5/5/23
Newsletter #327
The Crack of Dawn
Since I have spent most of my life so far – 50 years of it – writing fiction: screenplays, short stories, and novels, naturally, the three books that I’ve had published were all non-fiction. Therefore, the goal of getting a novel published is still unfulfilled, and continues to beckon me. Seriously, I’m not even sure how many unpublished novels I’ve written – at least five; maybe eight. In any case, I remain undaunted, and continue to write them.
My most recent unpublished (yet to be published?) novel is, The Gospel According to Judas. I got the idea in 1998 and wrote it as a short story. The folks I got to read it all seemed to think it was OK: nobody hated it and nobody loved it. Like most of my writing, I filed it and moved on. However, some story ideas simply won’t go away. This then begs the daunting question: is it a crappy idea, or is it actually a good idea, and I just didn’t write well enough?
So, last year I took another crack at it, taking a completely different approach. As opposed to using the omnipotent third-person perspective, which is how most novels are written, I decided to use the first-person point of view, since that’s what the title implies – this is Judas’s story and he’s going to tell it. Once I switched points of view, having to now climb into Judas’s head and convey what he saw and how he reacted to it, I thoroughly understood how to tell the story. Best of all, I don’t think anyone else has done it.
The most standard (and extremely useful) bit of advice given to aspiring writers is, “Write what you know.” A fine example of that – be it good or bad – is this newsletter. When I sit down to write this thing every morning it’s always based on something I already know, whether it’s a personal experience or something I learned somewhere along the way. However, I think it’s perfectly valid, and quite common, to write about something that interests you, then research it until you know what think you need to know to tell your story.
Therefore, to write from Judas’s point of view, I had to figure out who he was, and ostensibly, what he knew. Unlike most every other topic, there is only one source to research the life of Judas Iscariot, and that’s the New Testament Bible. Since Jews don’t accept the New Testament as holy, nor Jesus as the messiah, I never bothered to read it. Well, it’s a much better read than the Old Testament. First of all, the New Testament is nearly four times shorter than the Old Testament – 300 pages as opposed to over 1,100 pages. But best of all, unlike the Old Testament that tells many, many stories; the New Testament tells one story, the life of Jesus Christ.
OK. Right away I was presented with the problem of what name do I use for this character? His name was Yeshua, or Joshua (like somebody I know). Jesus is the Latin version of Joshua; Christ is the Greek word christos, meaning, “Anointed one.” If I used Joshua, the name of another famous biblical Jewish historical figure, it would just be confusing. So I went with Jesus, ‘cause I like the name.
Judas Iscariot means “Judas of Kerioth.” Kerioth is a tiny village in the Moab Desert, across the Dead Sea from Judea. Hence, in my version, Judas has much darker skin than everybody else because he’s a Moabite, most of whom are Arabs. In my story Judas is regularly mistaken for an Arab. And since Judas doesn’t get an entrance in the Bible like all of the other lead apostles, I put him in from the very beginning so he could tell the whole story.
Judas lives in a tiny village in the middle of the Moab desert. He hears about a wild and crazy holy man named John the Baptist, who lives in the wilderness, dresses in animal skins, eats insects, and professes to be directly in touch with God. He and his acolytes have made several appearances along the Jordan River in the greater Jerusalem area. Judas decides to leave his village for the very first time in his life and go see this holy man. I made Judas the same age as Jesus at that point, which was 30.
OK. Although I was writing in English, everybody in the story was really speaking Aramaic, which is a form of Syrian, and was the language in use those parts for 1,000 years. Nobody in Israel spoke Hebrew at that time, and hadn’t for 600 years. The Old Testament Bible was in Hebrew and nobody could read it except for a few learned rabbis. Nor had anyone yet gone to the trouble of actually assembling an Old Testament Bible, so it didn’t actually exist as a book, which isn’t surprising since books hadn’t been invented yet. But nobody had translated the Old Testament into Aramaic, so how on Earth are John the Baptist or Jesus quoting the Bible all the time? In Aramaic?
That’s just a few of the issues I faced, and I was only in the first chapter of the book. But it was great trying to put myself into that time and place, then trying to understand what might have actually been happening. So what I did was to tell the whole Jesus story, but get it to make sense in the real world, without any supernatural events.
Look at that, I’ve used up my 900 words. I thought I’d run out of shit to write after a week, and here it is almost a year later and I won’t shut up. I heartily thank those of you who read this, but I write the Crack of Dawn for me. Just to see if I can do it.
Quick, look behind you. Made you look.