Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

started to heal her and ask about her faith when…
    “Your denariis changed to shekels, while you wait! No amount too large or small. Drachmas to talents, talents to shekels—all your money changed while you wait.”
    “Do you believe that the Lord loves you?” Joshua asked the little girl.
    “Bitter herbs! Get your bitter herbs!” cried a vendor.
    “Dammit all!” Joshua screamed in frustration. “You’re healed, child, now get out of here.” He waved off the little girl, who got up and walked for the first time in her life, then he slapped a dove vendor, ripped the top off his cage of birds, and released a cloud of doves into the sky.
    “This is a house of prayer! Not a den of thieves.”
    “Oh no, not the moneychangers,” Peter whispered to me.
    Joshua grabbed a long low table where men were changing a dozen currencies into shekels (the only coin allowed for commerce inside the Temple complex) and he flipped it over.
    “Oh, that’s it, he’s fucked,” Philip said. And he was. The priests took a big percentage from the moneychangers. He might have slid by before, but now he’d interfered with their income.
    “Out, you vipers! Out!” Joshua had taken a coil of rope from one of the vendors and was using it as a scourge to drive the vendors and the moneychangers out of the Temple gates. Nathaniel and Thomas had joined in Joshua’s tirade, kicking at the merchants as they scampered away, but the rest of us sat staring or ministered to those who had come to hear Joshua speak.
    “We should stop this,” I said to Peter.
    “You think you could stop this?” Peter nodded to the corner of the courtyard, where at least twenty priests had come out from the Inner Temple to watch the fracas.
    “He’s going to bring down the wrath of the priests on all of us,” Judas said. He was looking at the Temple guards, who had stopped pacing the walls and were watching the goings-on below in the courtyard. To Judas’ credit, he, Simon, and a few of the others had managed to calm the small crowd of the faithful who had gathered to be blessed and healed before Joshua’s tantrum.
    Beyond the walls of the Temple we could see the Roman soldiers staring down from the battlements of Herod the Great’s old palace, which the governor commandeered during feast weeks when he brought the legions to Jerusalem. The Romans didn’t enter the Temple unless they sensed insurrection, but if they entered, Jewish blood would be spilled. Rivers of it.
    “They won’t come in,” Peter said, a tiny note of doubt in his voice. “They can see that this is a Jewish matter. They don’t care if we kill each other.”
    “Just watch Judas and Simon,” I said. “If one of them starts with that no-master-but-God thing, the Romans will come down like an executioner’s blade.”
    Finally, Joshua was out of breath, soaked in sweat, and barely able to swing the coil of rope he was carrying, but the Temple was clear of merchants. A large crowd had started to follow him, shouting at the vendors as Joshua drove them out of the Temple. The crowd (probably eight hundred to a thousand people) was the only thing that kept the priests from calling the guards down on Joshua right then. Josh tossed the rope aside and led the crowd back to where we had been watching in horror.
    “Thieves,” he said to us breathlessly as he passed. Then he went to a little girl with a withered arm who had been waiting beside Judas.
    “Pretty scary, huh?” Joshua said to her.
    She nodded. Joshua put his hands over her withered arm.
    “Are those guys in the tall hats coming over here?”
    She nodded again.
    “Here, can you make this sign with your finger?”
    He showed her how to stick out her middle finger. “No, not with that hand, with this one.”
    Joshua took his hand away from her withered arm and she wiggled her fingers. The muscle and tendons had filled out until it looked identical to her other arm.
    “Now,” Joshua said, “make that sign. That’s good. Now show it to those guys behind me with the tall hats. That’s a good girl.”

    “By whose authority do you perform these healings,” said one of the priests, obviously the highest-ranking of the group.
    “No master—” Simon began to shout but he was cut off by a vicious blow to the solar plexus from Peter, who then pushed the Zealot to the ground and sat on him while furiously whispering in his ear. Andrew had come up behind Judas and seemed to be delivering a similar lecture without