Final Fridays by John Barth Page B

son of God, and who also happens to know the Old Testament prophecies; in order to validate himself as the Messiah, he sees to it that whatever that script calls for—“whatever the part requires,” as proverbial starlets say—he does, perhaps including even death by immolation or poisoned Kool-Aid. He has followed, more or less to the letter, the messianic curriculum, but....
    Case 2 is altogether more problematical and interesting: Suppose our candidate to be not merely an aspiring mythic hero or one more entertainer of messianic delusions, but a bona fide young Aeneas or, in fact, the long-prophesied Messiah. He understands what he must do 13 —here is the monster to be slain, as aforewarned; here is the prophesied kingdom to be established or reclaimed; here approaches the foretold dark consummation, et cetera—and he does it, not in
this case because that is what aspiring mythic heroes or messiahs are expected to do in order to qualify, but because he is in very truth a mythic hero or the Messiah. In short, while the template or the prophecies validate him, he likewise validates them. To get right down to it: Among Jesus’s contemporaries, the fellow’s claim to messiahship might be buttressed by his doing what Isaiah and company predicted that the Messiah will do; to believing Christians, however, it is at least equally Isaiah’s claim to prophethood that is buttressed by Jesus’s fulfillment of the prophecies.
    That reciprocal or coaxial validation—for Christians, the very crux (pardon the metaphor) of that between the Old and New Testaments—is the paradox of the Jesus Paradox, to which I shall return after pointing out that its secular analog applies not only to “later-arriving” mythic figures like Bellerophon and Aeneas but to later authors like Virgil, not to mention us Postmodernists. As afore-suggested, by writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad , Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and the political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not “unselfconscious” Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering-hero role but orchestrates his own welcome, as afore-footnoted, into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they
must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, however, Dante brings the thing off—and we now return to the Jesus Paradox.
    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:
    â€¢ 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
    â€¢ 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.’”
    â€¢ 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.’”
    â€¢ Jesus’s later move to Galilee (4:12–14): “. . . he withdrew into Galilee . . . that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. . . .”
    â€¢ His