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

angel.
    Levi went across the hall and took her in his arms. They kissed for a long time until the angels began to clear their throats and murmur “Get a room” under their breaths.
    They held each other at arm’s length. Levi said, “Maggie, is this going to be like it always was? You know, you’re with me, and you love me and everything, but it’s only because you can’t have Josh?”
    “Of course.”
    “That’s so pathetic.”
    “You don’t want to be together?”
    “No, I want to, it’s just pathetic.”
    “I have money,” she said. “They gave me money.”
    “That’s good.”
    “Go,” said Raziel, losing his patience. “Go, go, go. Go away.” He pointed down the hallway.
    They started walking down the hallway, arm in arm, tentatively, looking back at the angels every few steps, until at last they looked back and the angels were gone.
    “You should have stuck around,” the Magdalene said.
    “I couldn’t. It hurt too much.”
    “He came back.”
    “I know, I read about it.”
    “He was sad because of what you had done.”
    “Yeah, so was I.”
    “The others were angry with you. They said that you had the greatest reason to believe.”
    “That why they edited me out of their Gospels?”
    “Good guess,” she said.
    They stepped into the elevator and the Magdalene pushed the button for the lobby. “By the way, it was Hallowed,” she said.
    “What was Hallowed?”
    “The H. His middle name. It was Hallowed. It’s a family name, remember, ‘Our father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’”
    “Damn, I would have guessed Harvey,” Biff said.

A fterword
    Teaching Yoga to an Elephant
    And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.
    JOHN 21:25
    Can you really teach yoga to an elephant? Well no, you can’t, but we’re talking about Jesus here. Nobody knows what he could do.
    The book you’ve just read is a story. I made it up. It is not designed to change anyone’s beliefs or worldview, unless after reading it you’ve decided to be kinder to your fellow humans (which is okay), or you decide you really would like to try to teach yoga to an elephant, in which case, please get videotape.
    I researched Lamb, I really did, but there is no doubt I could have spent decades researching and still managed to be inaccurate. (It’s a talent, what can I say?) While I’ve made some attempt to paint an accurate picture of the world in which Christ lived, I changed things for my own convenience, and sometimes, obviously, there was no way of knowing what conditions really existed in the years 1 through 33.
    The available written history about the peasant class, society, and the practice of Judaism in the first century in Galilee degenerates quickly into theory. The role of the Pharisees in peasant society, the Hellenistic influence, the influence of an international city like Joppa nearby: who knows how these things would have affected Christ as a boy? Some historians postulate that Yeshua of Nazareth would have been little more than an ignorant hillbilly, while others say that because of the proximity of Sepphoris and Joppa, he could have been exposed to Greek and Roman culture from an early age. I chose the latter because it makes for a more interesting story.
    The historical life of Jesus, beyond a couple of references by Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, and the odd mention by Roman historians, is again mostly speculation. What we can know today of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is included in the four slim Gospels found in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For those readers who know the Gospels (bear with me), you know that Matthew and Luke are the only two to mention Christ’s birth, while Mark and John cover only the ministry part of Jesus’ life. The wise men are mentioned only in one short passage in Matthew, and the shepherds are mentioned only in Luke. The slaughter of the innocents and the fleeing into Egypt are mentioned only in Matthew. In short, Jesus’ infancy is a jumble, but the chronicle of his childhood is worse. Of the time from Jesus’ birth to when he began his ministry in his thirties, the Bible gives us only one scene: Luke tells us of Jesus teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem at age twelve. Other than that, we have a thirty-year hole in the life of the most influential