Yesterday I finished Zapffe‘s The lost son (no. "Den fortapte sønn"), a dramatical re-telling of Jesus’ life based on his scientific studies of history’s best known suicidal Messiah: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (INRI).
It was great. Last year doing ex.fac (philosophy of science) I read an article by someone who criticized the work put into it, but concluded that the work was in fact scientific. I’m not all too eager to jump to conclusions, but I can’t say that Zapffe’s keeping up with Karl Popper’s falsification-principle, because there is, in fact, no way to state that he was wrong. I thought it good, then, that he presented his work as a drama and not a treatise. I was shocked, as well, to realize how good a writer Zapffe really was, allthough I’m almost half-way through his Collected works..
(You can read more about Zapffe at the article I and other ‘pedians wrote for wikipedia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wessel_Zapffe)
I got a little hung up on prohpecies, or the prophets themselves, rather. I haven’t read too much of the Bible, so I ain’t had too much to do with these shoutin’ men and women proclaiming the coming of a king or judgement day or both. It was interesting to see how inconsistent their opinions were, all very natural – of course, but then how Jesus tried to follow up on all of them. This is, summing up, what Zapffe really thought about it. It was a scheme.
Myself I’m a great fan of one of the prophets in Monty Python‘s "blasphemic" picture The life of Brian. Here’s the excerpt from the script*, scene 14:
…Obadiah, his servants. There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi– with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time,shall the third one…
Hilareous.
(The script was found at Monty Python script page)