) has not declined. In our own times, certain beliefs attract “devotees” who do not have to change anything about their lives, it being sufficient, among like minded people, to profess belief to be believed; and, being believed, to affect a sense of identity that presumes to be informed by belief – often by a cocktail of beliefs. Underpinning this “spiritual” culture is the hedonistic mantra of the age: If it feels good, do it! Supporting it is another slogan diametrically opposed to Judeo-Christian faith: No limits! And there is the trend of making it up as you go along, disguised as the politically liberating tenet, Tell your own story – understood not as Do not be told what your history is; tell it as you know it, but distorted to mean Create a persona and story to suit your whim. Each of the foregoing are made visible in the actions of the “Gnostics” in this novel. But there is yet another tendency that is all but impossible to avoid. At its worst it’s “doing things for others” to make oneself look good. Governments are notorious for such hypocrisy, and so too are some churchmen – and these days, probably some churchwomen. But how thin is the line between knowingly doing something for others to make oneself look good, and unknowingly doing something for others to make oneself feel good. In this story, look not for an example of this among those who believe in the One, but to one less experienced than the others in the knowledge of The Truth.

At the end of the book there is a note from the author headed something like Why I wrote this book. I can’t remember precisely what he said, but it was something like, he wanted to know what John was doing the day before he wrote the gospel. I mention this only because it showed me something about how I had (mis?)read the book. I had thought as I read that he was addressing a number of issues in our own times. If he is to believed – and why wouldn’t one take him at his word – he was doing something completely different: not looking back at an event through the eyes of a 21st Century partisan, but seeking an insight into another time on its own terms. And yet, in doing so, he probably addressed those issued more convincingly than anyone might who set out to do so. Three cheers for the power of fiction. Hip hip…

1. The authorship of the Gospels is vigorously debated. If they were not necessarily written by the person named on the title page they were written by anonymous scribes in the tradition of the Evangelists. Niall Williams does not say that Papias wrote the Gospel of John – the edition that we know today – but he might have pointed the way for readers to imagine such a conclusion. It is an inference that I feel can be drawn from two things that he says about Papias. He has Papias ask John to dictate a Gospel, indicating that it was not the first time he’d done so. Though Papias is not present when John finally does begin to dictate his Gospel to the community, he tells us that in John’s final vision he sees Papias, healed of the disease, writing books that tell of the apostle John, whose voice yet lives and remains.

2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_vadis for a translation and explanation of the expression.

Some may remember that there was a movie titled Quo Vadis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis_(1951_film)
There is a Polish version which depicts the “clash of civilizations” – first screened in August 2001
http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/cinema/QV.html

3. Harold Bloom says that despite being overtly Christian, American religion is actually Gnostic.
See Omens of Millennium, 1996; and The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation, 2006
Were he to turn his gaze on the whole of the Western World, he might come to a similar conclusion. He might start by doing field research in Byron Bay, Australia.

Reviews
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/fiction2
http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/historicalfictionreviews/fr/john.htm
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/john-by-niall-williams-1062487.html

A post from Niall Williams’ Blog
http://kiltumper.blogspot.com/2007/11/about-novel-john-by-niall-williams.html

Examples of neo-apocalyptic language
(this is a work in progress and will be added to as I read the book for a second time)

"Seabirds unsheltered try to go beyond the storm but are blown backwards in darkness like the souls of the undeserving from the near bounds of heaven."