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

Jamal dropped the adulteress’s arm and stepped back. Joshua looked up at the other man who was holding the woman. “And your name?”

“Uh, Steve,” said that man.

“His name is not Steve,” said another man in the crowd. “It’s Jacob.”

Joshua wrote “Jacob” in the dust. “No,” said Jacob. He let go of the woman, pushing her toward us. Then Joshua stood up and took the stone from the man nearest him, who surrendered it easily. His attention was focused on the list of sins written in the dirt. “Now let us stone this harlot,” Joshua said. “Whoever of you is without sin, cast the first stone.” And he held out the stone to them. They gradually backed away. In a moment they had all gone back the way they had come and the adulteress fell to Joshua’s feet and hugged his ankles. “Thank you, Rabbi. Thank you so much.”

“That’s okay,” said Joshua. He lifted her to her feet. “Now go, and sin no more.”

“You really smell good, you know that?” she said.

“Yeah, thanks. Now go.”

She started off. “I should make sure she gets home okay,” I said. I started off after her, but Joshua caught the back of my tunic and pulled me back. “You missed the ‘sin no more’ part of my instructions?”

“Look, I’ve already committed adultery with her in my heart, so, you know, why not enjoy it?”

“No.”

“You’re the one who set the standards. By those rules, even John committed adultery with her in his heart, and he doesn’t even like women.”

“Do too,” said John.

“To the Temple,” Joshua said, pressing on.

“Waste of a perfectly good adulteress, if you ask me.”

In the outer court of the Temple, where the women and the Gentiles were allowed to go, Joshua called us all together and began to preach the kingdom. Each time he would get started, a vendor would come by barking, “Get your doves. Get your sacrificial doves. Pure as the driven snow. Everybody needs one.” Then Joshua would begin again and the next vendor would come by.

“Unleavened bread! Get your unleavened bread! Only one shekel. Piping hot matzo, just like Moses ate on the way out of Egypt, only fresher.”

And a little girl who was lame was brought to Joshua and he started to heal her and ask about her faith when…

“Your denariis changed to shekels, while you wait! No amount too large or small. Drachmas to talents, talents to shekels—all your money changed while you wait.”

“Do you believe that the Lord loves you?” Joshua asked the little girl.

“Bitter herbs! Get your bitter herbs!” cried a vendor.

“Dammit all!” Joshua screamed in frustration. “You’re healed, child, now get out of here.” He waved off the little girl, who got up and walked for the first time in her life, then he slapped a dove vendor, ripped the top off his cage of birds, and released a cloud of doves into the sky.

“This is a house of prayer! Not a den of thieves.”

“Oh no, not the moneychangers,” Peter whispered to me.

Joshua grabbed a long low table where men were changing a dozen currencies into shekels (the only coin allowed for commerce inside the Temple complex) and he flipped it over.

“Oh, that’s it, he’s fucked,” Philip said. And he was. The priests took a big percentage from the moneychangers. He might have slid by before, but now he’d interfered with their income.

“Out, you vipers! Out!” Joshua had taken a coil of rope from one of the vendors and was using it as a scourge to drive the vendors and the moneychangers out of the Temple gates. Nathaniel and Thomas had joined in Joshua’s tirade, kicking at the merchants as they scampered away, but the rest of us sat staring or ministered to those who had come to hear Joshua speak.

“We should stop this,” I said to Peter.

“You think you could stop this?” Peter nodded to the corner of the courtyard, where at least twenty priests had come out from the Inner Temple to watch the fracas.

“He’s going to bring down the wrath of the priests on all of us,” Judas said. He was looking at the Temple guards, who had stopped pacing the walls and were watching the goings-on below in the courtyard. To Judas’ credit, he, Simon, and a few of the others had managed to calm the small crowd of the faithful who had gathered to be blessed and healed before Joshua’s tantrum.

Beyond the walls of the Temple we could see the Roman soldiers staring down from the battlements of Herod the Great’s old palace, which the governor commandeered during feast weeks when he brought the legions to Jerusalem. The Romans didn’t enter the Temple unless they sensed insurrection, but if they entered, Jewish blood would be spilled. Rivers of it.

“They won’t come in,” Peter said, a tiny note of doubt in his voice. “They can see that this is a Jewish matter. They don’t care if we kill each other.”

“Just watch Judas and Simon,” I said. “If one of them starts with that no-master-but-God thing, the Romans will come down like an executioner’s blade.”

Finally, Joshua was out of breath, soaked in sweat, and barely able to swing the coil of rope he was carrying, but the Temple was clear of merchants. A large crowd had started to follow him, shouting at the vendors as Joshua drove them out of the Temple. The crowd (probably eight hundred to a thousand people) was the only thing that kept the priests from calling the guards down on Joshua right then. Josh tossed the rope aside and led the crowd back to where we had been watching in horror.

“Thieves,” he said to us breathlessly as he passed. Then he went to a little girl with a withered arm who had been waiting beside Judas.

“Pretty scary, huh?” Joshua said to her.

She nodded. Joshua put his hands over her withered arm.

“Are those guys in the tall hats coming over here?”

She nodded again.

“Here, can you make this sign with your finger?”

He showed her how to stick out her middle finger. “No, not with that hand, with this one.”

Joshua took his hand away from her withered arm and she wiggled her fingers. The muscle and tendons had filled out until it looked identical to her other arm.

“Now,” Joshua said, “make that sign. That’s good. Now show it to those guys behind me with the tall hats. That’s a good girl.”

“By whose authority do you perform these healings,” said one of the priests, obviously the highest-ranking of the group.

“No master—” Simon began to shout but he was cut off by a vicious blow to the solar plexus from Peter, who then pushed the Zealot to the ground and sat on him while furiously whispering in his ear. Andrew had come up behind Judas and seemed to be delivering a similar lecture without benefit of the body blow.

Josh took a little boy from his mother’s arms and held him. The boy’s legs waved in the air as if they had no bones at all. Without looking away from the boy, Joshua said, “By what authority did John baptize?”

The priests looked around among themselves. The crowd moved in closer. We were in Judea, John’s territory. The priests knew better than to challenge John’s authority under God in front of a crowd this size, but they certainly weren’t going to confirm it for Joshua’s sake, either. “We can’t say at this time,” said the priest.

“Then I can’t say either,” said Joshua. He stood the little boy on his feet and held him steady as the boy’s legs took his full weight, probably for the first time ever. The boy wobbled like a newborn colt and Joshua caught him and laughed. He took the boy’s shoulders and helped him walk back to his mother, then he turned on the priests and looked at them for the first time.

“You would test me? Test me. Ask me what you will, you vipers, but I will heal these people and they shall know the word of God in spite of you.”