And sure enough, Jesus had come back to life, and was relaxing in Galilee.
“Jesus! I’m so glad you aren’t, you know, dead. So, what’s up next? Are we going back to Jerusalem? Should we perform a few miracles to get the ball rolling?”
“My work here is done,” Jesus informed them. “I’m going back to Heaven to be with God. You’re on your own.”
“But…what are we supposed to do, then?” one of them asked.
“What do you mean?” Jesus replied. “You’ve just seen like three hundred miracles, including me coming back from the dead. Go tell people about it. Tell them I was the Son of God. Tell them the Messiah has come to get the world ready for the Kingdom of God. Oh, and tell them that I’ll be coming back soon.”
And with that, Jesus flew up to Heaven.
“Go, Jesus, go!” the disciples shouted after him.
The Gospel of Mark
Mark’s tale begins with Jesus meeting John the Baptist, a mystic who lived in the desert and was so poor that he wore camel fur and ate crickets, which he made taste better by putting honey on them. John the Baptist got his name from the fact that he liked to baptize people, or dip them under water. A baptism was a bathing ritual which symbolized someone’s rebirth as a spiritual being.
When Jesus was baptized, the skies parted and a dove fluttered down. In his booming voice, God announced to everybody that Jesus was his son, and boy was he proud of him.
Having gotten a big thumbs up from God, Jesus went from town to town, doing God’s work and dazzling people with miracles. He performed exorcisms, brought down fevers, and cured scores of lepers. Jesus had a thing for lepers.
Jesus was no snob. He would hang out with anybody. Soon, a cadre of fishermen, prostitutes, and other low-lifes began following him full time. He made twelve of these followers his official disciples. When asked how a supposed man of God could keep such sordid company, he merely shrugged and said, “Who needs a doctor more: the man who is well, or the man who is sick?”
While people loved his street magic, Jesus also started teaching his own religious philosophy, which rankled a lot of people.
“I like the free fish and bread,” they’d complain, “But can’t he just leave religion out of it?”
Jesus could not leave religion out of it. He went around telling people that all that really mattered was how much they loved God and how well they treated another, which especially bothered the Pharisees, who considered themselves to be holy men because they meticulously followed all the thousands of rules laid out by Moses.
“We’re not about to let our life’s work be undermined by some guy in homemade sandals,” they vowed.
One day, the Pharisees caught Jesus picking grain in a field on the Sabbath, a clear violation of the Law of Moses. When they confronted him, Jesus shrugged them off, saying, “God made the Sabbath to serve man, not man to serve the Sabbath.”
Meanwhile, Jesus’ irreverent teachings and magic tricks were making him more and more controversial, and thus, more popular. As his following grew, Jesus decided to take his miracles up a notch. He was healing lepers and cripples by the busload. Eventually, he even began raising people from the dead. Jesus was making a lot of powerful people nervous, and they all began to think of ways they might quietly get rid of him.
But Jesus continued taking his show across the nation. One day, his tour took him by his old hometown. Everyone in this conservative sleepy town remembered him as little Jesus. Now he was coming back as this notorious shock preacher. His mother and his brothers worried that if Jesus started telling these people that he was the Son of God, or that they needed to follow him, he would get himself killed. They nervously tried to lead Jesus off the stage.
“Please, let us take him home,” Mary begged. “He doesn’t mean any harm, he’s not right in the head.”
“Yes, why don’t you go home,” the Pharisees argued. “Look, you’re making your poor mother sick!”
But Jesus ignored his family, and the Pharisees, and launched into his routine, healing the sick and casting out demons. Seeing Jesus perform exorcisms, the Pharisees flipped out, accusing him of witchcraft and devil-worship.
“How does that make any sense at all?” Jesus asked them. “If I were working for the devil, wouldn’t I be putting demons in people, rather than taking them out?”
Later, the Pharisees caught Jesus eating lunch without washing his hands first. They started in on him, blowing their whistles and shouting, “The Law of Moses requires you to wash your hands! You have defiled yourself, sir! You have eaten lunch without washing your hands, and now you are defiled!”
Jesus rolled his eyes, and said, “People aren’t defiled half as much by what goes in their mouths as by the shit which comes out.”
Then he went back to eating his sandwich. The Pharisees decided they’d had just about enough of this smartass.
At one point during the tour, Jesus came upon a big commotion. His followers were arguing with a local family about whether they should ask Jesus to heal their son.
“What’s going on here?” Jesus asked.
The father came over to Jesus and said, “It’s my son. He’s possessed by some seizure demon who causes him to flop around on the ground and foam at the mouth. The seizures get so bad that he’ll flop right out of bed, or into the fireplace. Sometimes, when we’re outdoors, he’ll shake so hard that he rolls into the lake. We can’t have him flopping into the lake. It’s dangerous! I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
“How long has he been like that?” Jesus asked.
“All his life, I’m afraid.”
Jesus walked over and put his hands on the boy. The boy shrieked and shook violently for a moment and then went limp and quiet.
“Oh my God, Jesus killed him!” someone cried out.
But after a few minutes, the boy came to, and everyone cheered.
“All the Pharisees do is scold and blow whistles at us,” people said. “I’ll take Jesus over those guys any day.”
Jesus and his disciples stopped in Jerusalem for Passover. When he got to the temple, he found the entrance lined with vendor booths selling animals for sacrifice and bankers exchanging money. Jesus was enraged to find that the temple had become more of a farmers market than a place of worship. He began knocking over the money-changing tables and horse-whipping the pigeon salesmen. This outburst put him in hot soup with the Sadducee priesthood who ran the temple.
They arrested Jesus and read a list of charges against him.
“God isn’t interested in your laws,” Jesus said. “He doesn’t care about your sales figures. The only things God wants from you are the very things you lack: love and understanding.”
“Jerusalem isn’t some hayseed town,” they explained to him. “Running amok and knocking over cash registers might be how things are done in East Stop Sign, or wherever it is you come from, but here in Jerusalem, we have laws. We have a system. Put simply, you don’t have any authority here. Now you’re welcome to enjoy Passover, buy some souvenirs, whatever.
Just don’t forget who’s in charge, okay, son?”
Jesus responded with a parable, “There was a vineyard.”
“What, is he telling us a story, now?” one of the priests asked.
“Shhh! I want to hear this,” another one said.
Jesus cleared his throat and continued. “The owner of the vineyard rented it to some nice, respectable-looking men, much like yourselves. Then, when the time came to harvest, the owner sent a servant to go collect the rent. Instead of paying up, though, the tenants beat the servant up and sent him away empty-handed. ‘Hmmm, there must have been some mistake,’ the owner thought, so he sent another servant, whom they killed. Finally, the owner said, ‘I’ll send my son, they wouldn’t dare refuse to pay their due to my son.’ But they killed him, too.”
“What are you trying to say?” they asked him, annoyed.
“I’m saying that if you mak
e the owner come back to the vineyard himself, there’s probably going to be a change of management.”
Whatever their faults, the priests had a firm grasp of subtext. Jesus was advocating revolution. This was the final straw, as far as they were concerned. And Jesus knew that it was only a matter of time before they came for him.
At first, they merely tried to ruin Jesus by tricking him into saying something stupid or that would get him arrested by the Romans. They asked Jesus whether he thought people ought to pay taxes, hoping that if he said “yes,” he would lose his radical chic, or that if he said “no,” he would be guilty of treason. Jesus slipped out of this rhetorical noose by brandishing a coin and asking whose face was on it. When the crowd answered that it was Caesar’s, he simply told them that they should give Caesar that which already belongs to him. Then he shamed the priests by adding that they should pay God in what they owed him. The priests eventually gave up on trying to disgrace Jesus. They would simply arrest him, but they would tastefully wait until after Passover.
The day before Passover, Jesus decided to drop in on his friend, Simon the Leper. While he was sitting at the table, a woman cracked open an alabaster jar of expensive perfume and began pouring it over Jesus’ hair.
“Ahhhhhh!” Jesus groaned in pleasure.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the other guests scolded her. “We can’t afford that. That perfume was made out of pure nard!”
“I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” Jesus asked indignantly.
“That perfume cost a lot of money,” he explained. “We could have sold it and given the money to the poor.”
“That was a really beautiful thing she did for me,” Jesus replied, “and you just had to shit all over it. Look, you’ll have plenty of time to take care of the poor, but I’m going to be dead soon, so just let me have this moment, all right? Geez.” Jesus tied his sweet-smelling hair into a ponytail and carried on with his evening.
The next day, Jesus sent his disciples into town to make reservations for Passover dinner. After dinner, they were hanging out in a garden when one of their own sold Jesus out to the cops.
The cops took Jesus to the priests, who roughed him up, and asked if he thought he was the Messiah. When Jesus replied that he was the Messiah, they sent him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to have him executed for treason.
The governor didn’t think Jesus was much of a threat to the Roman Empire, so he invoked an ancient and poorly conceived custom that allowed a randomly assembled crowd pick a convict to be released from prison. He brought out Jesus and an insurgent named Barabbas and offered to free whichever one got the most applause from the crowd. The priests had stacked the crowd with their own people, so Barabbas was clearly the favorite.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have Jesus?” Pilate asked. “King of the Jews? Anybody?”
“No, the other one! Barabbas!” they shouted.
There was nothing left to do but have Jesus crucified. After Jesus died, they placed him in a tomb that had been donated by one of his friends and rolled a large stone against the door to seal off the entrance.
That Sunday, some ladies went to go visit Jesus’ tomb. Among them were Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his friend Mary Magdalene. They brought some perfume to rub on Jesus’ corpse. “I think he would have liked that,” Mary Magdalene said. “He liked to smell good.”
They were walking to Jesus’ tomb when his mother suddenly stopped.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” she said, “but how are we supposed to get inside? They rolled that giant rock in front of the door, remember?”
Nevertheless, they sallied forth with their perfume. When they arrived, the stone that had been sealing off the tomb had been rolled away.
Instead of Jesus’ corpse, the women entered the tomb to find an angel in a white robe sitting on a bench.
“Where’s Jesus?” they asked.
“Oh, he’s running around here somewhere,” the angel replied.
“You mean he’s alive?”
“Well, sure,” the angel replied. “You didn’t honestly think they could kill a guy who brings the dead back to life, did you?”
The Gospel of Luke
God decided that he wanted kids. So he talked a young woman named Mary into having his son. Perhaps more impressively, he convinced her fiancé Joseph that this was totally cool and nothing to worry about.
The couple were traveling to a small town named Bethlehem when Mary suddenly had to drop. Since the hotels were all full, God’s son was born in a stable, among the cows, sheep and donkeys. Joseph and Mary named the baby Jesus.
Jesus was smart as a whip, and as you’d expect from a son of God’s, he showed an early aptitude for religion. Joseph and Mary would take him to Jerusalem for Passover every year. One year, they were halfway home when they realized that Jesus wasn’t with them. Nervously, they raced back to Jerusalem and searched everywhere, finally finding him in the temple, debating the Torah with some priests.
“Jesus H. Christ!” his mother shouted, “Do you have any idea how worried we were about you?!”
“It’s okay,” Jesus replied, “I was just visiting my father’s house.”
As an adult, Jesus decided to take up religion full time and became a traveling rabbi. He assembled a group of twelve disciples to be his assistants. They were a motley crew of fishermen, tax collectors, and failed revolutionaries. Jesus liked to give his disciples nicknames. He changed Simon’s name to Peter, which means “rock.” There was another Simon in his group whom he called “Zealot.” He would refer to James and his brother John as “The Sons of Thunder.”
Among the disciples who didn’t get cool nicknames were Thomas, who was famous for being a skeptic (a rarity in someone who’s joined a cult), and Judas, the guy who would later betray him. Being rather progressive for the times, Jesus also had several women in his inner circle, including Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and her sister Martha. Jesus and his disciples traveled all over Israel, telling stories, performing miracles, and freeloading at friends’ houses. In that way, they were sort of like an improv group.
Jesus had a lot of ideas about religion. His most important idea, though, was forgiveness.
The ancient world in which he lived was all about revenge, killing, and constantly appeasing gods who would strike you with lightning just to watch you glow in the dark. Jesus thought, “Wouldn’t life be nice if we all simply forgave each other? If I forgave you, I wouldn’t feel the need for revenge. If you forgave me, I wouldn’t need to be looking over my shoulder all the time. If God forgave all of us, we would more love him as a father than fear him as a cosmic policeman.”
When the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he told them they should pray that God would forgive them as they forgave others.
“The old way is all about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Jesus explained, “but I say if someone slaps you, offer him a shot at the other cheek. If he sues you for a coat, give him two. Why not? Sure, you’ll be down two coats, but mentally speaking, you’ll be able to move on. Let the other dude be consumed by guilt and pettiness for the rest of his life. Who needs it?”
Jesus didn’t believe in revenge. “If the scales of justice need balancing out,” he told people, “that’s a job for God, not a lynch mob.”
Jesus decided to go to Jerusalem. Some of the disciples went ahead to find a place to crash for the night at a nearby village of Samaritans.
“Well?” Jesus asked upon his disciples’ return.
“They won’t let us stop in their village,” they replied. “Should we summon fire from Heaven to destroy their village, Lord?”
Jesus shook his head. “No, we’re going to FORGIVE them. Have you heard nothing I’ve been talking about?”
Jesus’ teachings greatly annoyed the religious establishment, especially the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group of somewhat sno
bby holy men who prided themselves on being worthy of God’s love by never breaking the rules. They made a point of following all God’s laws, all the time, no matter how trivial they may be.
Jesus was having dinner at the house of a Pharisee named Simon. A woman showed up to the dinner uninvited. The woman had been ostracized because of some great sin she’d supposedly committed. Having nothing left to lose, she walked into the house, right past security, and went up to Jesus. Standing there face to face with him, unable to think of anything to do or say, she simply broke into tears.
In her grief and shame, her tears began to splatter onto Jesus’ feet, so she bent down and began drying them with her hair.
“Will somebody get this skank out of here!” the Pharisee called out. But Jesus wouldn’t send the woman away. “Can I ask you something, Simon?” Jesus asked.
“Sure,” Simon replied, annoyed at the spectacle playing out on his dining room floor.
“There were these two people who owed a man some money. One of them owed him five hundred bucks, the other one only owed him fifty. Neither one had the money to pay him back, so he forgave both debts. Which of the two debtors do you think is going to be more grateful?”
“The one who owed him more, I suppose.” Simon answered.
“And that is precisely why we should forgive those who sin the most.” Jesus raised the woman up from her knees and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Go, and live in shame no more. Your sins are forgiven.”
Jesus was always telling little stories like that. Most of his teachings came in the form of these little parables. Jesus liked to keep things simple. He once told a crowd of people that in order to be worthy of the Kingdom of God, they needed to do only two things: to love God and love their neighbor. Apparently, even that wasn’t simple enough, as one guy immediately tried to lawyer-ball Jesus, asking him to define the term “neighbor.”
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