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

his own wife and many of his sons. Herod was called “the Great” because he built things. Amazing things: fortresses, palaces, theaters, harbors—a whole city, Caesarea, modeled on the Roman ideal of what a city should be. The one thing he did for the Jewish people, who hated him, was to rebuild the Temple of Solomon on Mount Moriah, the center of our faith. When H. the G. died, Rome divided his kingdom among three of his sons, Archelaus, Herod Philip, and Herod Antipas. It was Antipas who ultimately passed sentence on John the Baptist and gave Joshua over to Pilate. Antipas, you sniveling fuckstick (if only we’d had the word back then). It was Antipas whose toady pandering to the Romans caused bands of Jewish rebels to rise up in the hills by the hundreds. The Romans called all of these rebels Zealots, as if they were all united in method as well as cause, but, in fact, they were as fragmented as Jews of the villages. One of the bands that rose in Galilee called themselves the Sicarii. They showed their disapproval of Roman rule by the assassination of Roman soldiers and officials. Although certainly not the largest group of Zealots by number, they were the most conspicuous by their actions. No one knew where they came from, and no one knew where they went to after they killed, but every time they struck, the Romans did their best to make our lives hell to get us to give the killers up. And when the Romans caught a Zealot, they didn’t just crucify the leader of the band, they crucified the whole band, their families, and anyone suspected of helping them. More than once we saw the road out of Sepphoris lined with crosses and corpses. My people.

    We ran through the sleeping city, stopping only after we had passed through the Venus Gate, where we fell in a heap on the ground, gasping.
    “We have to take Maggie home and get back here for work,” Joshua said.
    “You can stay here,” Maggie said. “I can go by myself.”
    “No, we have to go.” Joshua held his arms out to his sides and we saw the bloody handprints the killer had left on his shirt. “I have to clean this before someone sees it.”
    “Can’t you just make it go away?” Maggie asked. “It’s just a stain. I’d think the Messiah could get a stain out.”
    “Be nice,” I said. “He’s not that good at Messiah stuff yet. It was your uncle, after all…”
    Maggie jumped to her feet. “You were the one who wanted to do this stupid thing…”
    “Stop!” Joshua said, holding his hand up as if he were sprinkling us with silence. “If Maggie hadn’t been with us, we might be dead now. We may still not be safe when the Sicarii realize that three witnesses live.”
    An hour later Maggie was home safe and Joshua emerged from the ritual bath outside the synagogue, his clothes soaked and rivulets running out of his hair. (Many of us had these mikvehs outside of our homes—and there were hundreds outside the Temple in Jerusalem—stone pits with steps leading down both sides into the water so one might walk in over one’s head on one side, then out on the other after the ritual cleansing was done. According to the Law, any contact with blood called for a cleansing. Joshua thought it would be a good opportunity to scrub the stain out of his shirt as well.)
    “Cold.” Joshua was shivering and hopping from foot to foot as if on hot coals. “Very cold.”
    (There was a small stone hut built over the baths so they never got the direct light of the sun, consequently they never warmed up. Evaporation in the dry Galilee air chilled the water even more.)
    “Maybe you should come to my house. My mother will have a breakfast fire going by now, you can warm yourself.”
    He wrung out the tail of his shirt and water cascaded down his legs. “And how would I explain this?”
    “Uh, you sinned, had an emergency cleansing to do.”
    “Sinned? At dawn? What sin could I have done before dawn?”
    “Sin of Onan?” I said.
    Joshua’s eyes went wide. “Have you committed the sin of Onan?”
    “No, but I’m looking forward to it.”
    “I can’t tell your mother that I’ve committed the sin of Onan. I haven’t.”
    “You could if you’re fast.”
    “I’ll suffer the cold,” Joshua said.
    The good old sin of Onan. That brings back memories.

    The sin of Onan. Spilling the old seed on the ground. Cuffing the camel. Dusting the donkey. Flogging the Pharisee. Onanism, a sin that requires hundreds of hours of practice to get right, or at least