[In the following review, Korn offers a mixed assessment of Live from Golgotha, which he finds to be both “savvy” and tiresome.]

He weighs more than a Japanese wrestler, more than Orson Welles even. You can’t turn that mass of blubber into a part of the Trinity when he is larger than the whole Trinity put together. The image for us of a fat Jesus is simply catastrophic, particularly now that the Polish Pope is making so many converts in the third world, where people are starving to death, and what do we have to offer them? The fattest god in the business. …

At first blush, it seems that Gore Vidal is declaring solidarity with Salman Rushdie, demonstrating that Christians too can blaspheme, contemplate diabolic revisions of sacred texts and write with bawdy derision of the Founder of their faith. Will there be thunderous denunciations, book burnings, a jeremiad from Jerry Falwell, a patwa from Pat Robertson?

On deeper analysis, Live From Golgotha turns out to be a stemmatological fantasia, a study of the inevitable and enjoyable corruption of texts and doctrines. The scene is late-first-century Macedon, the protagonist and increasingly unreliable narrator is that Bishop Timothy, known to us only as the recipient of some of St Paul’s more relaxed correspondence, the one with the stomach problems and the frequent infirmities. Gore Vidal’s Timothy is a well-endowed muscular blond, the recipient not merely of a little wine, but some gross Pauline familiarities. Paul is not seen as admirable (“all those years working as a secret agent for Mossad had made Saint even more devious than the Big Fella in the sky had made him in the first place”), but he wows the audiences around the Eastern Mediterranean bortsch circuit. Into this idyll irrupt various characters from our own time, from Gore Vidal’s own time, presenting themselves variously as dreams, ghosts, visions, mediumistic messages, retroincarnating channelers, holograms and fully fledged time-travellers. Timothy has some initial difficulty distinguishing Messages from spiritual junk mail (“This is no nightmare, Timmy! We’re in the big league now. This is a vision”). The intruders include Mary Baker Eddy, Dr Cutler 1 and 2, the same boffin at different ages, sundry kibitzers, Shirley MacLaine (who brings tofu) and a Media Mogul who brings a television set, thanks to which the bishop promptly becomes an addict of CNN “and what appears to be the usual ongoing bad new for the dollar”, as well as the Sunday Hour of Power and Prayer. But television faces distress him:

Back here in 96 AD those of us who still have a few teeth don’t usually like to show them, which is why there isn’t a lot of smiling going on—not that there is much to smile about, what with high taxes and the crazy Zionists threatening an intifada against the Romans who are, like it or not, the masters of the world, as the Jews learned twenty years ago when the Romans tore down the Temple in Jerusalem and wiped out the entire Zionist movement except for the Irgun terrorist gang, now going strong setting fire to hotel lobbies.

The problem they are all facing back home is that an entity, presumed diabolic, known only as the Hacker, is spreading virus-like among the tapes of the Gospels, both on Earth and in Heaven, erasing as it goes. As the records vanish and memories fade, the past itself is changed. Timothy’s visitors would like him to write another, definitive gospel, and conceal it somewhere whence it will only emerge to save the Saviour in good time for the Second Coming, tentatively scheduled for 2001 AD.

Of course, the visitors, especially the two variant Drs Cutler, have different notions of the truth they wish to preserve, and each attempts to forestall the others: “a foreign network got through to Him—by remote of course—and the interviewer nearly talked Him into giving up all that Zionist crap of His and emigrating to Palm Springs where there’s this reformed temple with His name on it, along with a brand new condo…”.

As the diachronic shenanigans intensify, Timothy’s testimony departs further and further from Gospel truth, as the various intruders put a different spin on him. Suspicious anachronisms abound. Why does Saint Paul refer to the birth of our Lord at Las Vegas and speak of the gospel writers as “Matt, Mark, Lu-lu and John-John”?

Time-travel paradoxes, since there is nothing to restrain them, soon fatigue the conscientious reader. But Live From Golgotha, you will have gathered, is a romp, a Carry On Up To The Right Hand Of God. Timothy is to be transported as anchor-man for a prime-time NBC Easter special, back to the Place of the Skull. But the big question looms: did they nail the right guy? And is it going to prove significant that the television is a Sony, and not a GE model? It sure is.

Meddling with sacred history is an honourable tradition, ever since the pious copyist who (allegedly) inserted into Josephus the eye-witness of Jesus that Josephus so carelessly omitted. A man named Ranger-Gull (he called himself Guy Thorne) wrote When it was Dark (1903), about a Jewish conspiracy to disprove the resurrection with fake archaeological evidence, causing such dismay to the faithful that they would be able to achieve world domination by 1904. That had fewer jokes. Borges played with these ideas, succinctly, in “Three Versions of Judas”. Vidal is not always-succinct. Jokes about Christian fund-raising (the Holy Rolodex), about the smell of fish sauce, jokes about the radical chic set speaking “faux Gallique” are repeated for safety’s sake. A witty phrase about “St Paul seeing the ghost of our Founder on the eastbound Jerusalem-Damascus freeway” is lovingly repeated. And some of the punches are not so much telegraphed as faxed. Moreover (unless it is the unreliable narrator again) Vidal seems to think that dates AM are After Moses (rather than Anno Mundi).

But at his sharpest, there’s nobody sharper or more politically savvy than Gore Vidal (combining, as it were, the best of Albert Gore and Vidal Sassoon): “Selma has elements of boredom in her personality which have not yet been given, perhaps, their fullest rein”; “Jesus didn’t just clear the moneychangers out of the temple, he lowered the prime rate”. He’s particularly skilful at the farcical blending of various modes of gobbledegook: mediaspeak, econotalk, chicchat; nor does he scorn the belly laugh:

“I doubt that.”

One knew immediately that the speaker was Thomas.