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

doing. It will get easier.”
    Joshua looked at my father, who was stripped to the waist, chiseling away on a stone the size of a donkey, while a dozen slaves waited to hoist it into place. He was covered with gray dust and streams of sweat drew dark lines between cords of muscle straining in his back and arms. “Alphaeus,” Joshua called, “does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?”
    “Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open, begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don’t have to face another morning. It also has its downside.”
    “Thanks,” Joshua said. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
    “I for one, am excited,” I said. “I’m ready to cut some stone. Stand back, Josh, my chisel is on fire. Life is stretched out before us like a great bazaar, and I can’t wait to taste the sweets to be found there.”
    Josh tilted his head like a bewildered dog. “I didn’t get that from your father’s answer.”
    “It’s sarcasm, Josh.”
    “Sarcasm?”
    “It’s from the Greek, sarkasmos . To bite the lips. It means that you aren’t really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.”
    “Well, if the village idiot named it, I’m sure it’s a good thing.”
    “There you go, you got it.”
    “Got what?”
    “Sarcasm.”
    “No, I meant it.”
    “Sure you did.”
    “Is that sarcasm?”
    “Irony, I think.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
    “So you’re being ironic now, right?”
    “No, I really don’t know.”
    “Maybe you should ask the idiot.”
    “Now you’ve got it.”
    “What?”
    “Sarcasm.”
    “Biff, are you sure you weren’t sent here by the Devil to vex me?”
    “Could be. How am I doing so far? You feel vexed?”
    “Yep. And my hands hurt from holding the chisel and mallet.” He struck the chisel with his wooden mallet and sprayed us both with stone fragments.
    “Maybe God sent me to talk you into being a stonemason so you would hurry up and go be the Messiah.”
    He struck the chisel again, then spit and sputtered through the fragments that flew. “I don’t know how to be the Messiah.”
    “So what, a week ago we didn’t know how to be stonemasons and look at us now. It gets easier once you know what you’re doing.”
    “Are you being ironic again?”
    “God, I hope not.”

    It was two months before we actually saw the Greek who had commissioned my father to build the house. He was a short, soft-looking little man, who wore a robe that was as white as any worn by the Levite priests, with a border of interlocking rectangles woven around the hem in gold. He arrived in a pair of chariots, followed on foot by two body slaves and a half-dozen bodyguards who looked like Phoenicians. I say a pair of chariots because he rode with a driver in the lead chariot, but behind them they pulled a second chariot in which stood the ten-foot-tall marble statue of a naked man. The Greek climbed down from his chariot and went directly to my father. Joshua and I were mixing a batch of mortar at the time and we paused to watch.
    “Graven image,” Joshua said.
    “Saw it,” I said. “As graven images go, I like Venus over by the gate better.”
    “That statue is not Jewish,” Joshua said.
    “Definitely not Jewish,” I said. The statue’s manhood, although abundant, was not circumcised.
    “Alphaeus,” the Greek said, “why haven’t you set the floor of the gymnasium yet? I’ve brought this statue to display in the gymnasium, and there’s just a hole in the ground instead of a gymnasium.”
    “I told you, this ground is not suitable for building. I can’t build on sand. I’ve had the slaves dig down in the sand until they hit bedrock. Now it has to be back-filled in with stone, then pounded.”
    “But I want to place my statue,” the Greek whined. “It’s come all the way from Athens.”
    “Would you rather your house fall down around your precious statue?”
    “Don’t talk to me