“Juanita just told me that Christianity was hijacked by viral influences when it was only fifty days old. She must have been talking about this. What is it?”
“‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”’ Acts 2:4–12.”
“Damned if I know,” Hiro says. “Sounds like Babel in reverse.”
“Yes, sir. Many Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues was given to them so that they could spread their religion to other peoples without having to actually learn their language. The word for that is ‘xenoglossy.’”
“That’s what Rife was claiming in that piece of videotape, on top of the Enterprise. He said he could understand what those Bangladeshis were saying.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does that really work?”
“In the sixteenth century, Saint Louis Bertrand allegedly used the gift of tongues to convert somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred thousand South American Indians to Christianity,” the Librarian says.
“Wow. Spread through that population even faster than smallpox.”
“What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?” Hiro says. “They were still running the country, right?”
“The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time, there were three groups of Jews: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”
“I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices who were always hassling Christ.”
“They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”
“He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”
“This sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at—but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”
“Who were the other two groups?”
“The Sadducees were materialists.”
“Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”
“No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world—hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”
“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”
“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”
“How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however.”
“How’s that? I was just kidding, really.”
“Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.”
Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things.
“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”
“How about ‘sword’?”
“From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is ‘to cut or pierce.’ One of them is ‘post’ or ‘rod.’ And the other is, simply, ‘to speak.’”
“Let’s stay on track,” Hiro says.
“Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire.”
“I don’t want to get all forked up at this point. Tell me about the third group—the Essenes.”
“They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure that their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the Gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not with miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of their body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”
“They sound kind of like hippies.”
“The connection has been made before, but it is faulty in many ways. The Essenes were strictly religious and would never have taken drugs.”
“So to them there was no difference between infection with a parasite, like tapeworm, and demonic possession.”
“Correct.”
“Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”
“Speculation is not in my ambit.”
“Speaking of which—Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called a namshub. What does that mean?”
“Namshub is a word from Sumerian.”