Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

I’ve hidden the book in the bathroom, so I can sneak in and read it while the angel is in the room. I didn’t have time to actually read much of the part of the book they call the New Testament, but it’s obvious that it is the story of Joshua’s life. Or parts of it, anyway.

I’ll study it later, but now I should go on with the real story.

I suppose I should have considered the exact nature of what we were doing before I invited Maggie to join us. I mean, there is some difference between the circumcision of an eight-day-old baby boy, which she had seen before, and the same operation on the ten-foot statue of a Greek god.

“My goodness, that is, uh, impressive,” Maggie said, staring up at the marble member.

“Graven image,” Joshua said under his breath. Even in the moonlight I could tell he was blushing.

“Let’s do it.” I pulled a small iron chisel from my pouch. Joshua was wrapping the head of his mallet with leather to deaden its sound. Sepphoris slept around us, the silence broken only by the occasional bleat of a sheep. The evening cook fires had long since gone to coals, the dust cloud that stirred through the city during the day had settled, and the night air was clean and still. From time to time I would catch a sweet whiff of sandalwood coming from Maggie and I would lose my train of thought. Funny the things you remember.

We found a bucket and turned it upside down for Joshua to stand on while he worked. He set the tip of my chisel on Apollo’s foreskin and ventured a light tap with the mallet. A tiny fragment of marble flaked away.

“Give it a good whack,” I said.

“I can’t, it will make too much noise.”

“No, it won’t, the leather will cover it.”

“But I might take the whole end of it off.”

“He can spare it,” Maggie said, and we both turned to her with our mouths hanging open. “Probably,” she added quickly. “I’m only guessing. What do I know, I’m just a girl. Do you guys smell something?”

We smelled the Roman before we heard him, heard him before we saw him. The Romans covered themselves with olive oil before they bathed, so if the wind was right or if it was an especially hot day you could smell a Roman coming at thirty paces. Between the olive oil they bathed with and the garlic and dried paste of anchovies they ate with their barley, when the legions marched into battle it must have smelled like an invasion of pizza people. If they’d had pizzas back then, which they didn’t.

Joshua took a quick swipe with the mallet and the chisel slipped, neatly severing Apollo’s unit, which fell to the dirt with a dull thud.

“Whoops,” said the Savior.

“Shhhhhhhh,” I shushed.

We heard the hobnails of the Roman’s boots scraping on stone. Joshua jumped down from the bucket and looked frantically for a place to hide. The walls of the Greek’s bathhouse were almost completed around the statue, so really, except for the entrance where the Roman was coming, there was no place to run.

“Hey, what are you doing there?”

We stood as still as the statue. I could see that it was the legionnaire that had been with Justus our first day in Sepphoris.

“Sir, it’s us, Biff and Joshua. Remember? The kid from the bread?”

The soldier moved closer, his hand on the haft of his half-drawn short sword. When he saw Joshua he relaxed a bit. “What are you doing here so early? No one is to be about at this hour.”

Suddenly, the soldier was yanked backward off of his feet and a dark figure fell on him, thrusting a blade into his chest over and over. Maggie screamed and the figure turned to us. I started to run.

“Stop,” the murderer hissed.

I froze. Maggie threw her arms around me and hid her face in my shirt as I trembled. A gurgling sound came from the soldier, but he lay still. Joshua made to step toward the murderer and I threw an arm across his chest to stop him.

“That was wrong,” Joshua said, almost in tears. “You are wrong to kill that man.”

The murderer held his bloody blade up by his face and grinned at us. “Is it not written that Moses became a prophet only after killing an Egyptian slave driver? No master but God!”

“Sicarii,” I said.

“Yes boy, Sicarii. Only when the Romans are dead will the Messiah come to set us free. I serve God by killing this tyrant.”

“You serve evil,” Joshua said. “The Messiah didn’t call for the blood of this Roman.”

The assassin raised his blade and came at Joshua. Maggie and I leapt back, but Joshua stood his ground. The assassin grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him close. “What do you know of it, boy?”

We could clearly see the murderer’s face in the moonlight. Maggie gasped, “Jeremiah.”

His eyes went wide, with fear or recognition, I don’t know which. He released Joshua and made as if to grab Maggie. I pulled her away.

“Mary?” The anger had left his voice. “Little Mary?”

Maggie said nothing, but I could feel her shoulders heave as she began to sob.

“Tell no one of this,” the murderer said, now talking as if he were in a trance. He backed away and stood beside the dead soldier. “No master but God,” he said, then he turned and ran into the night.

Joshua put his hand on Maggie’s head and she immediately stopped crying.

“Jeremiah is my father’s brother,” she said.

Before I go on you should know about the Sicarii, and to know about them, you have to know about the Herods. So here you go.

About the time that Joshua and I were meeting for the first time, King Herod the Great died after ruling Israel (under the Romans) for over forty years. It was, in fact, the death of Herod that prompted Joseph to bring his family back to Nazareth from Egypt, but that’s another story. Now you need to know about Herod.

Herod wasn’t called “the Great” because he was a beloved ruler. Herod the Great, was, in fact, a fat, paranoid, pox-ridden tyrant who murdered thousands of Jews, including 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.