Book Review: Joshua

The natural way to clear the "link rot" out of a blog would be to start at the beginning, read through the individual posts, pull down the ones that contained rotten links, and leave the ones that didn't. Blogspot was set up to make that easy, for a long time, until the change junkies messed it up and, in their frenzy to flap and squawk about "artificial intelligence," forgot to fix it. So nearly all the older blog posts are disappearing. A few are, as promised, coming back. Here's one, reposted from 2012:

Title: Joshua

Author: Joseph F. Girzone

Date: 1983

Publisher: Collier / Macmillan

Length: 271 pages

ISBN: 0684813467

Quote: "'Joshua,' a shrewd older priest said, 'do you feel this is just a peculiarity of certain individuals or the way the Church is structure?' 'I think it is probably both.'"

In the 1980s, Joshua was a controversial bestseller within the Christian book ghetto. Joshua is a new human manifestation of Jesus who's come back to check on how well Christians (and Jews) are doing with his teachings. Nobody could write a book with this premise that would not be controversial.

The most obvious point of controversy is that Joshua seems so much more ordinary than the real Jesus of Nazareth could have been. Practically every word attributed to Jesus was a brilliant aphorism, the sort of thing you'd expect to find recorded of a young, obscure rabbi who attracted attention by using more memorable phrases than other rabbis. Of course, living in a mostly oral culture, Jesus didn't have to worry about being original, nor did He; He was free to put together quotes, even cliches, in the way that would be easiest for the audience to remember and understand, and by all indications He did. But the fictional Joshua doesn't try to be either original or memorable. He mumbles. Readers won't go around repeating his words.

Irreverence, incompetence...or reverence? I think it may have been reverence. Anyone who wants to imitate a great writer or speaker can learn to copy the master's word count and rhythm and so on, to produce a credible imitation of the master. Most of us don't, or if we do we destroy those exercises after writing them, because publishing them seems disrespectful. I think it's possible that Girzone chose deliberately to present fictional Joshua as an unimpressive man, more dropout than gifted teacher, because he didn't want to seem to be making a claim either (1) that if Jesus came back to check on His followers He'd try to repeat or improve on His original mission, or (2) that Girzone was trying to channel or even imitate Jesus.

Christians aren't to be saved by Joshua, and so, while Jesus did not hesitate to teach in the temple or demur when addressed as "Rabbi," Joshua does. He teaches, but he's strictly an amateur, a dropout, a craftsman just inside the line that separates struggling artists from bums.

If you accept the premise and read the story, further controversies follow. Joshua tells a Jewish group that "God will be your Messiah." Under the rules of Jesuit sophistry, this is allowable. Would Jesus have used the rules of Jesuit sophistry? Would He have backed away from telling a Jewish audience that Jesus was their Messiah? Let's not rehash that argument here...all I meant to do was mention that this point of controversy exists between the covers of Joshua.

Then, toward the end of the book, Joshua is summoned to Rome for a formal vote on whether or not he should be censured by the Catholic church. The way the book is written, this wouldn't happen. Joshua has not identified himself with the Catholic church; the whole point of this novel is that Joshua frowns on denominationalism and is here to correct each of the denominations he visits. In real life all kinds of preachers do that, and the Catholic church does not censure any of them; it writes them off as Protestants. The summon to Rome makes sense only if we presuppose something the novel avoids saying--that Joshua was some sort of "undercover" Catholic priest or monk who'd been sent out for the purpose of "sheep stealing," enticing Protestants into the Catholic church, which the Catholic church did not officially admit doing in the twentieth century. Very controversial.

Apart from these major points of controversy, is Joshua a nice little meditation on how Christians--who are, after all, committed to imitating Jesus, to the degree that seems respectful to us--should think and behave? I think, on the whole, it is. Joshua's comments on the philosophical errors into which contemporary Christians fall are worth thinking about.