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

filling with sand.”
    He helped me to my feet and as we entered the seaside city of Ptolomais, I taught Josh about sex.
    Down narrow stone streets between high stone walls.
    “Well, most of what we learned from the rabbis was not exactly accurate.”
    Past men sitting outside their houses, mending their nets. Children selling cups of pomegranate juice, women hanging strings of fish from window to window to dry.
    “For instance, you know that part right after Lot’s wife gets turned to stone and then his daughters get drunk and fornicate with him?”
    “Right, after Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.”
    “Well, that’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said.
    We passed Phoenician women who sang as they pounded dried fish into meal. We passed evaporation pools where children scraped the encrusted salt from the rocks and put it into bags.
    “But fornication is a sin, and fornication with your daughters, well, that’s a, I don’t know, that’s a double-dog sin.”
    “Yeah, but if you put that aside for a second, and you just focus on the two young girls aspect of it, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds initially.”
    “Oh.”
    We passed merchants selling fruit and bread and oil, spices and incense, calling out claims of quality and magic in their wares. There was a lot of magic for sale in those days.
    “And the Song of Solomon, that’s a lot closer, and you can sort of understand Solomon having a thousand wives. In fact, with you being the Son of God and all, I don’t think you’d have any problem getting that many girls. I mean, after you figure out what you’re doing.”
    “And a lot of girls is a good thing?”
    “You’re a ninny, aren’t you?”
    “I thought you’d be more specific. What does Maggie have to do with Lot and Solomon?”
    “I can’t tell you about me and Maggie, Josh. I just can’t.”
    We were passing a lick of prostitutes gathered outside the door of an inn. Their faces were painted, their skirts slit up the side to show their legs glistening with oil, and they called to us in foreign languages and made tiny dances with their hands as we passed.
    “What the hell are they saying?” I asked Joshua. He was better with languages. I think they were speaking Greek.
    “They said something about how they like Hebrew boys because we can feel a woman’s tongue better without our foreskins.” He looked at me as if I might confirm or deny this.
    “How much money do we have?” I asked.

    The inn rented rooms, stalls, and space under the eave to sleep. We rented two adjacent stalls, which was a bit of a luxury for us, but an important one for Joshua’s education. After all, weren’t we on this journey so he could learn to take his rightful place as the Messiah?
    “I’m not sure if I should watch,” Joshua said. “Remember David was running over the roofs and happened onto Bathsheba in her bath. That set a whole chain of sin in motion.”
    “But listening won’t be a problem.”
    “I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
    “Are you sure that you don’t want to try this yourself, Josh? I mean, the angel was never clear about your being with a woman.” To be honest, I was a little frightened myself. My experience with Maggie hardly qualified me to be with a harlot.
    “No, you go ahead. Just describe what’s happening and what you’re feeling. I have to understand sin.”
    “Okay, if you insist.”
    “Thank you for doing this for me, Biff.”
    “Not just for you, Josh, for our people.”
    So that’s how we ended up with the two stalls. Josh would be in one while I, along with the harlot of my choice, instructed him from the other in the fine art of fornication.
    Back out at the front of the inn I shopped for my teaching assistant. It was an eight-harlot inn, if that’s how you measure an inn. (I understand that now they measure inns in stars. We are in a four-star inn right now. I don’t know what the conversion from harlots to stars is.) Anyway, there were eight harlots outside the inn that day. They ranged in age from only a few years older than us to older than our mothers. And they ran the gamut of shapes and sizes, having in common only that they were all highly painted and well oiled.
    “They’re all so…so nasty-looking.”
    “They’re harlots, Biff. They’re supposed to be nasty-looking. Pick one.”
    “Let’s go look at some different harlots.” We had been standing a few doors down from the harlots, but they knew we were watching. I walked over