I was just in Cyprus, doing research for a book. Every time I go to a place to do this type of research, somewhere along the way, I seem to lose one protagonist and gain another. This book is the second in a series. The first took place in Israel, so I went to work there a few years ago to get a sense for the place. I was going to write a novel about Mary Magdalene, so I signed up to work at a Catholic mission on the shores of Galilee in the very town of Magdala where Mary, or Miriam in her native Aramaic, lived. I am not a Catholic. Neither am I a Christian of any stamp. But in my youth, I was. My father was a minister, and so I grew up entrenched in the Christian narrative. That is something very hard to shake, even when you are a radical student and you believe Nietzsche is nothing if not a misunderstood prophet.
But Mary Magdalene is interesting. In the gospels, she is one of the wealthy women who supported the ministry of this Jesus character. Let's call him Yeshua, because that was his name. Yeshua Ben Yosev. The church, in its inimicable way, managed to take this woman and equate her with a prostitute in some other story. She was a woman in a patrarchy, for God's sake, and therefore suspect.
I digress. This Catholic mission did not allow me, as a heathen protestant, to attend mass in Magdala, which took place every morning for the workers and the consecrated people that lived in the compound. So, instead, I would wander down the path through tall reeds to the shores of Galilee and walk along the water's edge. You know, it was surprisingly like a Scottish loch, with hills and a few houses. And even though I didn't find Mary Magdalene there, I did find Yeshua, and so I wrote a novel about his life, as much as possible trying to discard the religious dross and come up with a human story.
That was that book. Now I am embarking on a serial, because I can't let this thing go, my need to make sense of how we came to this juncture in the West (but really more than just the West, because Islam might not have happened if it hadn't been for this other evangelical religion expanding at full speed on the wings of the Roman Empire.) How have we come to a place where Jesus has become an instrument of division, when the mission of Yeshua was precisely the opposite? Really, very quickly Christianity went off the rails. It wasn't very long before people were killing in the name of this "mountain, field and lake preacher." This man who taught the primacy of compassion has become a paradigm of "us against the rest." A violent paradigm at that.
Scripture can take some of the blame for this, and here's where my new novel comes in. Take the first gospel in the New Testament, which is widely agreed to be Mark. He wrote it around 75 C.E. He had not known Yeshua. He spoke Greek, not Hebrew. He didn't seem to know about the geography of Israel. He didn't come from there, but he wanted to put in writing all those stories about Yeshua that had been circulating for decades. Mark doesn't have a virgin birth in his narrative. No shepherds washing their socks by night. No We three kings. Mark ends his story with three women (our Miriam being one) coming to the tomb, finding it empty and fleeing. They tell no one. End of story. Later scribes stepped up and put that right for him.
I went to Cyprus to find Markus, the writer of the first gospel (no-one knows where he wrote it, so Cyprus, the crossroads of East and West, seemed as good a place as any.) Who I found there was someone else from that time period, an older woman who tends the shrine at Aphrodite's Temple in Paphos. Marcus is going to be woven into the story, of course, just as Miriam was in the first book. The shrine to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, had been there since 12thC BCE, until the Christians came in and replaced her with their own symbol of Love, a male figure. The ruins of the shrine remain for tourists to wander among, which is what I was doing in Cyprus, knowing that somehow, with words as my only tool, I was going to have to rebuild it.
