SOURCE: “Meddling with Sacred History,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 2, 1992, p. 20.

In the following review, Korn offers a mixed assessment of Live from Golgotha, which he finds to be both “savvy” and tiresome.

He weighs more than a Japanese wrestler, more than Orson Welles even. You can’t turn that mass of blubber into a part of the Trinity when he is larger than the whole Trinity put together. The image for us of a fat Jesus is simply catastrophic, particularly now that the Polish Pope is making so many converts in the third world, where people are starving to death, and what do we have to offer them? The fattest god in the business. …

At first blush, it seems that Gore Vidal is declaring solidarity with Salman Rushdie, demonstrating that Christians too can blaspheme, contemplate diabolic revisions of sacred texts and write with bawdy derision of the...