LINDA: One of the apostles.
JOHN: They weren’t really apostles. They didn’t do any real teaching. Peter the fisherman learned a little more about fishing.
ART: How do you know that?
JOHN: The mythical overlay is so enormous…and not good. The truth is so… so… simple. The New Testament in a hundred words or less. You ready?
EDITH: I don’t think I wanna hear this. Harry, will you take me home?
HARRY: No! Not right now. I do want to hear this.
ART: Sit down, Edith. You act like you believe him.
EDITH: (softly) It’s sacrilege.
HARRY: How can it be sacrilege? He hasn’t said anything yet.
EDITH: (righteously) The new New Testament is sacrilege.
DAN: There are a dozen new new testaments, from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Tyndale, all the way to King James, all revisionist, and all called revealed truth.
EDITH: I mean a new New Testament in 100 words.
HARRY: I can give you the Ten Commandments in ten words:
Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.
DAN: (laughing) Don’t. The commandments are just modern updates of more ancient laws. Hammurabi’s code.
HARRY: That’s right, and they weren’t the first, right? Edith, I was raised on the Torah… My wife, on the Quran. My oldest son is an Atheist. My youngest is a Scientologist. My daughter is studying Hinduism. I imagine that there is room there for a holy war in my living room. But we practice live and let live.
Why don’t you sit down?
Edith hesitantly sits
HARRY: What is your preferred version of the bible?
EDITH: The King James, of course. It’s the most modern, the work of great scholars.
DAN: Modern is good.
HARRY: Alright, John, hit us with the short form.
Choral/religious music…
JOHN: Guy met the Buddha, likes what he heard, thought about it for a while— Say 500 years, while he returned to the Mediterranean, became an Etruscan. Seeped into the Roman Empire. He didn’t like what they became— A giant killing machine. He went to the near East thinking, "Why not pass the Buddha’s teachings on in a modern form?" So he tried. One dissident against Rome? Rome won. The rest is history. Well, sort of. Lot of fairy tales mixed in.
EDITH: (quietly) I knew it. He’s saying he was Christ.
JOHN: Oh, no. That’s the medal they pinned on Jesus to fulfill prophecy.
DAN: The crucifixion.
JOHN: He blocked the pain, as he had learned to do in Tibet and India. He also learned to slow his body processes down to the point where they were undetectable. They thought he was dead. So his followers pulled him from the cross, placed him in a cave… His body normalized as he had trained it to… He attempted to go away undetected, but some devotees were standing watch. Tried to explain. They were ecstatic. Thus, I was resurrected, and I ascended to central Europe to get away as far as possible.
EDITH: You don’t mean a word of this, John. My god, why are you doing this?!
ART: Let me see your wrists.
JOHN: I don’t scar. Besides, they tied me…but nails and blood make better religious Art.
HARRY: (laughing) All the speculations about Jesus. He was black, he was Asian, he was a blue-eyed Aryan with a golden beard and hair straight out of Vidal Sassoon’s, he was a benevolent alien, he never existed at all…Now he’s a caveman. (laughs)
DAN: The Christ figure goes all the way back to Krishna— Hercules, of course.
HARRY: Hercules?
JOHN: Born of a virgin: Alcmene. A god for a father: Zeus. The only begotten. The savior— The Greek? "Soter". The Good Shepherd, the Prince of Peace, bringing gentle persuasion and divine wisdom. He died, joined his father on Olympus a thousand years before Gethsemane.
EDITH: How can you compare Pagan mythology to the true word?
HARRY: Pretty damn closely, I’d say.
DAN: The early Christian leaders, they threw away Hebrew manuscripts and borrowed from Pagan sources all over the place.
EDITH: Do you realize how…inconsiderately you’re treating my feelings?
DAN: About as inconsiderately as we’re treating John’s.
EDITH: Well, he does— he doesn’t believe what he’s saying!
SANDY: Do you believe literally everything in the bible, Edith?
EDITH Yes!
…N— Uh— Before you say it, I know it’s undergone a lot of changes, but God has spoken through man to make his word clearer.
HARRY: He couldn’t get it right the first time?
EDITH: We-we’re imperfect! He had t-to work to make us understand.
HARRY: He couldn’t get us right the first time, Edith?
DAN: Taken alone, the philosophical teachings of Jesus are Buddhism with a Hebrew accent— Kindness, tolerance, brotherhood, love… A ruthless realism acknowledging that life is as it is here on earth, here and now. The Kingdom of God, meaning…goodness, is…is right here, where it should be. "I am what I am becoming." That’s what the Buddha brought in.
JOHN: And that’s what I taught. But a talking snake make a lady eat an apple, so we’re screwed. Heaven and Hell were peddled so priests could rule through seduction and terror…save our souls that we never lost in the first place. I threw a clean pass…they ran it out of the ballpark.
EDITH: This is blasphemy. It’s horrible! Who else were you? Solomon? Elvis? Jack the Ripper?
DAN: It’s been said that Buddha and Jesus would laugh or cry if they’d known what was done in their name.
HARRY: And if there is a creator, he’d probably feel the same way.
JOHN: I see ceremony, ritual, processions, genuflecting, moaning, intoning, venerating cookies and wine.
And I think…it’s not what I had in mind.
EDITH: But that’s Vatican flapdoodle. It doesn’t have a thing to do with God.
DAN: As you said, John. Everywhere, religions…from exalting life to purging joy as a sin. Rome does it as grand opera. A simple path to goodness needs a supernatural roadmap.
HARRY: Supernatural…
ART: A stupid word, I mean…anything that happens, happens within nature, whether we believe in it or not.
JOHN: (looks up)…Like a 14,000-year-old caveman.
The sound of a car approaching… John heads outside to receive Will.
WILL: I–I— I drove for a while, and then I sat for a while. I’m so ashamed. (Shivering) And I’m freezing!
JOHN: Well, come inside.
WILL: I still don’t believe you, of course. You need help.
JOHN: Everybody needs help.
WILL: Yes, well, some more than others.
Fade out
ACT II
Fade in, Will is warming himself in front of the fire, it is darker.
WILL: From the Buddha to the cross, I have always imagined both as entirely mythic. Ye— but I would like to hear more. May I lie on the couch for a moment? I’m not as young as I used to be. (plonks himself on the couch) Ohh! Hah, so! You were Jesus. Well, perhaps somebody had to be, for better or for worse. The jury is still out.
When did you begin to believe you were Jesus?
JOHN: When did you begin to believe you were a psychiatrist?
WILL: Since I graduated Harvard medical school and finished my residency, I’ve had that feeling. Oh, I sometimes dream about it.
JOHN: Have you acted upon this belief?
WILL: I had a private practice for a while, and then I taught. Nothing unusual— Oh, until one day, I met a caveman who thought he was Jesus.