by God
9 No other reference or anecdote exists; no other written record to shed light on how he was girding himself for glory during these three decades.
10 But I was there; I watched him through it all; and I will tell thee exactly what he was doing during this period:
11 Fieldwork.
12 Jesus wanted to redeem humanity; and to redeem it he had to understand it; and to understand it he had to become part of it, and that is just what he did:
13 He unflinchingly surrendered to life, enjoying and suffering and experiencing all the thoughts and feelings and sensations and impulses of a real, flesh-and-blood human being.
14 Thus, as soon as Jesus was born,
15 Jesus wept.
16 And Jesus slept.
17 Jesus breast-fed; he nourished himself on the milk the Virgin Mary produced in her mammary glands; he sucked on her nipples to drink thereof.
18 Jesus weaned; whereupon Jesus ate; and Jesus chewed; and Jesus swallowed; and Jesus digested; and Jesus absorbed the nutrients; and Jesus excreted solid waste.
19 (He performed an equivalent procedure for liquids.)
20 Jesus learned to crawl, and was amazed; Jesus learned to walk, and was awestruck; Jesus learned to talk, and the sound of his own voice was a revelation.
21 The toddler Jesus had a blanket he took with him everywhere.
22 Jesus adored Mary and Joseph, and they him; he was obedient and full of love; they were tender and full of love.
23 At six, Jesus got chicken pox; for five days there were red blotches all over Jesus’s face and body; then Jesus got better.
24 Outside the family home lay a field of lavender; its smell wafted in through the window at night; Jesus came to associate the smell with his home; unto the day of his death the smell of lavender recalled to him his childhood.
25 At nine the young Jesus began his apprenticeship with Joseph; throughout his childhood he learned the craft of carpentry; Jesus labored diligently; Jesus made many mistakes; but Jesus improved; Jesus grew competent; in time, Jesus grew masterful; and Jesus felt pride in his progress.
26 Jesus had childhood friends; they would amuse themselves by chasing each other through the fields, and throwing rocks at trees; over the years Jesus lost contact with them; Jesus regretted this.
27 Jesus had strange dreams about giant elephants, and removing his clothes in public, and being pursued by a giant sandal; upon waking he could only remember them partially; and he could not construe their meaning.
28 Throughout his youth Jesus attended synagogue, and observed the Sabbath, and was devoutly religious; he did not yet know he was my son, but from an early age he manifested a profound interest in all things spiritual.
29 Jesus picked his nose when he thought no one was looking.
30 He did not put his finger all the way up there; only a little; and he never ate it.
31 Jesus would hear passersby singing songs, and the songs would get stuck in Jesus’s head, and Jesus would be unable to stop humming them for weeks.
32 Sometimes after meals Jesus felt queasy; he came to notice that this happened whenever he ate pistachios, to which he thus learned he was allergic; and refrained from consuming henceforward.
33 Jesus reached puberty; Jesus’s voice broke; Jesus grew half a cubit in six months; Jesus sprouted pubic hair; and Jesus felt the adolescent’s stirrings of lust in all their cyclonic fury.
34 And so Jesus masturbated; for no one, not even my son, can pass through adolescence without masturbating; but he did it less often than most, and with a commendable shame.
35 Jesus sampled wine on numerous occasions; several times he drank too much; one night Jesus vomited on the street; he woke up sick and tunic-besmirched, vowing never again to imbibe the fruit of the vine to the point of besottedness; and he never did.
36 Jesus ended his apprenticeship and opened his own shop; he made yokes and ploughs and other farm equipment; some projects he found satisfying, others drudgery; overall he found the work only mildly fulfilling.
37 But in his spare hours he devoured the Hebrew Scriptures, and the rabbinical commentaries thereof; and followed the events of his time with passion; and engaged himself completely with the world; a world he no longer looked down on, but was part of;
38 Until he had become like any 30-year-old human being, or rather, like the best of them: churning, and changing, and yearning, and questing; bursting with consciousness; throbbing with life.
39 Yea; Jesus had gone native.
40 (But know this: Jesus never lay with a woman; Jesus never married; and Jesus certainly never impregnated anyone.
41 Dost thou hear me, Dan Brown?
42 Thy hunt-and-peck blasphemy may win thee legions of readers on beaches and tarmacs and other flat surfaces; but I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe: and I have outsold thee 5,000 to 1.)
CHAPTER 10
1Prepare ye the way of the LORD! Prepare ye the way of the LORD!”
2 Even those of you abiding in the paganest depths of Greenwich Village know these words; for they are the beginning of Godspell, a musical I esteem almost as highly as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
3 (I am omniscient; so I can say with authority, that over 39 percent of you appeared in a production of Godspell at some point in adolescence.
4 Even I appeared in Godspell once; I did a cameo as myself; I was good; not great, but good.)
5 But they are more than bouncily set lyrics; they are the very words spoken by John the Baptist on that epochal day, when Jesus entered the River Jordan a man, and left it a savior, like unto Superman in a liquid phone booth.
6 John was a cousin of Jesus’s, a prophet who had been born on the outskirts of Crazyville and had recently moved to the heart of downtown.
7 His clothes were of camel hair, and his food was wild locusts and honey, but he was a prophet; and as I said before, prophets need not be the most presentable of people; they are obliged only to be accurate, not sane.
8 On the Boxing Day morning after he turned 30, my son came to the Jordan, hungry for fulfillment and longing to be baptized.
9 Now, baptism has long since become a sacrament; but at this time it was seen by the rabbis as meritless and gaudy; pretentious; a gratuitous waste of one’s monthly bath.
10 Only a small group of Judeans had yet rejuvenated themselves with this form of spiritual hydrotherapy, and only three itinerant rabbis performed the ceremony; all three were quite bapt; but assuredly, John was the baptest.
11 And so Jesus took a number and waited on line at the riverbank, as John baptized the crowd, all the while denouncing the Pharisees in attendance as a “generation of vipers” for whom “the ax is laid unto the root of the trees,” and demanding that they “bring forth therefore fruits mete for repentance.”
12 (That last quote was no allegory; he had gone six months on wild locusts and honey, and would have killed for some figs.)
13 Then he began speaking of one more powerful than him, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
14 No doubt such agricultural metaphors mean little to thy generation, which believeth its sustenance to originate in either the stockroom of a supermarket or the warehouse of Frito-Lay®; but back then it was fearsome imagery.
15 And then my son walked in (not on; that was later) the water; and John saw him, and was filled with reverence, and dropped to his knees, and said, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?”
16 And Jesus had not yet been made aware of his true identity; so although he responded, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness,” inwardly he thought, “Stalker alert. Stalker alert.”
17 Lo, this was the moment.
18 For 30 years my son had remained ignorant of his own divinity; but at the moment he was baptized he flew straightaway out of the water,
1
9 And the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw my Spirit descending like a dove, and lighting upon him,
20 And he turned to me, with instant and total recollection, and I said to him, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; and Jesus smiled, and embraced me.
21 But I only said that because Ruth was there.
22 I still thought the whole thing was a stupid idea.
CHAPTER 11
1The next episode in Jesus’s story was his testing in the wilderness by the devil; and here I must digress.
2 Forgive me, Reader; trust me, I will forgive thee in turn.
3 When my publisher first approached me about writing this book, I said unto him, “Happily would I merge the House of the LORD with the noble House of Simon, and the decent one of Schuster; but know this from the getteth-go:
4 There are two, and possibly three, subjects I will not discuss in my memoirs: heaven, hell, and limbo.
5 I will not divulge any information on them; neither where they are, nor what they are like, nor who inhabits them, nor how to reserve a spot in them; nor which if any is the eternal resting place of righteous nonbelievers, or deathbed converts, or Chinese people.
6 I will give no revelation regarding any aspect of man’s posthumous destiny; for such a revelation would be like unto the spoiler of all spoilers, draining life of all its mystery and suspense;
7 And moreover, such enlightenment would furnish today’s readers with a moral shortcut that would be unfair to those already departed souls who earned their eternal salvations and damnations strictly on merit.”
8 That is what I said, and that is what I meant; I have given thee brief glimpses of the goings-on in heaven, and may offer a few more before this book is through; but otherwise that which lies beyond the portals of death must remain forever shrouded to the eyes of man.
9 Sorry.
10 Knowing this, thou canst see why the devil, too, is a subject of whom I would speak very little; for to talk of him and his activities would be to expose highly classified information regarding the afterlife.
11 (Besides which, there is also the matter of authorial courtesy; for I understand he is currently in negotiations with HarperCollins.)
12 But his unsuccessful temptation of Jesus is not classified; it is right there in the Synoptic Gospels for all to see, so I do not mind mentioning it here.
13 And this seems an apt time also to discuss the little else I am willing to tell thee about the devil; for none of it is new information, but rather mere confirmation of things thou hast long suspected.
14 For the devil is, indeed, the fallen angel Lucifer.
15 And Lucifer did, indeed, lead a rebellion against me; and I did, indeed, suppress it, and cast him out.
16 And ever since, Lucifer hath, indeed, sought to lure mankind into the path of evil.
17 And he doth, indeed, do this by projecting himself and his evil messages into books, and shadows, and weird murmurings in the forest, and creaking sounds in the dark, and R-rated movies, and whatever the latest, most youth-oriented form of music is.
18 And he doth, indeed, especially love heavy-metal; into the recording sessions whereof he does, indeed, sneak, that he may insert backward messages into songs; for he believeth retrograde gibberish laid inaudibly under ear-shattering grindcore, to be the most effective way to promote his views.
19 And he doth, indeed, visit people in their time of need; and offer to grant them mortal happiness in exchange for their immortal soul; and if they agree, he doth, indeed, have them sign a contract; for though he is the amoral Prince of All Lies, he hath for some reason an unshakable respect for tort law.
20 And he doth, indeed, have red skin; and horns; and a long curved tail; and a trident.
21 And he did, indeed, go down to Georgia, and lose a violin competition there to a young musician named Johnny; whereupon he did, indeed, give his beloved golden fiddle to Johnny; who thereupon did, indeed, call him a son of a bitch.
22 Yea, there is only one widely held belief about the devil that is a misconception; and even that only partially so.
23 The number of the devil is not 666.
24 That is only his area code; his full number is unlisted.
CHAPTER 12
1It is not my intention here to outline the final three years of Jesus’s life, for of those there is more than enough record; all four Gospels tell the story in magnificent detail.
2 My favorite of these is Matthew, but Mark has its moments; and John’s literary style is at times quite engaging.
3 Luke stinks.
4 But I will offer my recollections of Jesus during his ministry; for I was not only a witness but a participant, in frequent contact with him during that time; as was H. G., whose interest in his younger brother’s vocation remained avid.
5 Soon after resisting the devil’s temptations, H. G., Jesus, and I gathered one day for a strategy session in Jesus’s cerebellum.
6 It quickly devolved into a shouting match between Jesus and me; for he wanted his ministry to consist of preaching and hugging and telling people he loved them and baking them vegan millet loaves;
7 While I wanted it to consist of upbraiding heretics and slaughtering animals and afflicting the wicked with liver disease.
8 Finally, just as Jesus was limbering up his orbicularis oculi in preparation for the Look, H. G. stepped forward and said, “Dad, Jeez, it’s very simple: PAM.
9 PAM. Parables, Apostles, Miracles.
10 That’s it. That’s all we need.
11 For in my many travels around the world I have observed human beings of every size and shape and color and socioeconomic background, and there are three things that never fail to impress them:
12 Stories, entourages, and magic.
13 So let us write some parables; let us write them so as to have wide popular appeal; meaning nothing too artsy, Jesus, and nothing too bloody, Dad.
14 And then let us gather apostles to help spread the Word; it matters not exactly how many, though my instinct says somewhere between ten and the low teens.
15 And then the miracles ... well, the miracles will be the easy part.
16 What do you say? Let us PAM.
17 Say it with me: PAM. PAM.
18 PAM! PAM! PAM! PAM! PAM! PAM! PAM!”
19 His excitement was contagious; and soon all three of us were dancing around shouting “PAM!”;
20 For even I am not immune to the power of a catchy slogan.
CHAPTER 13
1So we adapted H. G.’s PAM mantra; and we began by composing a body of parables for Jesus, proven material he could fall back on whenever his newer stuff bombed.
2 But our worries were unfounded; for from the moment he began his first sermon Jesus spellbound the crowd with his passion, sincerity, empathy, and prop work.
3 Nor did he need much help crafting his parables; for he took to the form like Aesop to fables, or Sparks to schlock;
4 Proving most adept at condensing complex moral and theological issues into lively stories that conveyed a message without being preachy.
5 Indeed, every utterance of Jesus in the Gospels is memorable and inspired; but in reviewing them again for this book—for verily, the last edition of the New Testament I read was Gutenberg’s—it struck me that a few sections and quotations have come to feel dated.
6 So I have provided below, and in the two chapters that follow, new versions of four of his parables, and various of his other utterances; which
H. G. and I have revised in accordance with the spirit of thine age, and with Jesus’s full, albeit unspoken and unsought, permission.
THE PRODIGAL SON
7 A certain farmer had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.”
8 So he divided in two his estate; and soon after the younger son ceased tilling his father’s land, and began wasting himself with riotous living.
9 He continued in this manner for
years, his condition ever worsening, his denials ringing ever hollower; until one day he hit rock bottom, drunkenly falling off Mount Hebron and landing on a rock at the bottom.
10 And as he lay there half-dead, I came to him in his delirium and said, “My name is Jesus Christ, and I am an interventionist.
11 Thou art addicted, my son, addicted to sin, and it is a sickness; for maketh no mistake, addiction is a disease.