@reasoning logic,
Go ahead rl. Your username is intellectually dishonest.
In the Gospel According to the Son, Mailer conjures up a conversation between Jesus and Judas. Judas tells Jesus that he doesn't believe any of the Kingdom of Heaven stuff. Jesus asks him why he is a follower.
"Then why are you with me", Jesus asks him.
"Because many of your sayings are closer to me than any enjoyment I receive by witnessing their games. Having grown up among them, I know what is in their hearts, and I detest them. They continue to believe they are good. They see themselves as rich in charity, in piety, and in loyalty to their people. So I scorn them. They not only tolerate the great distance between the rich and the poor, they increase it."
"Then you are with me?"
"Yes".
"Is it because I know that we cannot reach the Kingdom of Heaven until there are no rich and no poor?"
"Yes."
"Still, you almost speak as if you do not care about entering the Kingdom of Heaven."
"God strike me, but I do not believe in it."
"But you say you are with me. Why, then, are you with me?"
"Can you bear the truth?"
"I am nothing without it."
"The truth, dear Yeshua, is that I do not believe you will ever bring us all to salvation. Yet in the course of saying all that you say, the poor will take courage and feel equal to the rich. That gives me happiness."
"That alone?"
"I hate the rich. They poison all of us. They are vain, undeserving, and wasteful of the hopes of those who are beneath them. They spend their lives lying to the lowly".
The fact that Mailer is fictionalising has no bearing on the argument that he is making there.
In the evolving ideological struggle which took place with the Apostles, the disciples, those who knew them, those who knew someone who knew them, those who remembered what had been said and those who had read of it, as the years went by just as they do now, the purity of the faith was diluted in the service of establishing a Church. A world-wide Church. A catholic Church. Men of the world were needed for that. The message dribbles away into the sand otherwise. There were heretics everywhere. And confusion.
An ecclesiastical hierarchy was established to take the message into the world. To teach a theory that, while it may not undermine the Bible in any serious way, as the volume of Biblical scholarship proves, allows people to easily use it to do so, constitutes a contribution to undermining the message. "But many of your sayings.."
There are atheists who swallow their pride because they think it is insignificant compared to the message and the promotion of it.
Just as Marx said that the state would wither away, just so Judas withered away on the end of a rope for money. Which might symbolise that the discrepancy between the rich and the poor is no longer a matter of idealism but of actual survival. Which would make Judas a very powerful symbol.
