Once again, welcome to Uchronia Lallena, and the second Easter post (yes, a couple of weeks too late, sorry for that), in which I will speak about a person that, undoubtedly, greatly influenced in the future of millions of people with his actions, even though there is little to none real evidence that his actions had such great reach as many believe. This person is Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians consider the Son of God. In order to be realistic, we will ignore his supposed divine condition to concentrate in the human person.
Unfortunately, beyond what is said in the New Testament (which was written many years after it is said Jesus died), there is little proof about Jesus' existence. It is true that there are certain testimonies that speak about him, but they are fragments of documents that have been dated at times later than when he was alive, and they mostly speak about his ideology, instead of his life. One of the Christians' most used sources to indicate that he existed, the Testimonium_Flavianum (by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish that wrote the history of his people in the times of Vespasianus and Titus, after the Diaspora), is suspected of being a forgery introduced at a later point by a Christian monk.
However, in spite of this great shortage of data, many writers have used their literary abilities to speak about him. For example, in the novel El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato, Eduardo Mendoza uses Pomponius Flatus, a Roman philosopher with eternal health problems that has traveled to Judea, to show a young Jesus that asks him to help save his father from a false accusation of murder, and Juan José Benitez shows Jesus through a 20th century time traveller's eyes in the novel series Caballo de Troya.
Of course, these are not the only ones, and the writers of alternative history have not had any problems in writing about him in different situations.
Michael Moorcock, with his novel Behold the Man, has, as its main character, Karl Glogauer, a young man with many neurosis and a Messiah complex that travels in time from the year 1970 to the year 28 without being able to return, so that he can meet Jesus. However, when he arrives, and after an encounter with a group of Essenes (a Jewish sect), he travels to Nazareth, where he discovers Mary is not the model of virginity he expected, and Joseph is a bitter old man that sneers at Mary's proclamations that it was an angel who left her pregnant. Even worse, Jesus turns out to be a retarded man that can only say his own name. The shock of discovering this unhinges him, and he begins to travel around, surrounding himself with disciples and using psychological tricks to simulate miracles. In the end, he is crucified, pretty much becoming the reason he had traveled back in time for. His last words? Instead of the biblical Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani (God, God, why have you forsaken me?), he says It's a lie, it's a lie, let me back down.
In another work, the duology Seekers of the Sky (Искатели неба) by Russian writer Sergey Lukyanenko, Jesus dies during the Massacre of the Innocents, and God decides his son will not return to Earth: instead, the only survivor, whom Herod's soldiers missed, is given to Mary and Joseph to raise, and instead of the power of miracles, God gives him the power of the Word, with which he can put (and pull) objects in a pocked dimension called the Cold, an ability that can be taught. The child, called both the Redeemer and God's Stepson, eventually becomes Roman Emperor thanks to his power, but when he realises that human nature makes it impossible to turn humanity towards a message of peace, decides to send all the known iron in the world to the Cold, to then commit suicide by sending himself to the same place. Two thousand years later, the Roman Empire is still alive and controls all of Europe, but it is opposed by the Ottomans, iron has become the economic standard in every nation of the world instead of gold, and China is the most technologically advanced nation in a world which, in the equivalent to our 21st century, still has soldiers armed with swords (bronze words, of course) and the only way to fly is with wooden gliders that can only be propelled on long distances by using rockets. This story has small jokes and real people cameos, such as Antóine de Saint Exupéry, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gérard Depardieu.
A third story, which unfortunately I do not remember the title of, changes Jesus, who decides to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through strength instead of words, creating a theocratic empire that lasts until the 20th century.
And, to finish, a short story that, although it cannot be actually considered alternative history, it is quite juicy because of the small touch of black humour with which it ends: in a future time in which time travel is not only possible, but it is used by normal people to make tourism (you can visit Napoleonic Paris as if you would do with the current city!), a man decides to travel to the year 33 to see Jesus when Pilate offers the people to choose between Jesus and Barabbas as part of the Jewish Easter celebrations. The tourist is warned that he cannot change the course of history: when Pilate appears, he must shout Barabbas' name. The man goes, visits Roman Judea, and when he appears at the square and begins to shout the name, he discovers, horrified, that no one in there are "local" people: every person that is condemning Jesus to death by crucifixion are actually other temporal tourists that are just doing what they have been told to do so as to not change history, when it turns out that they have already changed it.
I do hope this week's two articls have been of your liking, and I wait for you here the next week with more new articles.
See you later!
No comments:
Post a Comment