Dear Tod,

Would you, at need, accept a highly truncated lyrical examination of
some of the issues of power and religion, not in the modern world but
at the beginnings of the Christian church?  Here we find collaboration
with imperial power; the maniacal fear/hatred of women/sexuality, put
to use in both sectarian and nationalist movements. Here too we find
to some degree the substrate of Islam, the unbending zeal and ascetism
mixed with an abiding concern for the poor — the very concerns of the
strain of early Christianity that was marginalized and driven into the
Arabian deserts after the Roman sacking of Jerusalem in AD 70, which
left only two main survivors, religiously: the collaborationist
Pharisees and Pauline Christians.

The brief lines are backed up largely by Robert Eisenmann's massive
(900+ pages) work on James, the Brother of Jesus, a work of meticulous
scholarship, told straight, that nonetheless feels like a fever dream
as you read it….

 

Dear Chris,

 

Oh, definitely.  definitely, definitely…

 

And here it is:

 

 

 

 

The Book of James

 

                                    I.

In the desert, harsh winds shift sand among the stones.

From a distance, the illusion of substance arises;

you can almost see the outline and bulk of a great fortress:

sandstone battlements, impregnable walls, secured immensity.

Yet it seems to float in the tortured air, it will not keep still,

it shifts as the sand shifts, it falls apart and forms again

at some remove.

 

Because that which knows must have meat for knowing;

because that which fears must be consoled;

because that which beats and boils in the flesh

must seek a reason beyond its blood –

therefore these footprints in the shining sand,

snaking, lurching, tangled, lost.

 

                                    II.

Unbending zeal. Submission to the Law.

Fear of the corruption by blood. “Who lieth with a woman

in her blood.” Abomination of kindred marriage.

Purity of diet. Preparation for war and world’s end;

the restoration of national liberty.

“Who lieth with a woman in her blood.”

Righteousness. Perfection in holiness.

Separation from foreign luxury:

hiding the Temple from the eyes of the usurper

and his harlots. “Who lieth with a woman in her blood.”

The Standing One; the Hidden; the silence in the desert

that broods for centuries, then explodes at last

in the ancient metal of a black rock from heaven.

 

                                    III.

Paul and the Pharisees sought his death.

He escaped beyond the Jordan, to Qumran.

 

Paul was at home in the court of Herod.

He had contacts in the household of Nero.

 

No one knows how Paul died, or where. Many collaborators

were awarded with estates in Spain or Gaul.

 

                                    IV.

He did not write by candlelight, for the room was close,

an ill-made cell, and the heat and smoke disturbed him.

Instead by day, with an open door, he worked

on his ecclesiastical correspondence.

This was in Alexandria, in the reign of Trajan,

many years after the destruction of Jerusalem,

and during one of the intervals of persecution.

He was engaged in polemic with a Desert Father

from Damascus region over the Virgin Birth

and the nature of Christ’s family. There was as yet no canon,

and both men drew upon such writings as they had found

in years of searching or had been given to them

by their masters in the faith. The Damascan

was an Ebionite, a sect sometimes called “The Poor,”

partisans of James, the brother of Jesus.

In years to come, when Rome took up the Cross,

they would be killed, or driven deep into the wastes;

but for now, he could still address this adversary

in Christian love as “Brother.”

 

“Brother,” he wrote, in the blazing light of morning,

“The Mother of Our Lord knew not this taint of blood.

No, not even her loins were touched with blood

when she gave birth to Our Lord, but the Holy Spirit

surrounded the Infant with a shell of light,

so that like an egg, a perfect oval,

He was brought into the world unpolluted.

Those who speak of Our Lord’s ‘brothers’ have been led astray.

These were cousins and the sons of Mary’s husband;

they rejected and despised Him, they hated her

for their father’s sake, for in her righteousness

she would not lie with him, nor knew she any blood

to make her fruitful of the flesh, but only by the Holy Spirit

did she, but once, conceive. So it was He gave her,

on the cross, into the keeping of another, that is,

unto the Spirit, not the flesh.”

 

Today the door is open, and the street beyond is peaceful;

but not long since were fires, and mobs in  blood,

rending both the faithful and the lost. Then the cohort,

maddened by the general roar, trampled down all before them,

killing, raping, looting, through an endless day and night.

Shuttered and bolted against the storm, he had trembled;

he had prayed and had been passed over. But his son was murdered,

his family with him; and his daughter outraged, and her child.

 

“Brother,” he wrote, and the sea-heat gave him vigor,

“Put aside your false books, which mire you in the world.

Do not be as Jews and heathen, whose righteousness is of the flesh.

For Christ has conquered powers and principalities,

and therefore we dwell in the house of the Spirit,

in the purified Temple, rebuilt by His blood.”

 

A survivor goes limping past the doorway. Lit from behind,

her rags are like flames in the glorious sun.

 

 

***

Postscript to the Study of Christian Origins

 

Remember the darkness of those days

(no greater than ours, but different in kind):

how fluid the boundaries of information,

as permeable as quantum matter;

how dissolute the bulk of authority,

how magical still the word, its quality of spell,

its dangerous half-life radiating even from fragments,

a stylus cutting patterns in the brain. And how this chaos

(no greater than ours, but different in kind)

was combated with chance accretions

of myth, rumor, instinct, tradition –

a porous dream, a net,

a grate through which surging waters flow,

altered, for an instant, to its form.