Review

Culture

Music

27 February 2025

6 min read

The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed

In the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A colorful mural depicts the eyes of Bob Dylan staring to the side.

Dylan mural, Minneapolis.

Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown begins with his arrival in New York and concludes with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He begins the film as a complete unknown, as he arrives with no backstory to share or, where he does, one that he has invented. He ends it as a complete unknown, because he consistently refuses all the boxes or labels in which others want to imprison him.

This aspect of Dylan’s life and career has also characterised many of the earlier biopics, such as 2007’s I’m Not There which features six different versions of Dylan as poet, born-again Christian, outlaw, actor, folk singer, and electrified troubadour. Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend throughout much of the time covered by A Complete Unknown, described the way in which he absorbed influences at this time like a sponge:

“He had an incredible ability to see and sponge – there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that’s ﬂying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music.”

Focusing on this aspect of Dylan’s life and practice can, however, lead to a minimising of his upbringing and also to a misleading sense of brilliant but entirely disconnected phases – essentially a series of rejections – as having characterised his career. There are some important elements of Dylan’s life and ideas that are overlooked, underplayed or simply lost as a result. Many of these involve the particular expression of spirituality that has informed his work from the beginning.

As Rabbi James Rosenberg has explained: “Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. He spent the majority of his childhood, including his high school years, in Hibbing, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth. His father and mother, Abram and Beatie, whose parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, sent both him and his younger brother David to the local synagogue for their Jewish education leading to Bar Mitzvah at age 13.”

As a result, Dylan’s songs have from the beginning of his career been suffused with the phrases and imagery of the Bible; interestingly, not just the Hebrew Bible, but the Christian Bible too. Whether it’s the references to Judas in “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” or quoting Jesus in ‘the first one now will later be last’ (“The Times They Are A-Changin’”) or the Old Testament stories that feature at the end of “When the Ship Comes In”, wherever you look within Dylan’s lyrics the influence of the Bible is apparent.

Follow that thought with another which notes the prevalence of apocalyptic images (storms, hurricanes etc) and events (‘The hour when the ship comes in’, the moment when “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or the night when the “Chimes of Freedom” ring, for example). Then think from where images of apocalyptic events primarily derive in the Western imagination and you’ll be circling back to the Bible, and the Books of Daniel and Revelation in particular. That is of course what Dylan himself did following his born-again experiences in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but the Bible was always the original seedbed for his images and ideas.

Then, look deeply into one of the most apocalyptic of his early songs – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – and you’ll see a manifesto to which he has held throughout his career and which illuminates his work in every decade and every change of direction within his lengthy career. The central character in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” commits to walking through an apocalyptic world in order to tell and think and speak and breathe and reflect what he sees in order that all souls might see it too. In a much later manifesto song – “Ain’t Talkin’” – he puts it like this:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe …

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

In the last outback, at the world’s end

Throughout Dylan’s career, he writes songs about people travelling through life in the face of apocalyptic storms seeking some form of relief or salvation or entry to heaven. So, what we have in the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century (and then twenty-first century) culture.

It's actually all there right at the beginning in the song that he wrote for and sang to his hero Woody Guthrie:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home

Walkin’ a road other men have gone down

I’m seein’ your world of people and things

Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

(“Song to Woody”)

Dylan’s songs, from that point onwards, have documented where his pilgrim journey in the eye of the apocalypse has taken him; often with imagery of storms lighting his way. He has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world-weary blues. On his journey he: saw seven breezes blowing around the cabin door where victims despair (“Ballad of Hollis Brown”); lightning flashing for those who are confused, accused and misused (“Chimes of Freedom”); surveyed “Desolation Road”; talked truth with a thief as the wind began to howl (“All Along the Watchtower”); sheltered with an un-named woman from the apocalyptic storm (“Shelter from the Storm”); felt the idiot wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognised himself as an idiot and felt sorry (“Idiot Wind”); found a pathway to the stars and couldn't believe he'd survived (“Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat”); rode the slow train up around the bend (“Slow Train”); was driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief (“I Believe in You”); heard the ancient footsteps join him on his path (“Every Grain of Sand”); felt the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire (“Caribbean Wind”); betrayed his commitment, felt the breath of the storm and went searching for his first love (“Tight Connection to My Heart”); then, at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but he’s walking through the middle of nowhere trying to get to heaven before the door is closed (“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”):

The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies

I've been wading through the high muddy water

With the heat rising in my eyes.

Everyday your memory grows dimmer.

It don't haunt me, like it did before.

I been walking through the middle of nowhere

Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door.

(“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”)

Whatever the crises we face, whether personal or political, there’s a Dylan song that says there’s light at the end of the tunnel if you keep walking toward it and, whatever the song, there’s a depth of insight and compassion for those who are struggling along the way.

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Interview

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

S&U interviews

13 February 2025

5 min read

Marsha de Cordova: the personal experiences driving her passionate politics

“What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die.”

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A woman wearing a red jacket stands formally beside an office stair case.

When Marsha de Cordova talks about most issues relating to her work as the Member of Parliament for Battersea, in south London, she sticks to the standard position of her Labour party. Meeting at her constituency office by the busy Clapham Junction railway station, she dutifully defends her party’s government, elected last July. She points to ministers’ work to reform planning and improve renters’ rights as evidence they are making progress.

But when conversation turns to the Assisted Dying Bill currently going through parliament, her tone becomes unmistakeably more urgent and her passion more obviously personal.

The strong feelings mark de Cordova out as one of a group of Labour MPs who have been spurred by personal experience and, in many cases, religious conviction to oppose the Assisted Dying Bill introduced by a colleague, Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater. While the legislation is a private member’s bill without official government support, it has been widely seen as reflecting the views of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

De Cordova, who is Black, expresses similarly trenchant views about the government’s rhetoric on immigration. She is also a strong supporter of rapprochement with the European Union.

However, her views on assisted dying – informed partly by being a committed Christian – are particularly forcefully expressed. She answers tersely, “No, I’m not”, when asked if she is happy about the political capital the new government has expended on the Assisted Dying Bill. She adds that she voted against it at second reading, the first parliamentary vote on a bill. She intends to oppose it again at third reading, before it passes to the House of Lords.

“We didn’t need to expend so much capital on it,” de Cordova says. “The aim now has to be to ensure the bill doesn’t pass third reading.”

Many of the Labour MPs who have opposed the legislation have cited religious objections. In the Cabinet, they include health secretary Wes Streeting and foreign secretary David Lammy, both Christians, and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim.

De Cordova also links her opposition to her disability. De Cordova is registered blind because of nystagmus, in which the eyes repeatedly move involuntarily, disrupting vision. There have been fears assisted people could come under greater pressure than others to seek assisted death.

“As a disabled woman, I’m incredibly concerned,” de Cordova says. “What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die. That should be our government’s priority.”

“My faith is an integral part of who I am. It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

The assisted dying fight has garnered unusual levels of publicity for the Battersea MP, who entered parliament seven years ago when barely expecting to do so. De Cordova, now 49, was serving as a Lambeth borough councillor when the 2017 snap general election was called and decided to seek the Labour nomination for Battersea, then held by the Conservatives.

The seat was one of several Conservative seats in pro-Remain areas that fell to Labour’s surprisingly strong showing in the election in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“No one really thought I could win here,” de Cordova says. “Obviously, Brexit I would say played a role in that I’m a strong Remainer.”

De Cordova increased her majority in 2019 and last year’s general election. She sees strong continuities between serving as an MP and her previous role in the charity sector. She had been working when elected as the engagement and advocacy director for the Thomas Pocklington Trust, which supports blind and partially sighted people.

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” de Cordova says, of her upbringing in Bristol. “I’ve always had the desire to be making a difference. All of my work before becoming a politician centred around that – being that voice for the voiceless.”

She links her work to her faith. She became a Christian in her late 20s and now attends Holy Trinity Clapham. The church is famous as the spiritual home of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” of early 19th century campaigners against the slave trade and other social evils.

Her faith has led to her appointment as second church estates commissioner – the liaison between parliament and England’s established church, who answers questions in the Commons on behalf of the church.

“My faith is an integral part of who I am,” de Cordova says. “It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

It becomes clear speaking to her that her objections to the policies of the government – and the Assisted Dying Bill, which many of her party colleagues support – are clustered around areas involving challenges to fundamental rights.

She objects to the Assisted Dying Bill because she sees it as part of a steady erosion of disabled people’s rights.

“The issue will have a hugely, hugely disproportionate impact on disabled people,” she says. “That, for me, is a no-no.”

Provision for disabled people was “hollowed out” under the last Conservative government, she says.

“That, for me, will always be the issue,” de Cordova says. “I want to campaign and fight for full equality for us.”

She also views immigration issues through the prism of immigrants’ rights.

Asked if she wishes the government took a less hostile tone on the issue, she replies: “From my perspective, when I think about immigration, I tend to think about it in a compassionate way.”

She calls for the establishment of “safe routes” to ensure people fleeing persecution can claim asylum from outside the UK, without making dangerous Channel crossings. The government has shown no signs of introducing such rights.

“Let’s think about immigration in a positive way,” de Cordova says, adding that her grandparents were immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean. “The Tories and the right have always tried to portray it as a negative. It’s not always a negative.”

For de Cordova, the unglamorous role of church estates commissioner forms part of that pattern of advocating for the voiceless.

The job entails dealing with every aspect of MPs’ questions about church life, including the status of historic buildings and other less obviously morally important questions.

However, de Cordova, who was appointed a month before publication of the Makin Report on the church’s handling of abuse by John Smyth, is clear the church has urgent problems to resolve.

The Makin Report has to be a “turning point”, she says.

“I understand steps are being taken to address the challenges,” de Cordova says. “They need to set out over time how they’ll ensure such abuse never happens again.”

The campaigning approach is part of de Cordova’s wider philosophy. She says she has faced many challenges as a result of her disability and tried to overcome them.