Of the gospeleers, the most “Virgilian” in this respect is Matthew, in whose account of Jesus’s career just about everything goes literally by the book:
• The Annunciation (1:22, 23): “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive [et cetera].’”14
• The family’s flight into Egypt (2:15): “This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken of by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son.’”
• Their subsequent residency in Nazareth (2:23): “And [Joseph] went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled, ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’”
• Jesus’s later move to Galilee (4:12–14): “. . he withdrew into Galilee. . that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. . ”
• His “confidential” healing of the sick and the lame (12:15–21): “. . many followed him, and he healed them all, and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘[The Messiah] will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. . ’”
And so on and on. It is from the master himself, one guesses, that the apostle borrows this operative formulation: from Jesus’s flat-out declaration in the Sermon on the Mount, as Matthew reports it (5:17)—“‘. . I have come not to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them’”—to his reminding those of his followers indignant to the point of violence at his arrest and impending judgment (26:53, 54): “‘Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that [what’s about to happen] must be so?’” For this reader, the climactic such moment comes at the Last Supper, when, facing the prospect of his “death foretold,” Jesus declares (25:24), “The Son of man goes as it is written of him.” Even nonbelievers may feel a frisson at that remark: the hero’s calm acceptance of his hard fate. He has, in effect, no choice: If upon his agonized later prayer the bitter cup really were rescripted to pass from him, then either he or the sacred original script would be falsified.
Self-conscious, uninnocent mythic herohood; historically aware and prescient messiahship — they are not callings for the faint of heart.
In real, non-scripted life, of course, the distinction between Case-1 and Case-2 heroes and saviors is often notoriously less clear, at least as perceivable from “outside,” than it is in these thought experiments.15 God knows whether the Nazarene from Galilee was the Messiah, although every Christian ipso facto believes him to have been, and it is only on the hypothesis of his having been that the Jesus Paradox is energized. He knows by heart the excruciating script; per the poignant paradox, however, he isn’t acting, but reciprocally validating to the end what has validated him — from the beginning.
How It Was, Maybe: A Novelist Looks Back on Life in Early-Colonial Virginia and Maryland
This address, on a subject about which I’m a bit more knowledgeable (or once was, anyhow) than about Biblical texts, was delivered at the Williamsburg Institute’s 50th Annual Forum, in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in February 1998—a novel and rather challenging lecture-venue for me, but an attractive one. I include it here with a tip of the hat to the endlessly resourceful, somewhat protean Captain John Smith on the 300th anniversary of his first exploratory cruises from Jamestown to the head of Chesapeake Bay.
THE OPERATIVE WORDS in my title, as I trust you’ll have noticed already, are the words “maybe” and “novelist.” They are intended not quite to disqualify me from addressing an audience of professional and amateur specialists on the subject of colonial life hereabouts, but to disclaim any particular authority in the matter — in short, to cover my butt. By trade and by temperament I am in fact not any sort of historian or antiquarian, but a novelist and short-story-writer, a fictioneer — a professional liar, we might as well say, of whom the most one can reasonably demand is that his fabrications be of professional quality. I’ll do my best.
What’s worse, I’m not even a historical novelist, properly speaking. The straightforward historical novel — Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, James Michener’s Chesapeake—is a category of fiction that makes me just a tad uneasy,1 even though I’ve much enjoyed such exceptional specimens as Robert Graves’s Roman-Imperial epic I, Claudius. Of my dozen-plus published books, only one and a half have anything at all to do with colonial Virginia and Maryland, and the one called The Sot-Weed Factor—which very much does have to do with life in early-colonial Tidewaterland — was written between 1956 and 1960, when its author was not yet thirty years old. I wasn’t exactly a greenhorn back then in the medium of fiction (my first two novels had been published already), but I was an entire novice in the area of historical fiction and its attendant research. It’s gratifying to me that this many years after its initial appearance, the Sot-Weed novel remains in print. The flip side of that gratification, however, is that its author is still sometimes mistaken for an authority on matters of regional history, when in fact what I’ll be looking back on here is not only Life in Early-Colonial Et Cetera but my researches into that subject four decades ago.
Just recently, for example, I got a call from a bona fide colonial historian at work on a study of William Claiborne’s 17th-century Virginian trading post on Kent Island, in the upper Chesapeake: a famous thorn in the side of Lord Baltimore’s first Maryland settlers. She had noticed, this historian told me, that in my Sot-Weed Factor novel Lord Baltimore refers to that rogue Virginian as “Black Bill Claiborne”; her question was whether I could vouch for the use of “Bill” as a nickname for William in the 17th century. Heck no, I was obliged to tell her: Back when I was up to my earlobes in the documents of our colonial history, I might have confirmed or disconfirmed that usage with some confidence, but that time itself was history now. I then offered her my guess that although “Will” was unquestionably the most common nickname for William back then, if I chose to have Lord Baltimore say “Bill,” it was quite possible that I had seen that sobriquet deployed in some colonial document or other. But I reminded her, as I now remind you-all, of Aristotle’s famous distinction between History and Poetry — between how things were and how things might have been, or let’s say between verity and verisimilitude — and further, that while my memory is that in that novel I tried to stay rigorously close to the facts of colonial life and language where such rigor was appropriate, it was not at all impossible that the muse of Poetry rather than that of History dictated “Black Bill Claiborne,” as a denunciation more euphonious than “Black Will Claiborne.” (“Wicked Will,” I guess I could’ve called the fellow, if “Bill” is in fact an anachronism — but then “Wicked Will” sounds too much like that night-calling bird, doesn’t it….)