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

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2002, ISBN: 2002, Издательство: HarperCollins Publishers, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years — except Biff.
Ever since the day when he came upon six-year-old Joshua of Nazareth resurrecting lizards in the village square, Levi bar Alphaeus, called "Biff," had the distinction of being the Messiah's best bud. That's why the angel Raziel has resurrected Biff from the dust of Jerusalem and brought him to America to write a new gospel, one that tells the real, untold story. Meanwhile, Raziel will order pizza, watch the WWF on TV, and aspire to become Spider-Man.
Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung-fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes — whose considerable charms fall to Biff to sample, since Josh is forbidden the pleasures of the flesh. (There are worse things than having a best friend who is chaste and a chick magnet!) And, of course, there is danger at every turn, since a young man struggling to understand his godhood, who is incapable of violence or telling anything less than the truth, is certain to piss some people off. Luckily Biff is a whiz at lying and cheating — which helps get his divine pal and him out of more than one jam. And while Josh's great deeds and mission of peace will ultimately change the world, Biff is no slouch himself, blessing humanity with enduring contributions of his own, like sarcasm and café latte. Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the Savior's pal may not be enough to divert Joshua from his tragic destiny. But there's no one who loves Josh more — except maybe "Maggie," Mary of Magdala — and Biff isn't about to let his extraordinary pal suffer and ascend without a fight.
Lamb is the crowning achievement of Christopher Moore's storied career: fresh, wild, audacious, divinely hilarious, yet heartfelt, poignant, and alive, with a surprising reverence. Let there be rejoicing unto the world! Christopher Moore is come — to bring truth, light, and big yuks to fans old and new with the Greatest Story Never Told!

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

“I can’t go with you to find Gaspar. Women are not allowed in the monastery, and I have no desire to live in the backwater village nearby. Balthasar has left me much gold, and everything in the library, but it does me no good out here in the mountains. I will not stay in this tomb with only the ghosts of my friends for company. Soon Ahmad will come, as he does every spring, and I will have him help me take the treasure and the scrolls to Kabul, where I will buy a large house and hire servants and I will have them bring me young boys to corrupt.”

“I wish I had a plan,” I said.

“Me too,” said Josh.

The three of us celebrated Joshua’s eighteenth birthday with the traditional Chinese food, then the next morning Joshua and I packed up the camels and prepared to head east.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right until Ahmad comes?” Joshua asked Joy.

“Don’t worry about me, you go learn to be a Messiah.” She kissed him hard on the lips. He squirmed to get loose from her and he was still blushing as he climbed onto his camel.

“And you,” she said to me, “you will come to see me in Kabul on your way back to Israel or I will put such a curse on you as you’ll never be free of it.” She took the little ying-yang vial full of poison and antidote from around her neck and put it around mine. It might have seemed a strange gift to anyone else, but I was the sorceress’s apprentice and it seemed perfect to me. She tucked the black glass knife into my sash. “No matter how long it takes, come back and see me. I promise I won’t paint you blue again.”

I promised her and we kissed and I climbed on my camel and Joshua and I rode off. I tried not to look back, once again, to another woman who had stolen my heart.

We rode a half a furlong apart, each of us considering the past and future of our lives, who we had been and who we were going to be, and it was a couple of hours before I caught up with Joshua and broke the silence.

I thought of how Joy had taught me to read and speak Chinese, to mix potions and poisons, to cheat at gambling, to perform slight of hand, and where and how to properly touch a woman. All of it without expecting anything in return. “Are all women stronger and better than me?”

“Yes,” he said.

It was another day before we spoke again.

Part III

Compassion

Torah! Torah! Torah!

WAR CRY OF THE KAMIKAZE RABBIS

Chapter 16

We were twelve days into our journey, following Balthasar’s meticulously drawn map, when we came to the wall.

“So,” I said, “what do you think of the wall?”

“It’s great,” said Joshua.

“It’s not that great,” I said.

There was a long line waiting to get through the giant gate, where scores of bureaucrats collected taxes from caravan masters as they passed through. The gatehouses alone were each as big as one of Herod’s palaces, and soldiers rode horses atop the wall, patrolling far into the distance. We were a good league back from the gate and the line didn’t seem to be moving.

“This is going to take all day,” I said. “Why would they build such a thing? If you can build a wall like this then you ought to be able to raise an army large enough to defeat any invaders.”

“Lao-tzu built this wall,” Joshua said.

“The old master who wrote the Tao? I don’t think so.”

“What does the Tao value above all else?”

“Compassion? Those other two jewel things?”

“No, inaction. Contemplation. Steadiness. Conservatism. A wall is the defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That’s why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can’t be free without action.”

“So he spent all that time teaching us the Tao so we could see that it was wrong.”

“No, not wrong. Not all of it. The compassion, humility, and moderation of the Tao, these are the qualities of a righteous man, but not inaction. These people are slaves to inaction.”

“You worked as a stonecutter, Josh,” I said, nodding toward the massive wall. “You think this wall was built through inaction?”

“The magus wasn’t teaching us about action as in work, it was action as in change. That’s why we learned Confucius first—everything having to do with the order of our fathers, the law, manners. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won’t break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon. That’s what Balthasar was trying to teach me.”

“I’ve said it before, Josh—and you know how I love bacon—but I don’t think bacon is enough for the Messiah to bring.”

“Change,” Joshua said. “A Messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. Balthasar once said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as a conservative hero.’ He was wise, that old man.”

I thought about the old magus as I looked at the wall stretching over the hills, then at the line of travelers ahead of us. A small city had grown up at the entrance to the wall to accommodate the needs of the delayed travelers along the Silk Road and it boiled with merchants hawking food and drink along the line.

“Screw it,” I said. “This is going to take forever. How long can it be? Let’s go around.”

A month later, when we had returned to the same gate and we were standing in line to get through, Joshua asked: “So what do you think of the wall now? I mean, now that we’ve seen so much more of it?”

“I think it’s ostentatious and unpleasant,” I said.

“If they don’t have a name for it, you should suggest that.”

And so it came to pass that through the ages the wall was known as the Ostentatious and Unpleasant Wall of China. At least I hope that’s what happened. It’s not on my Friendly Flyer Miles map, so I can’t be sure.

We could see the mountain where Gaspar’s monastery lay long before we reached it. Like the other peaks around it, it cut the sky like a huge tooth. Below the mountain was a village surrounded by high pasture. We stopped there to rest and water our camels. The people of the village all came out to greet us and they marveled at our strange eyes and Joshua’s curly hair as if we were gods that had been lowered out of the heavens (which I guess was true in Josh’s case, but you forget about that when you’re around someone a lot). An old toothless woman who spoke a dialect of Chinese similar to the one we had learned from Joy convinced us to leave the camels in the village. She traced the path up the mountain with a craggy finger and it was obvious that the path was both too narrow and too steep to accommodate the animals.

The villagers served us a spicy meat dish with frothy bowls of milk to wash it down. I hesitated and looked at Joshua. The Torah forbade us to eat meat and dairy at the same meal.

“I’m thinking this is a lot like the bacon thing,” Joshua said. “I really don’t feel that the Lord cares if we wash down our yak with a bowl of milk.”

“Yak?”

“That’s what this is. The old woman told me.”

“Well, sin or not, I’m not eating it. I’ll just drink the milk.”

“It’s yak milk too.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“Use your own judgment, it served you so well in the past, like, oh, when you decided we should go around the wall.”

“You know,” I said, weary of having the whole wall thing brought up again, “I never said you could use sarcasm whenever you wanted to. I think you’re using my invention in ways that it was never intended to be used.”

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x