Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

by Christopher Moore

“You hadn’t heard? Herod has thrown John in prison for inciting people to revolt. That’s the excuse anyway. It’s Herod’s wife who wanted John silenced. She was tired of having John’s followers refer to her as ‘the slut.’”

  I patted Mary’s shoulder as I stepped away. “I’ll tell Joshua that you’re here.”

  I found Joshua sitting in a far corner of the courtyard playing with some children. One little girl had brought her pet rabbit to the wedding and Joshua was holding it in his lap, petting its ears.

  “Biff, come feel how soft this bunny is.”

  “Joshua, John has been arrested.”

  Josh slowly handed the bunny back to the little girl and stood. “When?”

  “I’m not sure. Shortly after we left, I guess.”

  “I shouldn’t have left him. I didn’t even tell him we were leaving.”

  “It was bound to happen, Joshua. I told him to lay off Herod, but he wouldn’t listen. You couldn’t have done anything.”

  “I’m the Son of God, I could have done something.”

  “Yeah, you could have gone to prison with him. Your mother is here. Go talk to her. She’s the one that told me.”

  As Joshua embraced Mary, she said, “You’ve got to do something about this wine situation. Where’s the wine?”

  James tapped Joshua on the shoulder. “Didn’t bring any wine with you from the lush vineyards of Jericho?” (I didn’t like hearing sarcasm being used by James against Joshua. I had always thought of my invention as being used for good, or at least against people I didn’t like.)

  Joshua gently pushed his mother away. “You shall have wine,” he said, then he went off to the side of the house where drinking water was stored in large stone jars. In a few minutes he returned with a pitcher of wine and cups for all of us. A shout went through the party and suddenly everything seemed to step up a level. Pitchers and cups were filled and drained and filled again, and those who had been near the wine jars started declaring a miracle had been performed, that Joshua of Nazareth had turned water into wine. I looked for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Having been free of sin all of his life, Joshua wasn’t very good at dealing with guilt, so he had gone off by himself to try to numb the guilt he felt over John’s arrest.

  After a few hours of subterfuge and guile, I was able to get Maggie to sneak out the back gate with me.

  “Maggie, come with us. You talked to Joshua. You saw the wine. He’s the one.”

  “I’ve always known he was the one, but I can’t come with you. I’m married.”

  “I thought you were going to be a fisherman.”

  “And I thought you were going to be a village idiot.”

  “I’m still looking for a village. Look, get Jakan to divorce you.”

  “Anything he can divorce me for he can also kill me for. I’ve seen him pass judgment on people, Biff. I’ve seen him lead the mobs to the stonings. I’m afraid of him.”

  “I learned to make poisons in the East.” I raised my eyebrows and grinned. “Huh?”

  “I’m not going to poison my husband.”

  I sighed, an exasperated sigh that I’d learned from my mother. “Then leave him and come away with us, far from Jerusalem where he can’t reach you. He’ll have to divorce you to save face.”

  “Why should I leave, Biff? So I can follow around a man who doesn’t want me and wouldn’t take me if he did?”

  I didn’t know what to say, I felt like knives were twisting in fresh wounds in my chest. I looked at my sandals and pretended to have something caught in my throat.

  Maggie stepped up, put her arms around me, and laid her head against my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I missed both of you, but I missed just you too.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

  “I know.”

  “Then please stop rubbing that against me.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Just then Joshua stumbled through the gate and crashed into us. We were able to catch ourselves and him before anyone fell. The Messiah was holding the little girl’s pet bunny, hugging it to his cheek with the big back feet swinging free. He was gloriously drunk. “Know what?” Josh said. “I love bunnies. They toil not, neither do they bark. Henceforth and from now on, I decree that whenever something bad happens to me, there shall be bunnies around. So it shall be written. Go ahead Biff, write it down.” He waved to me under the bunny, then turned and started back through the gate. “Where’s the friggin’ wine? I got a dry bunny over here!”

  “See,” I said to Maggie, “you don’t want to miss out on that. Bunnies!”

  She laughed. My favorite music.

  “I’ll get word to you,” she said. “Where will you be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll get word to you.”

  It was midnight. The party had wound down and the disciples and I were sitting in the street outside of the house. Joshua had passed out and Bartholomew had put a small dog under his head for a pillow. Before he had left, James had made it abundantly clear that we weren’t welcome in Nazareth.

  “Well?” said Philip. “I guess we can’t go back to John.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t find the camels,” Bartholomew said.

  “People teased me about my yellow hair,” said Nathaniel.

  “I thought you were from Cana,” I said. “Don’t you have family we can stay with?”

  “Plague,” said Nathaniel.

  “Plague,” we all said, nodding. It happens.

  “You’ll probably be needing these,” came a voice out of the darkness. We all looked up to see a short but powerfully built man walking out of the darkness, leading our camels.

  “The camels,” said Nathaniel.

  “My apologies,” said the man, “my brother’s sons brought them home to us in Capernaum. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get them back to you.”

  I stood and he handed the camel’s reins to me. “They’ve been fed and watered.” He pointed to Joshua, who was snoring away on his terrier. “Does he always drink like that?”

  “Only when a major prophet has been imprisoned.”

  The man nodded. “I heard what he did with the wine. They say he also healed a lame man in Cana this afternoon. Is that true?”

  We all nodded.

  “If you have no place to stay, you can come home with me to Capernaum for a day or two. We owe you at least that for taking your camels.”

  “We don’t have any money,” I said.

  “Then you’ll feel right at home,” said the man. “My name is Andrew.”

  And so we became six.

  Chapter 26

  You can travel the whole world, but there are always new things to learn. For instance, on the way to Capernaum I learned that if you hang a drunk guy over a camel and slosh him around for about four hours, then pretty much all the poisons will come out one end of him or the other.

  “Someone’s going to have to wash that camel before we go into town,” said Andrew.

  We were traveling along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (which wasn’t a sea at all). The moon was almost full and it reflected in the lake like a pool of quicksilver. It fell to Nathaniel to clean the camel because he was the official new guy. (Joshua hadn’t really met Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t really agreed to join us, so we couldn’t count him as the official new guy yet.) Since Nathaniel did such a fine job on the camel, we let him clean up Joshua as well. Once he had the Messiah in the water Joshua came out of his stupor long enough to slur something like: “The foxes have their holes and birds have their nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”

  “That’s so sad,” said Nathaniel.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Dunk him again. He still has barf on his beard.”

  And so, cleansed and slung over a camel damply, Joshua did by moonlight come into Capernaum, where he would be welcomed as if it were his home.

  “
Out!” screeched the old woman. “Out of the house, out of town, out of Galilee for all I care, you aren’t staying here.”

  It was a beautiful dawn over the lake, the sky painted with yellow and orange, gentle waves lapped against the keels of Capernaum’s fishing boats. The village was only a stone’s throw away from the water, and golden sunlight reflected off the waves onto the black stone walls of the houses, making the light appear to dance to the calls of the gulls and songbirds. The houses were built together in two big clusters, sharing common walls, with entries from every which way, and none more than one story tall. There was a small main road through the village between the two clusters of homes. Along the way were a few merchant booths, a blacksmith’s shop, and, on its own little square, a synagogue that looked as if it could contain far more worshipers than the three hundred residents of the village. But villages were thick along the shores of the lake, one running right into the next, and we guessed that perhaps the synagogue served a number of villages. There was no central square around the well as there was in most inland villages, because the people pulled their water from the lake or a spring nearby that bubbled clean chilly water into the air as high as two men.

  Andrew had deposited us at his brother Peter’s house, and we had fallen asleep in the great room among the children only a few hours before Peter’s mother-in-law awoke to chase us out of the house. Joshua was holding his head with both hands as if to keep it from falling off his neck.

  “I won’t have freeloaders and scalawags in my house,” the old woman shouted as she threw my satchel out after us.

  “Ouch,” said Joshua, flinching from the noise.

  “We’re in Capernaum, Josh,” I said. “A man named Andrew brought us here because his nephews stole our camels.”

  “You said Maggie was dying,” Joshua said.

  “Would you have left John if I’d told you that Maggie wanted to see you?”

  “No.” He smiled dreamily. “It was good to see Maggie.” Then the smile turned to a scowl. “Alive.”

  “John wouldn’t listen, Joshua. You were in the desert all last month, you didn’t see all of the soldiers, even scribes hiding in the crowd, writing down what John was saying. This was bound to happen.”

  “Then you should have warned John!”

  “I warned John! Every day I warned John. He didn’t listen to reason any more than you would have.”

  “We have to go back to Judea. John’s followers—”

  “Will become your followers. No more preparation, Josh.”

  Joshua nodded, looking at the ground in front of him. “It’s time. Where are the others?”

  “I’ve sent Philip and Nathaniel to Sepphoris to sell the camels. Bartholomew is sleeping in the reeds with the dogs.”

  “We’re going to need more disciples,” Joshua said.

  “We’re broke, Josh. We’re going to need disciples with jobs.”

  An hour later we stood on the shore near where Andrew and his brother were casting nets. Peter was taller and leaner than his brother, and he had a head of gray hair wilder than even John the Baptist’s, while Andrew pushed his dark hair back and tied it with a cord so it stayed out of his face when he was in the water. They were both naked, which is how men fished the lake when they were close to the shore.

  I had mixed a headache remedy for Joshua out of tree bark, and I could tell it was working, but perhaps not quite enough. I pushed Joshua toward the shore.

  “I’m not ready for this. I feel terrible.”

  “Ask them.”

  “Andrew,” Joshua called. “Thank you for bringing us home with you. And you too, Peter.”

  “Did my mother-in-law toss you out?” asked Peter. He cast his net and waited for it to settle, then dove into the lake and gathered the net in his arms. There was one tiny fish inside. He reached in and pulled it out, then tossed it back into the lake. “Grow,” he said.

  “You know who I am?” said Joshua.

  “I’ve heard,” said Peter. “Andrew says you turned water into wine. And you cured the blind and the lame. He thinks that you are going to bring the kingdom.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think my little brother is smarter than I am, so I believe what he says.”

  “Come with us. We’re going to tell people of the kingdom. We need help.”

  “What can we do?” said Andrew. “We’re only fishermen.”

  “Come with me and I’ll make you fishers of men.”

  Andrew looked at his brother who was still standing in the water. Peter shrugged and shook his head. Andrew looked at me, shrugged, and shook his head.

  “They don’t get it,” I said to Joshua.

  Thus, after Joshua had some food and a nap and explained what in the hell he meant by “fishers of men,” we became seven.

  “These guys are our partners,” Peter said, hurrying us along the shore. “They own the ships that Andrew and I work on. We can’t go spread the good news unless they are in on it too.”

  We came to another small village and Peter pointed out two brothers who were fitting a new oarlock into the gunwale of a fishing boat. One was lean and angular, with jet-black hair and a beard trimmed into wicked points: James. The other was older, bigger, softer, with big shoulders and chest, but small hands and thin wrists, a fringe of brown hair shot with gray around a sunburned bald pate: John.

  “Just a suggestion,” Peter said to Joshua. “Don’t say the fisher-of-men thing. It’s going to be dark soon; you won’t have time for the explanation if we want to make it home in time for supper.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “just tell them about the miracles, the kingdom, a little about your Holy Ghost thing, but stay easy on that until they agree to join up.”

  “I still don’t get the Holy Ghost thing,” said Peter.

  “It’s okay, we’ll go over it tomorrow,” I said.

  As we moved down the shore toward the brothers, there was a rustling in some nearby bushes and three piles of rags moved into our path.

  “Have mercy on us, Rabbi,” said one of the piles.

  Lepers.

  (I need to say something right here: Joshua taught me about the power of love and all of that stuff, and I know that the Divine Spark in them is the same one that is in me, so I should have not let the presence of lepers bother me. I know that announcing them unclean under the Law was as unjust as the Brahmans shunning the Untouchables. I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably wouldn’t even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them “parts-dropping-off challenged,” or something. I know all that. But that said, no matter how many healings I saw, lepers always gave me what we Hebrews call the willies. I never got over it.)

  “What is it you want?” Joshua asked them.

  “Help ease our suffering,” said a female-sounding pile.

  “I’ll be over there looking at the water, Josh,” I said.

  “He’ll probably need some help,” Peter said.

  “Come to me,” Joshua said to the lepers.

  They oozed on over. Joshua put his hands on the lepers and spoke to them very quietly. After a few minutes had passed, while Peter and I had seriously studied a frog that we noticed on the shore, I heard Joshua say, “Now go, and tell the priests that you are no longer unclean and should be allowed in the Temple. And tell them who sent you.”

  The lepers threw off their rags and praised Joshua as they backed away. They looked like perfectly normal people who just happened to be all wrapped up in tattered rags.

  By the time Peter and I got back to Joshua, James and John were already at his side.

  “I have touched those who they said were unclean,” Joshua said to the brothers. By Mosaic Law, Joshua would be unclean as well.

  James stepped forward and grabbed Joshua’s forearm in the style of the Romans. “One of those men used to be our brother.”

  “Come with us,” I said, “and we will make you oarlock makers of men.”r />
  “What?” said Joshua.

  “That’s what they were doing when we came up. Making an oarlock. Now you see how stupid that sounds?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  And thus we did become nine.

  Philip and Nathaniel returned with enough money from the sale of the camels to feed the disciples and all of Peter’s family as well, so Peter’s screeching mother-in-law, who was named Esther, allowed us to stay, providing Bartholomew and the dogs slept outside. Capernaum became our base of operations and from there we would take one- or two-day trips, swinging through Galilee as Joshua preached and performed healings. The news of the coming of the kingdom spread through Galilee, and after only a few months, crowds began to gather to hear Joshua speak. We tried always to be back in Capernaum on the Sabbath so that Joshua could teach at the synagogue. It was that habit that first attracted the wrong sort of attention.

  A Roman soldier stopped Joshua as he was making the short walk to the synagogue on Sabbath morning. (No Jew was permitted to make a journey of more than a thousand steps from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday—all at once, that is. One way. You didn’t have to add up your steps all day and just stop when you got to a thousand. There would have been Jews standing all over the place waiting for Saturday sundown if that were the case. It would have been awkward. Suddenly I’m thankful that the Pharisees never thought of that.)

  The Roman was no mere legionnaire, but a centurion, with the full crested helmet and eagle on his breastplate of a legion commander. He led a tall white horse that looked as if it had been bred for combat. He was old for a soldier, perhaps sixty, and his hair was completely white when he removed his helmet, but he looked strong and the wasp-waisted short sword at his waist looked dangerous. I didn’t recognize him until he spoke to Joshua, in perfect, unaccented Aramaic.

  “Joshua of Nazareth,” the Roman said. “Do you remember me?”

  “Justus,” Joshua said. “From Sepphoris.”

  “Gaius Justus Gallicus,” said the soldier. “And I’m at Tiberius now, and no longer an under-commander. The Sixth Legion is mine. I need your help, Joshua bar Joseph of Nazareth.”