Джон Литтл: The Murder of Jesus Christ

Like everyone else, I wondered what they were there for, but it seemed it would be some time before we got any answers. So far, they remained a mystery.

I’d left emails for Karen, along with several voicemails on her phone.

Finally, I woke on a warm summer morning and found a cryptic text from her: On my way to you. Hope I’m welcome.

I immediately texted back: Wonderful news. I can’t wait to see you!

I added the address of the church where she’d be able to find me. A couple hours later she texted back a happy face.

That day, I was as nervous as I had been in high school before asking a girl to the prom.

It was Tuesday, and Erika didn’t have any media interviews planned or anything else I needed to photograph. I ate breakfast and found her in the main part of the church, sitting in a pew. She was praying.

When she opened her eyes, she turned her head to look right at me. As usual, her ability to detect what was going on around her continued to surprise me. She smiled and waved me over.

“Good morning, David.”

I nodded. “Morning.”

“I won’t need you today. You take care of her.”

With anybody else, I’d be shocked and wonder how she could possibly know what was on my mind. With Erika, that happened all the time. Disconcerting, but no longer surprising.

“I’ve missed Karen.”

“I know. She’s a good woman. Go be with her.”

A rush of gratitude fell over me, and I pulled Erika to me and gave her a hug.

“I won’t be long.”

“I know.”

I was waiting outside when she arrived. It was a warm sunny day, and I had to squint to see her shiny VW bug. She climbed out and a wide smile grew on her face. That was a huge sense of relief.

We ran to each other and fell into each other’s arms, as if we’d never been apart. I held her tightly, and then we kissed, a long passionate kiss that told each of us how much we’d missed the other.

I knew tears were falling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was having Karen back.

Her hand held mine, and I didn’t want to ever let it go again.

When we were finally able to pull apart, I said, “I’ve missed you more than I can ever say.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

“Let’s go sit. I want to hear all about your flight.”

She let me lead her inside, and I took her to a small conference room we used for some of our planning. It had a couple of large stained-glass windows that let in a lot of light.

We sat on a couch. There were several soft chairs scattered around, but I wanted to be right next to her.

“I kept checking the news about you, wondering how things were going. It’s still hard to believe you went to the moon.”

“Bit of a wasted trip, though. Still, nobody knows what happened to us.”

“Erika Sabo knows,” I said. “She’s not talking about it, though. I’m just glad you came back safely.”

Karen licked her lips, and I realized she might be thirsty. There was a refrigerator at the back of the room, so I got us two bottles of water.

“It’s so weird. We didn’t feel the disappearance at all. We didn’t know anything happened until the computers started sending out alarms.”

I took a drink of water.

“You wanted to warn me about Erika.”

“David, there’s no reason to believe her story. God’s daughter? Really?”

“You need to meet her. She is who she says she is.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

How to answer? How could I tell her how the world was before? Before I went back in time and murdered the teenaged Jesus. How could I tell her that I stared into his eyes before I killed him and that Erika wore those same eyes now? How could she believe she was the only person on Earth besides me who knew exactly what happened?

Even forgetting that, though, surely she had to believe Erika was supernatural when she could make the moon disappear. And Karen herself, for that matter.

“I just know. I think it’ll take a while for me to explain.”

“You can start now, can’t you?”

I shook my head and held tightly onto her hand. I couldn’t lose her again.

“Why don’t you believe her?” I asked. “You’re a true follower of scripture, the most focused Jew I know.”

She shook her head as if I were an idiot. “It’s because of the Bible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I believe the Bible is the direct word of God.”

I nodded. Although she hadn’t been so blunt before, I certainly wasn’t surprised she felt that way.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know very much about the Bible. Given recent events, I planned to change that. I needed to read Erika’s history.

“There are a lot of prophesies scattered throughout the Bible,” Karen said. “Lots in the book of Isaiah, but in many other places, too. A very large amount of the book is dedicated to prophets.”

“Okay, how does that matter now?”

“There were lots of prophesies about the Messiah. Some are hard to interpret, but if you’re patient, you can see the whole life of the Messiah laid out in pieces, from his birth through his life as a teacher, and finally to his death by crucifixion.”

I was silent. I was pretty sure I knew where Karen was going with her comments.

“You see, some of the prophesies are much clearer, though. Three items in particular.

“First, the Messiah would be male.

“Second, he would be born in Bethlehem. That’s a town nobody’s ever heard of, in Israel.

“And third, his mother would be a virgin.”

The facts as she laid them out were familiar, although I didn’t know the Bible foretold Jesus’s birth in that detail.

Karen continued, “I believe the Bible. These facts are unquestionably true. So, when I look at Erika Sabo, she is not male. Her official biography on her website makes it clear she was born in Aynsville, New York. And, though I haven’t seen her comment on this, I have very large doubts that her mother was a virgin.”

She frowned. “You see, there’s no way Erika Sabo could be the Messiah. I don’t know what or who she really is, but she can’t be the daughter of God.”

It took a moment for me to take in Karen’s words. I tried to think of some way to make her change her thinking. Anything but the truth.

I wanted to tell her to trust me, but that wasn’t going to fly. There was only one thing to do. I had to tell her what really happened.

“The thing is… all you talked about happened,” I said.

“I think I’d know.”

“Please. Let me tell you what I know. It’s going to be very hard for you to believe, but I promise you on every good thing we ever had that it’s the truth.”

She didn’t react, but she seemed to relax a bit. Maybe she knew this was going to take a while.

“I’m not sure how to start. Maybe think of a parallel universe or something, a place where things are very close to our own universe, but where some things were different. Imagine in that universe a child was born in Bethlehem, exactly as you stated, 2,000 years ago. That child was named Jesus, and he was the Son of God.”

Karen was listening, but she wasn’t believing it. Of course not. She would have known.

“That child grew up to be the most famous person in history. A new religion grew from a dozen disciples to billions of followers around the world. In that alternate universe, you were a Christian, along with so many other Americans. I wasn’t.”

I felt my face redden with shame at that admission, which was odd because it was the least of all my sins.

I won’t re-tell the whole story here. You’ve read it. But over the next two hours, I talked about how my grandmother had died and left me the gift of Shelljah, allowing me to travel back through my previous lives, back to when my soul inhabited a body owned by Adlai. I talked about the journey to Galilee and finally meeting Jesus and his family.