Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal

The book is first and foremost a lampoon of Christianity, more specifically, the early years of the church. St. Timothy is a first hand observer St. Paul's effort to expand the market for Christianity. Other Vidal books have documented his cynicism of Christianity and the religious right, but "Live from Golgotha" clearly sets out to satire Christianity from its source: St. Paul. St. Timothy (blue-eyed, hyacinth curls, glutton for the older powerful ladies) is the main narrator for the story. St. Paul is the great fund raiser and dogma developer for the Christian church. While fighting off St. Paul's homosexual advances, St. Timothy experiences the charismatic St. Paul and his miraculous stage show from up close. The business interests from the future, namely NBC and its parent company General Electric, plan to utilize their time travel technology to allow them to transport a television crew back to the time of the Crucifixion at Golgotha. With the intent of sweeping the TV ratings, studio executives are transported to 96 AD in the form of holograms. St. Timothy is their main contact; the executives spare no expense to help St. Timothy prepare his Gospel. Apparently, a mysterious hacker has accessed history at its core and is erasing all other historical documentations of Jesus and his early church. So, St. Timothy must negotiate with self-serving holograms from the future. At times, he will have two holograms of the same person in his room, sent back from the future, but from ten years apart, so their holograms will be of varying quality. Gore Vidal takes a cynical and heretical view of religion and emphasizes Christianity's objectives as self-promotion in pursuit of the all mighty dollar. St. Paul is a charismatic marketer who rolls into a town with his dog-and-pony show. Sometimes, he is taken in and provided large sums of money, other times; he is nearly stoned to death. Vidal makes references to Saint Paul's Holy Rolodex of names used for fundraising and of Jesus' attempt to lower the Prime Rate as the real reason for Jesus' ousting of the money-lenders from the temple. With the aid of worldly knowledge he gains from a television that is transported back through time, St. Timothy transforms from an innocent apostle's assistant to an aggressive deal maker. If you can pardon the blasphemy, you will laugh and gain a new perspective of the early church. My favorite parts are the Yiddish speaking disciples, St. Timothy's gradual habituation towards "holograms" from the future, and Vidal's greatest invention; the juggling, soft-shoe dancing, seizure-prone St. Paul. Vidal seems to have an interesting response to the mantra "What would Jesus do?" According to Vidal, Jesus would erase all the material that refers to him that is today's lexicon of "Christianity."

On the surface, Gore Vidal's Live From Gologotha is a novel about St. Timothy, his relationship with St. Paul (the Apostle) and early Christianity combined with a satire on the modern media and its insatiable desire for the next story. But what this book is really about is how the modern mass media changes one's own perception of events which have happenned. Do I, for example, remember how I felt when the Berlin Wall came down or do I remember what CNNBCBS wants me to remember?St. Timothy is an old man busy writing his memoirs when he is visited by a telvision executive from the 20th century. The executive wants to go back and broadcast the crucifixion of Jesus live for a 20th century audience, hence the title. As Timothy continues to write his memoirs, he is constantly bothered by the feeling that what he is writing is not what really happenned, but what he has seen on the television provided to him and his wife by his 20th century visitors.Who was Jesus? Who was Judas? Who was Paul? As with all of Gore Vidal's historical novels, his history is bang on. What he does then is reinterpret known events from a different perspective, giving his readers an alternate history of sorts.But the history is not what is important here, what is is Vidal's view of the media. The 20th century media has intruded into Timothy's relatively quiet first century life, preventing him from remembering things that he experienced and making him believe that he has experienced events which he has not.For any person interested in early Christianity or media manipulation of events, or, even better, both, Live from Golgotha is a thought provoking read which has made this reviewer question his own memory with regard to history.

Take a tap-dancing St. Paul ("Solly"), an enormously fat Jesus, a rather mercenary St. Timothy, and a whole lot of Time-Travel, and you get this hysterical book.'I agree with soem of the previous reviewers: this book is indeed a bit confusing, but really, only if you don't follow it all the way to the end. If you pay close attention--this is totally one of those books that you have to think about all the way through--you won't get lost, and you will definately enjoy this little cyberpunk-mmets-early Christianity romp.

Entirely blasphemous. Astonishingly simple. Entirely engaging and written in such a black vein of humour that you won't be able to help yourself. Questions the foundation of the Christian faith: can you ever remain certain that it was Christ who was nailed to that Cross having read this?If you loved Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" you'll adore this book.

At some point, Vidal must have started with refreshingly plausible Jesus, Pilate, and Paul figures, and where he could have written a good but fairly ordinary novel from that beginning, he went out on several precarious limbs, made some highly original creative leaps, threw in computer technology, time travel, Zionists, Mormons, Christian Scientists, capitalists, sensualists, etc., etc., and provided us with a superior, wildly imaginative book. It's not for everyone, though. This is an iconoclastic novel to say the very least (its basis in historical research would give fundamentalists no comfort in any case), and there are a lot of lingering, graphic descriptions of male anatomy and sexual activity that squeamish readers might not appreciate. The language is fluid and the wit is sharp--this is the daring novel Norman Mailer didn't manage to write. "Live From Golgotha" may send you running to find Vidal's earlier novel, "Julian."