Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A Catholic priest-friend of mine sent me a copy of the special edition of the Time magazine.  The entire issue is on Jesus. Apart from essays written by eminent writers, there are numerous photographs related to Jesus like the ones below.  Most of the essays present Jesus as seen by his religious believers. The very first one, titled ‘Who Was Jesus?’, starts with a ‘discovery’ made in June 2024. During a routine digitisation at Humboldt University in Hamburg, researchers discovered a scrap of papyrus with 13 lines of Ancient Greek. They were able to identify some of the words: Jesus, crowing, branch, etc. It was the earliest physical copy of a narrative called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Jesus is 5 years old in this gospel. The child has just moulded 12 sparrows out of clay sitting by a river. His father, Joseph, finds him and scolds him for working on the Sabbath. Jesus then claps his hands and tells the sparrows to go away. “The sparrows took flight and went away chirpi...

Picture from LatinTimes ‘You’re so powerless, Pilate,’ Jesus thought as he stood in the praetorium.   The prefect of Caesar had washed his hands off his responsibility to uphold the truth.   ‘What is truth?’ he had asked. He did not wait for an answer.   Jesus was not going to answer him anyway.   He knew as well as Pilate that definitions were not what mattered to either of them.   ‘I am the truth,’ Jesus had said many times.   ‘You are the truth,’ he would have told Pilate, ‘if you wish to be.’   ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The crowd outside the praetorium clamours louder and louder.   Being very religious, they have not entered the praetorium.   The praetorium is a pagan place and Yahweh’s chosen people should not enter pagan places on the Passover day lest they be defiled. The High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas, instigated the people by wielding their religious power.   Jesus had set the axe at the very root of...

My favourite novelists are those whose characters went on some wild goose chases, looking for oases in the mirage of life.  Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Dostoevsky have remained on the top of my list for long.  Jose Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Javier Marias’s Infatuations captured my fancy later.  But one writer who has remained above them all for long is Nikos Kazantzakis.  His novels explore the conflict between the body and the soul, between “god and man” as he put it.  The Last Temptation of Christ, Christ Recrucified , and Saint Francis explore that conflict brilliantly.  However, the author’s earlier novel, Zorba the Greek , is what strikes me as the best.  Kazantzakis Zorba presents the classical Greek dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Apollo is the god of reason and control, while Dionysius revels in the wild passions.  In the novel, Zorba is a worker who is taken on as an as...

The season of Advent has begun for Christians who will be celebrating the birth of Jesus 25 days from now.  These 25 days are supposed to be a season of abstinence from certain foods and drinks so that the believer prepares himself spiritually for Christmas.  Religion has no significance unless it makes one a better person and the practices like abstinence are meant to help one in the process of self-renewal.  But can a set of practices or some rituals make anyone a better person?  They can help.  But Jesus was explicit in saying that religion is not a matter of rituals or regulations.  Religion is an attitude of love and compassion. The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best in the Bible.  A wayfarer was beaten up by thieves, stolen of all his possessions including his clothes, and was left “half dead” on the roadside.  A priest came along but went away doing nothing to help the dying man.  Then can a Levite.  A Lev...

Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus.  But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus.  It was a spring festival.  Many states in India have similar festivals.  Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples.  In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life.  “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life.  In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm.  Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot.  We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”.  Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life.  Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor.   The whole Christian conc...

Christians all over the world commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus today, Good Friday.  Jesus, in all probability, did not intend to found a new religion; he wished to reform his own religion, Judaism.  This is the opinion of many well known theologians like Hans Kung.  In his brief history, The Catholic Church [Phoenix Press, 2002], Kung says, “... he (Jesus) did not seek to found a separate community distinct from Israel with its own creed and cult, or to call to life an organization with its own constitution and offices, let alone a great religious edifice.  No, according to all the evidences, Jesus did not found a church in his lifetime.” (page 12) In Dostoevsky’s novel The Karamazov Brothers , there is a Grand Inquisitor who asks Jesus who appeared in Russia teaching people freedom and love, “Why do you come to disturb us?”  Will Jesus be a nuisance to the Church and its leaders if he comes again today?  Will the priests seek a way to el...

“The poor are poor not because the rich are rich,” says Robert J. Samuelson in his Washington Post column reproduced in The Hindu .  In 1968, the sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the phrase ‘the Mathew Effect’ for the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.  The name Mathew came from the Bible.  Jesus said, according to Mathew’s gospel, “For to him who has more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” [Mathew 13:12].  Jesus did not live in a time which promoted capitalism and its wealth-creating ideology.  Jesus was far, far from being a capitalist.  In fact, he would have been the ideal communist, had he been allowed to have his way by the various leaders of his time (political as well as religious).  What he meant was that those who have the spirit of life in them will be given more of that, and those who are just bullshit will get lost. ...

Introductory Note : According to the Bible, Jesus raised Lazarus from death.  What follows is mere fiction inspired by a friend’s questioning me on love.  Fiction “You’ve taken away my death, you’ve appropriated it,” Lazarus tried hard to suppress his anger. “I gave you life,” said Jesus calmly, “new life.” “You had no right to do it,” Lazarus was almost contemptuous.  “Look at me, Jesus, look into my eyes.  You had no right to bring me back from death.  Do you realise the gravity of what you’ve done?  You’ve destroyed the peace that I had found in death.  I can forgive you for that.  But you’ve upset the whole world of my sisters.  They were getting used to my death.  They were learning to accept it as an inevitable fact of life.  Do you know how absurd it is for anyone to live with someone who has come back from death?  What am I now to them?  A ghost?  They want to ask me what it is like there...

  I willed my being into an extension And the cosmos was born in a Bang: Every birth is a terror and a joy, Every creation an extension of a core. I live, move, and have my being In all that is, and that shall be, Much as in the core that sits here. Hypothesis is what the creation was When I let myself go in a bang: An overflow of love infinite. Experiment is what the creation is When I add patterns in the mosaic: A sporting game of love unremitting. Abel was I, much as Cain was. I am the turbulence of the rolling waters, The rage of blasting bombs and fleeting bullets, The hunger in the eyes of widows and babies, The roar of the clouds, and the grace of the rainbow. And the nailed wail on the crucifix. Evolution is what the creation is, of The hell and the heaven that I am. Afterword I wrote the above poem about 15 years ago.   It was a time when I wrote many poems of this type: apparently religious.   Psychologicall...

Christians all over the world are entering the Holy Week, a week dedicated to the commemoration of the last days of Jesus which led to his crucifixion and the putative resurrection.   Though I lost my religious faith three decades ago my interest in Jesus has refused to make a clean exit from my consciousness.   Probably my debilitatingly conservative Catholic upbringing has nailed Jesus too fast to my consciousness. Who was Jesus in reality?   This is a question that has fascinated me much.   I don’t believe he was the son of God.   I don’t believe there is any God up there or anywhere else begetting sons or daughters or any other miserable creatures.   I find it quite interesting that we, the human beings, who have explored the minute world of the subatomic particles and the stars billions of kilometres away, have not been able to discover much about a person who lived merely 2000 years ago.   Did he exist at all?   I remember a book w...

The Buddha, Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi are three persons whom I found myself admiring as I grew older though not proportionately wiser.  I don’t share their great qualities, feeble as I am.  In fact, I may find myself towards the middle of the spectrum if we construct such a continuum of human qualities and personality traits as the one envisaged by philosopher Spinoza.  Is what another philosopher, Nietzsche, said of himself true for me too: “What I am not, that for me is God and virtue” [in Thus Spoke Zarathustra ]? If I apply Spinoza’s classification, these three luminaries whom I have grown to admire belong to the category of people who regarded love as the primary virtue, considered all people to be equally precious, and resisted evil by returning good.  Spinoza argued that people like Jesus and Buddha constructed an ethical system that stressed feminine virtues.  At the other end of that spectrum are people like Machiavelli and Nietzsche [and mo...