Gospel
truths
Jim
Campbell reviews a Scots dramatist's controversial construal of Christianity as
a proto-Nazi movement
Star
Twin by John Cummings. Published 2004 by Pen Press, London, 81 pages, UK�5.99,
ISBN 1 904 75400 7.
In
2000, John Cummings wrote a thirty-minute play for television entitled Star
Twin. Its characters include Jesus, Mary, Miriam, Judas, Paul, Hitler and
Mussolini. For reasons they did not fully elaborate, the BBC rejected it, adding
the comment: "Surely you do not expect anyone to put this on." In response,
Cummings has written a spirited 41-page preface to the play which, like those
of George Bernard Shaw, is longer and a great deal more eloquent than the play
itself.
A
little background might be appropriate at this point. Cummings is a retired
teacher of modern languages living in Dumbarton, an industrial town on the
outskirts of Glasgow. The west coast of Scotland
became home for thousands of Irish immigrants in the 19th
century, Catholics mostly, who hoped to escape the poverty and famine of rural Ireland. Hostility between them and the Protestant native Scots was inevitable and
simmers to this day. When one remembers
that a similar religious cocktail led to open warfare in Ulster in the 1970�s
and 80�s, a region geographically and culturally close to the west coast of
Scotland, one can see that for some an upbringing in Dumbarton might encourage a
jaundiced view of Christianity.
Thirty years ago, Cummings tells us, he
decided to read the four gospels "one after another in a single sitting." I
think I would require a long period of solitary confinement with only a bible
and a chamber pot for company to be motivated to do the same. Those of us in
school in the 1950�s and 60�s will have read passages from the Bible and
will recall the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables and, of course, the
Crucifixion. What we lack is the big picture, the overall direction in which
these writings are leading us. Cummings argues that this is where things get
interesting. Nested within a patched and crudely edited compilation of writings
are two stories:
"On
top of the basic story of the life and death of Jesus, itself a story full of
strange quirks and contradictions, has been imposed the powerful and primitive
myth of the sacrificed god. The myth, a fertility myth of death and
resurrection, was familiar to most if not all of the peoples of the
Mediterranean
and the
Middle East."
His
point is that this myth has been grafted on as an afterthought to give this new
religion currency within the
Roman Empire
among non-Jewish Mediterranean people. We might term this �sexing up�
nowadays.
Things
get worse. Except
for walk on parts, women are written out of the story. There are no strong
females, no Penelope, no Jocasta, no Isis. The Apostles were all male, a fact
still used to support opposition to the ordination of women within certain Christian
Churches. Many Christian divines expressed fear and loathing of women and a horror of
sex. This is no small matter. Witch burning, often with church sanction, was
widespread throughout
Europe
at different historical times. Scotland
burnt its share as Cummings points out:
"[The
burning of witches] was surely the most appalling social tragedy this country
had known until the Clearances, and yet it hardly rates a mention in the
standard histories of Scotland."
Further,
and tellingly, the gospels are anti-Semitic. At this point in the preface,
Cummings assembles a catalogue of endemic anti-Semitism within the Christian
Church, early, middle and late.
It would seem Martin Luther was a Jew hater par
excellence. Cummings quotes from a little known pamphlet by him which is
insanely vituperative. Calvin took little interest in Jews and perhaps as a
result Scotland
did not persecute them, while Germany�s record in this area is as it is. The route to the Holocaust was sketched
out in the gospels and has been enthusiastically annotated by the Church ever
since.
The
last charge in the indictment against the Church is that it developed a lust for
temporal power and conquest inconsistent with the teachings of its founder. One
of the lines widely quoted from the Sermon on the Mount is "Blessed are the
meek for they shall inherit the earth." This is not an idea the Church
propagated by example. Cummings, with an eye for the telling illustration, lists
Crusades, wars, massacres and persecutions, instigated and endorsed by the
Church, both Catholic and Protestant.
In the case of the Cathars (and Albigensians), it enthusiastically
supported genocide.
What
we have here is a vigorous polemic laced with a dash of conspiracy theory. It is
well
researched and fluently written and I imagine that many committed Christians would
agree with much of it. Some might have difficulty with the following:
"There
have been many, many dark days in European history: the day the emperor
Constantine espoused the Christian cause was one of the darkest."
A
problem characteristically encountered with conspiracy theories is their
treatment of negative evidence. It tends to get dumped. Cummings does not
discuss the history of Medieval Europe. It is one of recurrent appalling
catastrophes. Seemingly inexplicable pandemics scythed through urban populations
at irregular intervals. Norsemen from Scandinavia, militant Islam from the
south and marauding tribes from
Central Asia
periodically devastated far and wide. These were the Barbarian invasions. In
the 8th
century and in response Charlemagne put together a militarised state, the
Holy Roman Empire
to subjugate and convert the barbarians. The Norsemen were sufficiently
impressed to adopt Christianity, along with the name Magnus for their children.
In the 12th century the
Mongol cavalry of Ghengis Khan brought Christendom to its knees. No European
army ever won a battle against them. In this perilous world the meek inherited
nothing.
Christianity�s
hatred and persecution of the Jews throughout the last two thousand years
culminated in the Holocaust, argues Cummings. This would be difficult to deny if
stated in these terms. He does not state it in these terms, however:
"Many serious commentators have traced the line which runs from the Gospels to
the Nazi extermination camps but I know of no commentator who comes straight out
and accuses the Church of the crime. Yet what other conclusion can be drawn?
Christianity, in my view, was a proto-Nazi movement."
If
the Holocaust is a Christian crime and that is what Cummings argues then the
Nazis were merely agents. As Cummings notes every action taken by the Nazis
against the Jews had been rehearsed, advocated, or implemented, in previous
centuries by the Church. The exception, and it is quite an important exception,
is genocide.
One
might ask why it took two thousand years for Christianity to fulfil its
genocidal mission. Did it take that long to summon up the malice? Were there
logistical problems? Neither seems to have prevented the genocide inflicted on
the Cathars and Albigensians in southern France
over eight hundred years earlier. Nor were the Nazis noted for their Christian
zeal. As Cummings points out they were "brutally contemptuous of
Christianity." It is hard to see them as puppets of a string-pulling Church.
Convicting the Christian churches of perpetrating the Holocaust would be
equivalent to convicting them of bombing Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
Have
other religions and societies been significantly gentler than Christendom?
This might be difficult to demonstrate. Historically, violent military
states are depressingly common. Sparta,
Assyria, Rome, the Inca Aztec and Zulu empires, Japan,
Persia, come to mind and none of these is Christian. The last ten thousand years of
human history is a nightmare of insensate brutality so horrible that historians
have clearly censored their accounts. Christianity has contributed generously to
this wretched litany and Cummings is right to point it out. He links religious
ideology to the psycopathy of individual church founders and both to criminal
states and empires. These are valuable insights.
We
come now to the play. The twins in the title are Hitler and St Paul. Jesus walks with a limp, is married to Mary and is called �Jay.� Miriam is
his mother. Jesus, who sees himself as the anointed one of the house of David,
has lost the support of the citizens of Jerusalem
(if indeed he ever had it) and has gone into hiding. His brother Judas is
counselling flight but Paul, who has turned up with Judas, wants Jesus to give
himself up and allow himself to be killed. Paul plans to invent a new state
religion combining the sacrifice of a God, anti-Semitism and hatred of women
and use it to take over the
Roman Empire and any subsequent empires. The end game will be a future state ruled by a
twin who shares his hatred of Jews, his morbid dysfunctional sexuality and a
similar �road to Damascus-like� revelatory experience, in this case while
lying blinded in a trench on the Western Front. Committed Christians might not
enjoy the final scene where Judas is in a twentieth century prison hut with Paul
and Hitler. A final shocking rant from Hitler against the Jews ends the play.
Which
takes us back to the BBC�s original comment: "Surely you do not expect
anyone to put this on." Plays are obliged to entertain, in some sense of this
term. It is hard to see how this would. It is too calculatedly bizarre. Little
explanation is offered for characters and events very unlike those in the
conventional version. Jesus is, for example, a deluded simpleton believing
himself to be the anointed one, and Paul (whose unhistorical presence is not
explained) is a fanatic who mesmerises both Jesus and his mother. Jesus� wife
Mary is a woman of some spirit albeit out of her depth; Judas, Jesus� brother,
is a tough-minded realist, the born survivor, and Mussolini�s brief appearance
is perhaps offered as comic relief. The script is pared to the bone, colloquial
and at times impenetrable. An audience is likely to be confused and irritated by
much of this. One can imagine Cummings chuckling over the fury and resentment
the play�s broadcast might occasion his local church and school dignitaries,
past and present. Much
as one might sympathise, this is not a recipe for high viewing figures.
The
play�s message is a cryptic version of the preface, powerful where
comprehensible. Both Paul and Judas are intriguing and complex characters,
opposites, from whom the play�s ideas emerge. The play could be adapted for
radio (it does not seem to have much to offer television) and given a narrator
who could weave into the dialogue extracts from the preface, itself an
absorbing, unsettling and well-written essay.
Jim Campbell graduated
in Philosophy in Belfast
and has a teaching qualification and an M.A. in Linguistics. After an
undistinguished career as a lecturer and teacher, he retrained as a plumber and
electrician and works as a self-employed builder in Bedford,
England.
Note:
This review was first published on August 29 2004 by JUST Book Reviews.
Return
to top
Home
| Feedback |
About
us | JUST
Response