The Gospel of Ralph: An Exegesis in Three Parts
I: The First Gospel
It is a little-known fact that Ralph Iscariot, brother of Judas, has three books of the Bible devoted to his extraordinary life: collectively, they are known as The Gospel of Ralph. Recently unearthed in a tiny cave near the sea of Galilee, these books document, in almost no useful detail at all, the period in which Jesus — and Ralph — lived, and died, and lived again.
Ralph was a mule tamer who learned about Jesus late in life, and spent the remainder of his days trying to track him down. He was perhaps not the most intelligent of Christ’s prospective disciples, however, as this representative verse, from First Ralph, Chapter 5, Verse 12, amply demonstrates:
Ralph came, in the fullness of time, to a fork in the road. And he stood uncertainly in this place, weighing his options, swinging his head from side to side, until the moon had risen and fallen seven times; and Ralph was weak with hunger. And then, on the seventh day, he collapsed, and then died.
This is the last we see of Ralph in the First Book of Ralph. Indeed, it is the last of the First Book of Ralph, which ends rather abruptly after his death.
II: The Second Gospel
One wonders, then, given Ralph’s death, why a Second Book of Ralph would be necessary. The easy answer — given that the book contains no actual words — is that it wasn’t necessary, but there’s no quicker way to annoy a Ralph exegisist than to point out the fact that the thirty pages of Second Ralph are actually blank. This will lead inevitably to a heated lecture on meaningful silences and the invisible semantic nuance of negative space and the Ineffable Beauty of Unbeing, and so on. When confronted with a Second Ralpher, it is always prudent to smile, exclaim politely over the empty page he will inevitably shove into your face, and then walk quickly away, not looking back.
III: The Third Gospel
Ralph makes a triumphant return in Third Ralph — resurrected, the gospel is at pains to point out, on a Tuesday.
… being the day on which all true Martyrs return from the dead. Unlike Wednesdays, when only False Martyrs, like a certain unshaven Bethlehemite, who we shall not name, was purportedly, but almost certainly not, reborn.
Ralph goes on to give what is essentially a critique of the rest of the Bible. It wasn’t a flood, he says: it was a few days of rain, blown out of proportion by crazy old man Noah — a senile aquaphobe who fled to the rowboat he kept in his backyard every time the air got a bit dewy, an enraged cat under each arm.
Leviticus: not a tribe of priests, but a cranky old tax-collector who sentenced everything that annoyed him to death — the yappy little schnauzer from nextdoor, men with excessively oiled mustaches, the weather, the color pink — and, finally himself, for being mean and intolerant and alone (the only death sentence he ever carried out, incidentally).
Sodom and Gomorra: nice little hamlets where you could buy a little weed and pick up a naughty scroll in one of many back-alley shacks. Peter: a smelly old madman. Lot: a failed writer who carved a misshapen, rudely curvaceous salt statue on his front lawn and told everyone it was his wife, punished for not doing “God’s” bidding (his wife had walked out on him many years before).
And so on, gossipy calumny in the bitter tones of a disappointed old man.
Until the middle of the book, where the tone abruptly changes, and it becomes clear that Ralph is writing from his second deathbed, wracked by some unnamed pain. There’s a sudden silence in the narrative, a kind of calm, and then this:
I saw him many years ago, in the market, buying chickens, in that calm, gentle way if his. It was as if he stood in the eye of the din that raged about him, extracting goodwill from cynical hardbitten merchants.
I stalked across the market and planted myself in front of him. “Where the hell,” I said, “have you been?”
He gave me that slow almost-smile, that infuriating not-quite-smile, and said “I’ve missed you, Ralph.”
“You aren’t who you say you are,” I said.
“Of course not. I’m who you say I am.”
“Yeah? Well I say you’re a fake an a liar.”
He inclined his head, just slightly, but did not otherwise respond.
“My brother thought you were a savior, and then he thought you were a traitor. The Romans thought you were a rebel. The Pharisees thought you were a usurper. All these idiots” — I waved my arms wildly, taking in the whole market — “think you’re a god.”
“I am all these things, and more,” he said.
I had a lot more to say, I wanted to scream my loneliness at him, the bitter and bereft years, the long dark passage into cynicism and despair. But I didn’t have the breath for it. I stood and stared at this long-dead man, and said nothing.
“What do you want me to be, Ralph?” he said, at last.
Dead, I thought. Groveling. Contrite. Unmasked.
“My friend,” I said.
“Then that is what I am,” he said. “Always and forever. Your friend.”
He took my hand, then.
I have been unhappy, on occasion, since that day. I have been angry and bitter and afraid. I have been vicious and unjust. But less and less, as time goes on. The despair that cloaks me is not gone, by any means, but it has become diaphanous, so that I can see the world through it. And that is a comfort.
There follows a long passage on “Crazy John the Apostle”, and the meth-infused joyride through Canaan that produced The Book of Revelations (which Ralph calls Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem), and then a sort of faux-Socratic dialog between Ralph and the pitcher of water on his bedside, on the subject of the rejected 11th commandment (Ralph: A commandment against farting? Seriously? Pitcher of Water: Look, you try wandering the desert for forty years with a bunch of tooting Israelites. I’d make commandments up too.).
The Gospel ends, abruptly, in mid-sentence, which has led a small contingent of Third Ralphers to claim that it is the only part of the Bible — and perhaps the only written document in existence — in which we can witness, first-hand, the death of its author. Others maintain that he simply lost interest. Most believe that the rest of the gospel was lost, and that there are many other Books of Ralph out there, somewhere, awaiting discovery.
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