Epistle to the New Age

On the Road with St Paul

As a Greek boy, I was spotlessly clean. In fact, the second I hit town, any town, I was off to the baths not only for fun and frolic but for oil and pumice stone, too. Naturally, next to godliness, Saint hated cleanliness – in laypersons, that is. For Saint there was only the One God who had sent his only Son to be crucified and resurrected and then while the rest of us hang around waiting for the end of the world (now slightly overdue according to Saint's original timetable), those who had been associates of our Lord would teach the others how to live in a state of purity – no sex mostly until He comes back and everyone has to appear in court where the good are routed up to Heaven and the rest down to Hell and so on. It's really and truly a wonderful religion, cash-flow-wise, and I say this now from the heart.

Saint worked the circuit like there was no tomorrow, preaching, collecting money, and putting together what was, frankly, the greatest mailing list ever assembled by anyone in the Roman world. Saint had converts everywhere – donors, too. By the time we hit Rome Saint had his own bank – of the Holy Ghost, he used to giggle because, like the Ghost, you had to have faith before you could see where the money was. Saint also invented the numbered account as well as instalment-paying. Although Moses is credited with the invention of double entry book-keeping, Saint developed so many new wrinkles in accounting that the Roman Internal Revenue service was still trying to untangle them at the time of the fall of same, if that movie with Alec Guinness is to be trusted.

Our first night in Philippi, we visited the old battlefield. There was all the usual tourist-trap stuff except for a meeting of the Brutus Good Name Society in a big hall close to the Ferris wheel. Needless to say, Saint decided then and there to put on a show, using as an excuse his lifelong admiration for Brutus, the bastard son of Julius Caesar who helped stab his Dad to death in the theatre of Pompey at Rome where I saw my first Asiatic burlesque show – and I don't mean Asiatic Minor. This was Major. With yellow girls. A dream. Anyway, a hundred years ago, Brutus was killed in a big battle here by Marc Antony; and they are both now tourist attractions.

Draughty hall. Full of smoke from cheap resin torches. Wooden stage. Statue of Brutus. Maybe a hundred men. Apple-knockers mostly. A few women. Your average Macedonian yokels. Heavy smell. Garlic.

'May I say a few words, Mr Chairperson?' Saint is all simpers and smiles. 'I'm Saul of Tarsus. But also Paul, citizen of Rome.' This always gets a rise in the boondocks where citizens of Rome are pretty thin on the ground. 'I too am an admirer of Brutus, who fell on this very battlefield, a martyr to man's never-ending struggle to preserve slavery.'

The chairperson, a one-eyed rustic, then gives Saint the green light and he's off and running and in no time he is hitting his stride and I unpack the collection plates.

Saint was not tall, contrary to legend. He was maybe five feet at the most, like Jesus, but where Jesus was enormously fat with this serious hormonal problem – the so-called parable about the loaves and fishes was just the fantasy of somebody who could never get enough to eat – Paul's body was thin and carpeted with short black hairs like a spider except for the big head which was bald. All he had going for him, was this beautiful speaking voice like the Sunday Hour of Power and Prayer man my wife's so taken with. And of course how Saint could lie! I've never known anyone who could make things up so quickly and so plausibly when he was really wired, and wired he was that night in Philippi, preaching to all those Brutus fans.

After a series of truly inspired improvised anecdotes about Brutus, stories never heard before or since because Saint had never had the occasion to make them up before, he segues smoothly into his Road to Damascus routine and I will say this: as often as I heard this particular rap – 10,000 times? I never got tired of it. There was something God-given as we Greeks say – charismatic to you – in Saint's delivery. Also the Yellow Brick Road story was never the same twice. I used to think that Saint's creative changes would be confusing to our flaks – particularly Mark who has to keep feeding his processor with the 'true' Jesus story in competition with Saint's recollections of Jesus, whom he never met except as a sort of ghost on the road to Damascus, but Mark says that the different versions are actually very helpful to him as he puts together the True Story of the Good News that Jesus brought all the world about the end of the world, to be later added to by Saint ('Call me Sol') Paul in his correspondence to yours truly, Timothy, among others. But Mark – or Saint Mark as he'll be promoted to unless the TV people are giving me the runaround, says that Saint's stories don't have to make sense because he, Mark, is redoing the whole story anyway. I wonder if Chet has got in touch with Mark, who is still alive I'm told, not that that makes any difference if we're all on tapes and Chet can just do a fast rewind to where Mark is alive and writing his Gospel. What, I wonder, does Chet really want?

It's interesting how everyone connected with this circus has his own axe to grind which is why, I suppose, I'm grinding mine right now. For instance, I think that suppressing Jesus's weight problem gives us a distorted view of his psychology which was itself distorted – if not pretty peculiar. There are also other aspects of His mission to the soon-to-be late great planet earth that have been completely omitted by Mark and the others, not to mention the key fact which is becoming more and more obvious – Jesus isn't coming back any time soon, and if there is to be a Judgement Day, it's going to happen way in the future, on cable television probably – at least that's my hunch.

Saint's Philippi version of how he was converted to Christianity (which he hadn't yet invented!) was particularly vivid as he described seeing the ghost of our founder on the eastbound Jerusalem–Damascus freeway. T had been a persecutor, my friends. Yea! Of Brutus. Nay! I mean Jesus. But then is not each the same in that he was persecuted for his goodness by a vile humanity?' Saint could make even a slip of the tongue become like a clashing cymbal. 'I had been hired by Mossad, the dreaded secret service apparatus of the Roman Palestinian-Zionist Lobby. I had been ordered to spy on all those who wished to make their peace with God who had sent them his only Son – the only Daughter is for later, for Judgement Day – to show mankind the road to Heaven. So there I was. A hot day. Palm trees. A mirage shivering in the middle distance. A camel. A pyramid. Your average Middle Eastern landscape as viewed from the freeway. Complete with burning bush. Suddenly. HE. WAS. THERE.'

In that silent smoky hall you could have heard a pin drop or the loosest foreskin slide back. 'Wide as he was tall, Jesus waddled toward me.' To live audiences, Saint often let this sort of detail slip out. But in his writing, never. 'That face. Those luminous eyes hidden somewhere in all that golden fat. The ineffable smile like the first slice from a honeydew melon. Oh, delight! He held up a hand, a tiny starfish cunningly fashioned of lard. He spoke, his voice so high, so shrill that only the odd canine ever got the whole message, hence the need for interpretation and self-consciousness – in short, mega-fiction.' Saint could make even literary theory sing when he wanted to and he wanted to that night at Philippi. '"Why," shrilled the Son of the One God, "dost thou persecuteth me-th?"' Saint always went ye-olde whenever he quoted Our Saviour. But saviour from what? This has never occurred to me before, and I'm a bishop. Sin, I suppose. But we've all given up on that, if the truth were known. Certainly Jesus wasn't going to save us from Judgement Day or from Hell either since he's part of the Whole Judicial Process, I suppose he intends to get his friends and fund-raisers off. I must give some real thought to this little loose end of our generally well-knit by now doctrine of Christianity.

Anyway, the folks ate up the ye-olde stuff. They also liked the fact that our Saviour, at least according to Saint, never said anything that your Aunt Minerva wouldn't have said after a long day of in-depth shopping so they always liked it when Saint dressed up the act a bit, by throwing in miracles and recipes and grooming hints galore.

Folks really like miracles and this is the age of them, too. Real ones, I mean. Like television. Naturally, we've been known to rig a miracle or two. Like raising from the dead someone who's actually alive but painted green and so on. But there is simply no way of explaining Chet's visit to me, and all the other strange people who've been monitoring us.

When I used to discuss these creepy visitors with Saint, he'd clam up. I bring up the subject now because the first one I ever saw – knew that I saw, that is – was that night at Philippi. I now know that Saint had more dealings with them than he ever let on: 'Angels in disguise,' he'd mutter. My own current hunch is that those peculiar visitors back then – now, too – were – and are – on the prowl for commercial franchises to our product, which means getting in on the ground floor of this definitely upmarket growth-oriented religion we've been inventing which is firmly based on the absolutely true word of the One God in his three sections, each suitable for worship taken in part or as a whole and guaranteed to dress up any residence or soul tastefully.

Saint played that Macedonian audience like a twelve-string lute in the hands of a love-mad Lesbian Islander. 'The hand, the hand! That was the proof. Because in the centre of each palm there was this hole where He had been tacked to the cross by a nail. I knew then that it was HIM – HE.' Saint always adjusted his grammar to the audience and never the audience to the grammar. But then we saints are born knowing all the tricks of the trade, including the halo. Even so, Saint had one trick that nobody else has ever mastered. When you go into all that genealogy of how J.C. is descended from King David and so on the result is not only boring but absolutely mystifying for a civilian audience that doesn't know the difference between a Jew and a Chinaman. So how did Saint get through the dull parts? He invented, all by himself, with no professional guidance of any kind, tap-dancing.

Saint had these copper cleats attached to the soles of his sandals. When he started with the 'begats', he would start dancing, back and forth across the stage, the taps preceding and succeeding each begat and then, grand finale, a tap between the 'be' and the 'gat' until by the time he gets past the begats Abendigo to HIM, he was like a simian bow-legged Astaire who my wife adores on the TV. Personally, I wouldn't put Saint in Astaire's class but he was certainly every bit as good as Dan Dailey, which is high praise.

Well, Saint had those Macedonian yokels clapping their hands and tapping their toes as he gave out with the message, Hallelujah! 'The form of this world is a'changin. It's all a'gonna end real soon. Them's who worship false gods, are in for eternal torment. But us'n'll be saved. And that's a promise. If'n you follow Him. 'Cause with Him–He–Hi-Ho! the law of Moses got itself crossed-out. Crossed-out! That's the Good News, folks!'

Usually Saint didn't do Moses-bashing with the goyim on the ground that they wouldn't know what he was talking about. But once he was launched on one of his raps, you never knew what was going to come out. Anyway, that hot muggy day night in Philippi, by the time he came to the 'And now a pair of young brothers in the Lord will pass among you with their collection plates and some literature which is absolutely gratis for an obel' ending, I knew that we had started up yet another church because that's how we did it back then. First a hell-fire sermon from Saint. Then the collection. Then names and addresses for our master Rolodex. Then Saint would take appointments for baptisms and so on. Finally, before skipping town, he'd appoint some deacons and deaconesses and lo! and behold the First Pauline Church of Philippi would open its doors for business.