A page from The Marxist's Red Banner Bible

I wrote the original incarnation of Marxhew 20 many years ago for a lark. It was a product of considerable procrastination and last-minute desperation to fulfil an assignment in a literary criticism class. I am indebted to that great man, George Orwell, whose denigration of Marxist jargon I drew upon at the time.

This is hopelessly obscure and targeted humour. It potentially appeals to about twenty-five people in the whole world who remember both the tone of Marxist propaganda and the language and intent of key biblical parables. I don't care. Even these twenty-five deserve to feel everything coming together for them at least once in their lives.

I shouldn't need to spell out the following, but I've been surprised before:

I assure any unsophisticated readers who are zealous to defend their sacred texts that this piece of satire respectfully employs scripture to mock Marxist newspeak, not the reverse. I hope you will agree that this small effort, whilst grossly inferior, is not inconsistent with the mission of the parable's creator—who condemned knee-jerk, superficial, and hypocritical adherence to the written tenets of his day. Perhaps if humanity had paid more heed to such enlightened instruction, and less to dogma, the 50 million people estimated to have been murdered in the last century's attempts to create Communist utopias might have been spared.

Marxhew 20 in PDF format (28Kb)