Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

“In an Agatha Christie mystery, the murderer is nearly always a figure closer than we expected. Remember The Man in the Brown Suit and The Seven Dials Mystery and Three Act Tragedy and The ABC Murders and especially The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to name just a few. Our vision of evil far away is acute, but the closer the evil, the greater the moral myopia. The edges become blurred, the centre hard to see. Thus the reaction when it is revealed who did it: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ The disciples must have reacted in this way when Judas, good Judas Iscariot, our dear friend and travelling companion, proved to be a traitor. How blind we are to evil close-by, how willing to look away.

“Speaking of blindness, there is this curious phenomenon. We read Agatha Christie in the grip of compulsion. We must keep on reading. We want to know who did it, and how, and why. Then we find out. We’re amazed at the complexity of the crime’s execution. Oh, the coolness of the murderer’s mind, the steadiness of his or her hand. Our devouring curiosity satisfied, we put the book down — and instantly we forget who did it! Isn’t that so? We don’t forget the victim. Agatha Christie can title her novels The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Lord Edgware Dies without any fear of losing her readers’ interest. The victim is a given, and he or she stays with us. But how quickly the murderer vanishes from our mind. We pick up an Agatha Christie murder mystery — she’s written so many — and we wonder, Have I read this one? Let me see. She’s the victim, yes, I remember that, but who did it? Oh, I can’t remember . We must reread a hundred pages before we recall who it was that took a human life.

“We apply the same amnesia to the Gospels. We remember the victim. Of course we do. But do we remember who killed him? If you went up to your average person on the street and said ‘Quick — tell me— who murdered Jesus? ’ my guess is that the person would be at a loss for words. Who did murder Jesus of Nazareth? Who was responsible? Judas Iscariot? Bah! He was a tool, an accessory. He betrayed Jesus, he gave him up to people who sought him, but he did not kill him. Pontius Pilate, then, the Roman procurator who sentenced him to death? Hardly. He just went along. He found Jesus innocent of any wrongdoing, sought to have him released, preferred to have Barabbas crucified, and yielded only in the face of the angry crowd. Pilate chose to sacrifice an innocent man rather than have a riot on his hands. So he was a weak man, another accessory to murder, but he was not the actual murderer.

“Who, then, did the deed? The Romans, more generally? Jesus was strung up by Roman soldiers following Roman orders according to Roman law in a Roman province. But who’s ever heard of such a nebulous murderer? Are we to accept theologically that the Son of God was murdered by the nameless servants of a long-vanished empire to appease a squabbling local tribe? If that’s the case, no wonder no one can remember who did it.

“Ah! But of course: It was Jews who murdered Jesus! That’s a familiar refrain, is it not? A group of manipulative Jewish elders, in collusion with the Roman authorities, conspired to get rid of a troublesome fellow Jew. (And we remembered to hate Jews but not Italians — how did that happen? The shame of it!) But if it was Jews who were responsible, which ones? What were their names? We have Caiaphas, the high priest. Any others? None who is named. And really, like Judas, like Pilate, Caiaphas was an accessory. Jews could not openly kill a Jew — remember the Ten Commandments? Caiaphas had to find others who would do it. So he and his fellow elders whipped up the crowd, and it’s the crowd that decided matters against Jesus. With them lies the true, practical guilt. If the crowd had cried for Jesus’ release and Barabbas’s crucifixion, Pilate would have obliged, Caiaphas would have been stymied, and Judas would have had to return his blood money.

“There we seem to have it, then: It was a crowd that was responsible for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth. To put it in exact terms, a crowd framed by mostly anonymous officials, manipulated by mostly anonymous elders, wished him dead, and then anonymous soldiers actually killed him. But it started with a crowd, and is there anything more anonymous than a crowd? Is a crowd not, by definition, anonymous? From this assessment, it’s clear: These guilty Jews, these guilty Romans — they are straw men, red herrings, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie. No wonder the common brutish mind thinks it’s the Jew next door who murdered Jesus — that’s more concrete. But in theological actuality, it was Anonymous who killed Jesus of Nazareth. And who is Anonymous?”

Maria stops. After some seconds of silence, Eusebio realizes with a start that his wife is waiting for him to answer the question.

“Oh! I’m not sure. I’ve never—”

“Anonymous is you, is me, is all of us. We murdered Jesus of Nazareth. We are the crowd. We are Anonymous. It is not the guilt of Jews that goes down through history, it is the guilt of all of us. But how quick we are to forget that. We don’t like guilt, do we? We prefer to hide it, to forget it, to twist it and present it in a better light, to pass it on to others. And so, because of our aversion to guilt, we strain to remember who killed the victim in the Gospels, as we strain to remember who killed the victim in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

“And at the end of it, is that not the plainest way to describe the life of Jesus, as a Murder Mystery? A life was taken, the victim completely innocent. Who did it? Who had the motive and the opportunity? What happened to the body? What did it all mean? An exceptional detective was needed to solve the crime, and he came along, some years after the murder, the Hercule Poirot of the first century: Paul of Tarsus. Christianity starts with Paul. The earliest Christian documents are his letters. With them we have the story of Jesus, years before the life of Jesus of the Gospels. Paul vowed to get to the bottom of the Jesus affair. Using his grey cells, he sleuthed about, listening to testimony, poring over the record of events, gathering clues, studying every detail. He had a big break in the case in the form of a vision on the road to Damascus. And at the end of his investigation he drew the only conclusion possible. Then he preached and he wrote, and Jesus went from being a failed Messiah to the resurrected Son of God who takes on our burden of sins. Paul closed the case on Jesus of Nazareth. And just as the resolution of the crime in an Agatha Christie brings on a sort of glee, and the reader is struck by her amazing ingenuity, so the resurrection of Jesus and its meaning induces a powerful glee in the Christian — more: a lasting joy — and the Christian thanks God for His amazing ingenuity, as well as His boundless compassion. Because the resurrection of Jesus to wash away our sins is the only possible solution to the problem as understood by Paul, the problem of a loving God unexpectedly put to death who then resurrects. Hercule Poirot would heartily approve of the logic of Paul’s solution.

“The world of the Gospels is stark. There is much suffering in it, suffering of the body, suffering of the soul. It is a world of moral extremes in which the good are purely good and the evil insistently evil. Agatha Christie’s world is equally stark. Who among us lives a life so beset by murders as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple? And behind these murders, so much conniving evil! Our world is not like that, is it? Most of us know neither so much good nor so much evil. We sail a tempered middle. And yet murders happen, sometimes on a large scale, do they not? The Great War ended not so long ago. Next door the Spaniards are killing each other with abandon. And now there are insistent rumours of another war across our continent. The symbolic crime of our century is the murder, Eusebio. Anonymous is still very much with us. That tempered middle we sail is an illusion. Our world is stark too, but we hide in a shelter built of luck and closed eyes. What will you do when your luck runs out, when your eyes are ripped open?