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

like my father and Joseph could give things that they made, and in some years my father fashioned mortars and pestles or grinding stones for the tribute, while in others he gave tithes of coin. Some people made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for this feast, but since it fell only seven weeks after Passover, many families could not afford to make the pilgrimage, and the gifts went to our simple village synagogue.
    During the weeks leading up to the feast, Joseph sat outside of his house in the shade of an awning he had made, worrying the gnarled olive wood with adze and chisel, while Joshua and I played at his feet. He wore the single-piece tunic that we all wore, a rectangle of fabric with neck hole in the middle, belted with a sash so that the sleeves fell to the elbows and the hem fell to the knees.
    “Perhaps this year I should give the Temple my first son, eh, Joshua? Wouldn’t you like to clean the altar after the sacrifices?” He grinned to himself without looking up from his work. “I owe them a first son, you know. We were in Egypt at the Firsts Feast when you were born.”
    The idea of coming in contact with blood clearly terrified Joshua, as it would any Jewish boy. “Give them James, Abba, he is your first son.”
    Joseph shot a glance my way, to see if I had reacted. I had, but it was because I was considering my own status as a first son, hoping that my father wasn’t thinking along the same lines. “James is a second son. The priests don’t want second sons. It will have to be you.”
    Joshua looked at me before he answered, then back at his father. Then he smiled. “But Abba, if you should die, who will take care of Mother if I am at the Temple?”
    “Someone will look after her,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
    “I will not die for a long time.” Joseph tugged at his gray beard. “My beard goes white, but there’s a lot of life in me yet.”
    “Don’t be so sure, Abba,” Joshua said.
    Joseph dropped the bowl he was working on and stared into his hands. “Run along and play, you two,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
    Joshua stood and walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around the old man, for I had never seen a grown man afraid before and it frightened me too. “Can I help?” I said, pointing to the half-finished bowl that lay in Joseph’s lap.
    “You go with Joshua. He needs a friend to teach him to be human. Then I can teach him to be a man.”

C hapter 2
The angel wants me to convey more of Joshua’s grace. Grace? I’m trying to write about a six-year-old, for Christ’s sakes, how much grace could he have? It’s not like Joshua walked around professing that he was the Son of God every day of the week. He was a pretty normal kid, for the most part. There was the trick he did with the lizards, and once we found a dead meadowlark and he brought it back to life, and there was the time, when we were eight, when he healed his brother Judah’s fractured skull after a game of “stone the adulteress” got out of hand. (Judah could never get the knack of being an adulteress. He’d stand there stiff as Lot’s wife. You can’t do that. An adulteress has to be wily and nimble-footed.) The miracles Joshua performed were small and quiet, as miracles tend to be, once you get used to them. But trouble came from the miracles that happened around him, without his volition, as it were. Bread and serpents come to mind.
    It was a few days before the Passover feast, and many of the families of Nazareth were not making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that year. There had been little rain through our winter season, so it was going to be a hard year. Many farmers could not afford the time away from their fields to travel to and from the holy city. My father and Joshua’s were both working in Sepphoris, and the Romans wouldn’t give them time off work beyond the actual feast days. My mother had been making the unleavened bread when I came in from playing in the square.
    She held a dozen sheets of the flatbread before her and she looked as if she was going to dash it to the floor any second. “Biff, where is your friend Joshua?” My little brothers grinned at me from behind her skirts.
    “At home, I suppose. I just left him.”
    “What have you boys been doing?”
    “Nothing.” I tried to remember if I had done anything that should make her this angry, but nothing came to mind. It was a rare day and I’d made no trouble. Both my little brothers were unscathed as far as