No one can imagine that the terms "Islam" and "filthy religion" would be associated with each other in the pages of The New York Times. But in the Sunday Book Review, an article on Tom Bissell's history of the apostles of Jesus Christ began with this stunning first paragraph from poet Christian Wiman:
Nietzsche believed that if only a Dostoyevsky had been among the apostles who followed Jesus, someone who understood the environment in which “the scum of society, nervous maladies and ‘childish’ idiocy keep a tryst,” we might have been spared centuries of ovine idiocy. One genius could have given us a work of ennobling art. Instead, we got 12 bleating sheep and one filthy religion.
Wiman is not really a fan of Bissell's book, but the introduction starts off the review with a bang. He finds it a little overstated that Bissell would say the Apostles had little effect on early Christianity:
Given the mediocrity of those to whom Jesus’ message was entrusted, it seems surpassing strange that the message should have taken hold with such force. Somehow those hapless men rose out of their stupor to become paragons of Christian virtues. Somehow that general obtuseness and vague malaise became a wildfire of faith so fierce that some were willing to go to their death for the sake of what they’d seen.
Or at least that’s one story. Tom Bissell, in his new book, Apostle, is out to tell another. “History does not record a single member of the Twelve, with the possible exception of Peter, as having had any particular impact on early Christianity.”
Unsurprisingly, the Times review suggests Bissell's "wry impiety" and his feeling unmoved after hiking many miles through Spain to the bones of St. James was refreshing:
Bissell’s brief, beautiful last chapter gives some idea of what this book might have been. “What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” he begins. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine.” This sandblasting candor comes as a relief. Bissell has just completed the 500-mile pilgrim walk known as the Camino de Santiago and discovered that he feels...not much, really. One hears so many rhapsodic accounts of this walk that Bissell’s wry impiety is refreshing — and promising.
Seeing the glass half-full from a believer's perspective came in a Bissell review in the Catholic magazine First Things by John V. Bennett:
Visiting a tomb in Rome’s Church of the Holy Apostles, he is intrigued by a young American who “had obviously come here to pray and reflect. I had not,” Bissell writes. “I found here only sawhorses on which to prop this man’s faith and skeptically saw away.”
Bissell decides “I want to talk to him,” and over beers at a café, the two amicably argue about the reliability of the Bible. “No one had ever had this argument before and felt as if he won,” Bissell explains, “just as no one had ever had this argument before and felt as if he lost.” With candid debate between believers and skeptics increasingly rare, Bissell deserves credit for having the argument at all.
PS: A fuller quotation of Nietzsche is found in his work The Antichrist, sounding a lot like network specials on the Apostles (I recall a special on St. Paul by Peter Jennings in the old days at ABC):
That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and "childish" idiocy keep a tryst must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to understand it at all in their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould. The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist, all these merely presented chances to misunderstand it.
