Apocrypha now: ‘More to the story’ religion, pop culture
When the Church fathers gathered for the Council of Nicea in AD 325, they had to decide, among many other things, which works would constitute the canon of the Christian Church.
By that point in time, there were all sorts of gospels in circulation, more than the four now regarded as official. More would emerge in the coming centuries, as would various letters attributed to Paul and Acts of the Apostles, such as the Acts of Thomas, which recounts his rather dubious exploits eastward all the way to India.
After their exclusion from the Christian canon, many of these now-apocryphal works were actively suppressed or simply not copied anymore. The rarity of these texts, combined with a post-Enlightenment suspicion of Church authority, lends them an air of mystery in our modern era.
Works of pop culture such as Wilton Barnhardt’s 1993 novel “Gospel” and the 1999 film “Stigmata” center upon the quest for some lost gospel that has the potential to upset the ecclesiastical order. And our media can always be relied upon to explode into breathless fervor every time some scrap of parchment is discovered that might reveal “the secrets of Jesus.” The 2006 unveiling of a manuscript of the “Gospel of Judas” coincided with the release of a television documentary on the subject and the publication of multiple books.
CHRISTIAN FAN FICTION
Most of these non-canonical gospels constitute little more than Christian fan fiction of the era. Whether or not Jesus existed as a historical figure, he presents in the authorized texts a fairly complex and human literary character who exhibits frustrations, sadness, anger and doubt. All of that humanity is expunged in many of the apocryphal gospels, most notably in the so-called “infancy gospels” that seek to fill in those early years in Jesus’ life left untouched by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. When Jesus and family cross into Egypt on the run from Herod, all the idols in the land fall over. The trees bow before Jesus, who also manages to tame some local dragons. The child Jesus sculpts clay birds that he brings to life and, at the age of one year, curses a boy, causing him to die, and later strikes blind some of Joseph and Mary’s neighbors. The precocious Son of God also manages to give sermons longer and more tedious than any presented by his adult self in the canonical gospels. It’s a childhood filled with such miracles and confidence that one must wonder how this person evolved into a man reluctant to use his powers, who speaks in parables rather than fullblown discourses on the nature of the divine.
Other gospels are similarly afflicted. The Gospel of Nicodemus features more than a mere death and resurrection; here, Jesus himself marches to the gates of hell to free all the righteous Jews and others who had died before his advent.
And there are all sorts of apocryphal acts of the apostles, in which the followers of Jesus work deeds that put Jesus to shame. One begins to think that the real miracle lay in those populations who remained unpersuaded by the Christian message.
THE EVOLUTION OF RAMBO
This distortion of character over time is not unique to Christian pseudepigrapha (i.e., fan fiction, spurious works supposedly written by biblical figures). We
can see the same process at work in popular culture, too, especially those franchises spanning decades.
Take, for example, the 1982 movie “First Blood,” which introduces John Rambo to the big screen. Although Rambo blows up a lot of stuff over the run time, he specifically, in the beginning of the movie, seeks to avoid conflict with the local sheriff’s department there in Hope, Wash. He never kills anyone deliberately; the only death is one he causes indirectly when he throws a rock at a helicopter, causing the pilot to lose control and tip out a deputy who had unhooked his safety harness. In the end, this man who had been traumatized by the Vietnam War doesn’t even kill the sheriff who had tormented him, but instead, after falling at the feet of his former commanding officer in tears, surrenders to federal authorities.
By the time “Rambo: First Blood Part II” rolls around three years later, the reluctant warrior has become a veritable Viking berserker in the jungles of Southeast Asia, shirtlessly killing Vietnamese soldiers with nary a psychological twinge. Three more sequels feature Rambo creatively butchering people across the world, leaving us to wonder what happened to that character in “First Blood.” Did a prison psychologist help him to embrace his inner murderer between the first two movies?
Something similar happens to the character of John McClane as “Die Hard” goes from being a one-off story and devolves into a series. The original movie is watchable because it centers the reality of human frailty. McClane starts his night of action as a barefoot guy in a tank top running from the bad guys and trying to get the local cops involved; only reluctantly does he try to take on these terrorists himself.
When they prick him, he bleeds — we get to see him spending time in a bathroom picking shards of glass out of his feet. Throughout it all, his overriding goal is to save lives. By the end of the movie, this New York cop is a limping, bloody mess propelled forward only by adrenaline and love for his wife.
However, by the last entry in the franchise, 2013’s “A Good Day to Die Hard,” McClane is a veritable god of war, aloof and indestructible, who gets thrown through windows and survives explosions, all resulting in nary a scratch on his body. He evinces little concern for civilian lives and likely kills or wounds several as he drives over their cars in one scene. All the humanity that made the 1988 movie so fun to watch has been violently excised.
But this is by no means the worst case of pop-culture drift toward apocryphal sensibilities. That dishonor goes to the sequels to 1984’s “The Terminator.” In the original, our hero Kyle Reese, who has traveled back in time to save the life of Sarah Connor and thus save hope for humanity, is clearly damaged. He can barely sleep without dreaming of the machine-dominated hellscape he left behind.
Yet he is not so traumatized that he can feel no tenderness. The one night he and Sarah Connor spend making love is a testament to the power of vulnerability, even in the face of the invulnerable Terminator, because it is that moment of surrender that conceives the future hero who will save humankind.
All of that is laid waste in 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” in which the hero is no longer representative of humanity but is instead a carbon copy of the inhuman Terminator from the first movie. The effect would be similar to making Pontius Pilate a hero of the Christian story. There are some apocryphal texts that tried to do exactly that.
WHERE’S THE HUMANITY?
As franchises develop, they often distill down the notes of humanity that made the originals so interesting, letting all that nuance boil away in the determination to give the audience a stronger kick. People are more likely to remember the exciting bits of any piece of media. They will remember John McClane jumping from an exploding tower with a fire hose tied around his midriff more vividly than they will his tearful admission that he often told his wife that he loved her but never told her he was sorry.
Likewise, in those later gospels and acts, the broader character of Jesus is boiled away, leaving behind more and more moments of miracle and wonder. More God, less human.
Our present political moment exemplifies this same trend. Our previous presidents, despite the various crimes they committed in office, were more complicated than might be expected.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was an actual general who involved the United States in the overthrow of democratic governments across the world, but still saw the value in international cooperation and warned of the military-industrial complex in his departing speech. Richard M. Nixon was an absolute criminal and one of the worst people to inhabit the Oval Office, but he didn’t lack the ability to govern and knew how to co-opt Democratic policies, such as environmental protection. Ronald Reagan oversaw Central American genocides and the selling of weapons to terrorist regimes, and was much more appearance than substance, as many actors are, but even he could shelve the heroic rhetoric for a bit to sign treaties with America’s greatest adversary and thus reduce our respective nuclear stockpiles and the likelihood of devastating war.
However, voters currently pushing America toward the dark embrace of populism don’t remember how previous administrations worked to cooperate with the other political party, or even some of America’s longtime adversaries, to produce a functioning government and a safer world. They remember not the nuance of earlier administrations but rather the catchphrases, such as “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
One should not rule by catchphrase and soundbite, but too many of today’s politicians do just that, knowing not what makes a good law but only what makes a good Tweet. And their voters, trained by our media’s ever faster push toward apocryphal sensibilities, demand yet more distilled moonshine, demand that governing (which should always be boring) be as exciting as possible.
APOCRYPHAL POLITICS RULE
They demand more insults, more violations of international norms, more attacks upon their fellow Americans, less governing, less uniting Americans in a common vision. They prefer the Jesus who struck children dead than the one who blessed them. They prefer the long-divorced and nigh invincible John McClane to the man with bloodied feet hoping he lives long enough to be reconciled to his wife.
Sure, we can admit that “I’ll be back” sounds cool when uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in the original context, it’s laden with threat, and after he says those three words, the Terminator does come back and kills a whole lot of police officers.
Yet when he went to visit Auschwitz in September 2022, ol’ Arnie wrote those three words in the guest book. He wrote down the most memorable catch phrase of a genocidal robot while visiting the most horrifying memorial to genocide in the world.
Why? It’s just those apocryphal sensibilities bubbling up, like they have throughout history, indestructible artifacts of inhumanity here to destroy our future. We can only defeat them by embracing our own full humanity, by refusing to reduce our worldviews to catch phrases and our fellow humans to caricatures.