Final Fridays

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Authors: John Barth
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“confidential” healing of the sick and the lame (12:15–21) : “. . . many followed him, and he healed them all, and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘[The Messiah] will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. . . .’”

    And so on and on. It is from the master himself, one guesses, that the apostle borrows this operative formulation: from Jesus’s flat-out declaration in the Sermon on the Mount, as Matthew reports it (5:17)—“‘. . . I have come not to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them’”—to his reminding those of his followers indignant to the point of violence at his arrest and impending judgment (26:53, 54): “‘Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that [what’s about to happen] must be so?’” For this reader, the climactic such moment comes at the Last Supper, when, facing the prospect of his “death foretold,” Jesus declares (25:24), “The Son of man goes as it is written of him.” Even nonbelievers may feel a frisson at that remark: the hero’s calm acceptance of his hard fate. He has, in effect, no choice: If upon his agonized later prayer the bitter cup really were rescripted to pass from him, then either he or the sacred original script would be falsified.
    Self-conscious, uninnocent mythic herohood; historically aware and prescient messiahship—they are not callings for the faint of heart.
    In real, non-scripted life, of course, the distinction between Case-1 and Case-2 heroes and saviors is often notoriously less clear, at least as perceivable from “outside,” than it is in these thought experiments . 15 God knows whether the Nazarene from Galilee was the Messiah, although every Christian ipso facto believes him to have been, and it is only on the hypothesis of his having been that the Jesus Paradox is energized. He knows by heart the excruciating script; per the poignant paradox, however, he isn’t acting , but reciprocally validating to the end what has validated him—from the beginning.

How It Was, Maybe: A Novelist Looks Back on Life in Early-Colonial Virginia and Maryland
    This address, on a subject about which I’m a bit more knowledgeable (or once was, anyhow) than about Biblical texts, was delivered at the Williamsburg Institute’s 50th Annual Forum, in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in February 1998—a novel and rather challenging lecture-venue for me, but an attractive one. I include it here with a tip of the hat to the endlessly resourceful, somewhat protean Captain John Smith on the 300th anniversary of his first exploratory cruises from Jamestown to the head of Chesapeake Bay.
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    T HE OPERATIVE WORDS in my title, as I trust you’ll have noticed already, are the words “maybe” and “novelist.” They are intended not quite to disqualify me from addressing an audience of professional and amateur specialists on the subject of colonial life hereabouts, but to disclaim any particular authority in the matter—in short, to cover my butt. By trade and by temperament I am in fact not any sort of historian or antiquarian, but a novelist and short-story-writer, a fictioneer—a professional liar, we might as well say,
of whom the most one can reasonably demand is that his fabrications be of professional quality. I’ll do my best.
    What’s worse, I’m not even a historical novelist, properly speaking. The straightforward historical novel—Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind , Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty , James Michener’s Chesapeake —is a category of fiction that makes me just a tad uneasy, 1 even though I’ve much enjoyed such exceptional specimens

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