The Last Testament: A Memoir (31 page)

¹⁷
Jesus breast-fed; he nourished himself on the milk the Virgin Mary produced in her mammary glands; he sucked on her nipples to drink thereof.

¹⁸
Jesus weaned; whereupon Jesus ate; and Jesus chewed; and Jesus swallowed; and Jesus digested; and Jesus absorbed the nutrients; and Jesus excreted solid waste.

¹⁹
(He performed an equivalent procedure for liquids.)

²⁰
Jesus learned to crawl, and was amazed; Jesus learned to walk, and was awestruck; Jesus learned to talk, and the sound of his own voice was a revelation.

²¹
The toddler Jesus had a blanket he took with him everywhere.

²²
Jesus adored Mary and Joseph, and they him; he was obedient and full of love; they were tender and full of love.

²³
At six, Jesus got chicken pox; for five days there were red blotches all over Jesus’s face and body; then Jesus got better.

²⁴
Outside the family home lay a field of lavender; its smell wafted in through the window at night; Jesus came to associate the smell with his home; unto the day of his death the smell of lavender recalled to him his childhood.

²⁵
At nine the young Jesus began his apprenticeship with Joseph; throughout his childhood he learned the craft of carpentry; Jesus labored diligently; Jesus made many mistakes; but Jesus improved; Jesus grew competent; in time, Jesus grew masterful; and Jesus felt pride in his progress.

²⁶
Jesus had childhood friends; they would amuse themselves by chasing each other through the fields, and throwing rocks at trees; over the years Jesus lost contact with them; Jesus regretted this.

²⁷
Jesus had strange dreams about giant elephants, and removing his clothes in public, and being pursued by a giant sandal; upon waking he could only remember them partially; and he could not construe their meaning.

²⁸
Throughout his youth Jesus attended synagogue, and observed the Sabbath, and was devoutly religious; he did not yet know he was my son, but from an early age he manifested a profound interest in all things spiritual.

²⁹
Jesus picked his nose when he thought no one was looking.

³⁰
He did not put his finger all the way up there; only a little; and he never ate it.

³¹
Jesus would hear passersby singing songs, and the songs would get stuck in Jesus’s head, and Jesus would be unable to stop humming them for weeks.

³²
Sometimes after meals Jesus felt queasy; he came to notice that this happened whenever he ate pistachios, to which he thus learned he was allergic; and refrained from consuming henceforward.

³³
Jesus reached puberty; Jesus’s voice broke; Jesus grew half a cubit in six months; Jesus sprouted pubic hair; and Jesus felt the adolescent’s stirrings of lust in all their cyclonic fury.

³⁴
And so Jesus masturbated; for no one, not even my son, can pass through adolescence without masturbating; but he did it less often than most, and with a commendable shame.

³⁵
Jesus sampled wine on numerous occasions; several times he drank too much; one night Jesus vomited on the street; he woke up sick and tunic-besmirched, vowing never again to imbibe the fruit of the vine to the point of besottedness; and he never did.

³⁶
Jesus ended his apprenticeship and opened his own shop; he made yokes and ploughs and other farm equipment; some projects he found satisfying, others drudgery; overall he found the work only mildly fulfilling.

³⁷
But in his spare hours he devoured the Hebrew Scriptures, and the rabbinical commentaries thereof; and followed the events of his time with passion; and engaged himself completely with the world; a world he no longer looked down on, but was part of;

³⁸
Until he had become like any 30-year-old human being, or rather, like the best of them: churning, and changing, and yearning, and questing; bursting with consciousness; throbbing with life.

³⁹
Yea; Jesus had gone native.

⁴⁰
(But know this: Jesus never lay with a woman; Jesus never married; and Jesus certainly never impregnated anyone.

⁴¹
Dost thou hear me, Dan Brown?

⁴²
Thy hunt-and-peck blasphemy may win thee legions of readers on beaches and tarmacs and other flat surfaces; but I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe: and I have outsold thee 5,000 to 1.)

CHAPTER 10

¹
P
repare ye the way of the L
ORD
! Prepare ye the way of the L
ORD
!”

²
Even those of you abiding in the paganest depths of Greenwich Village know these words; for they are the beginning of
Godspell,
a musical I esteem almost as highly as
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

³
(I am omniscient; so I can say with authority, that over 39 percent of you appeared in a production of
Godspell
at some point in adolescence.

⁴
Even
I
appeared in
Godspell
once; I did a cameo as myself; I was good; not great, but good.)

⁵
But they are more than bouncily set lyrics; they are the very words spoken by John the Baptist on that epochal day, when Jesus entered the River Jordan a man, and left it a savior, like unto Superman in a liquid phone booth.

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John was a cousin of Jesus’s, a prophet who had been born on the outskirts of Crazyville and had recently moved to the heart of downtown.

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His clothes were of camel hair, and his food was wild locusts and honey, but he was a prophet; and as I said before, prophets need not be the most presentable of people; they are obliged only to be accurate, not sane.

⁸
On the Boxing Day morning after he turned 30, my son came to the Jordan, hungry for fulfillment and longing to be baptized.

⁹
Now, baptism has long since become a sacrament; but at this time it was seen by the rabbis as meritless and gaudy; pretentious; a gratuitous waste of one’s monthly bath.

¹⁰
Only a small group of Judeans had yet rejuvenated themselves with this form of spiritual hydrotherapy, and only three itinerant rabbis performed the ceremony; all three were quite bapt; but assuredly, John was the baptest.

¹¹
And so Jesus took a number and waited on line at the riverbank, as John baptized the crowd, all the while denouncing the Pharisees in attendance as a “generation of vipers” for whom “the ax is laid unto the root of the trees,” and demanding that they “bring forth therefore fruits mete for repentance.”

¹²
(That last quote was no allegory; he had gone six months on wild locusts and honey, and would have killed for some figs.)

¹³
Then he began speaking of one more powerful than him, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

¹⁴
No doubt such agricultural metaphors mean little to thy generation, which believeth its sustenance to originate in either the stockroom of a supermarket or the warehouse of Frito-Lay®; but back then it was fearsome imagery.

¹⁵
And then my son walked in (not
on
; that was later) the water; and John saw him, and was filled with reverence, and dropped to his knees, and said, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to
me
?”

¹⁶
And Jesus had not yet been made aware of his true identity; so although he responded, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness,” inwardly he thought, “Stalker alert. Stalker alert.”

¹⁷
Lo, this was the moment.

¹⁸
For 30 years my son had remained ignorant of his own divinity; but at the moment he was baptized he flew straightaway out of the water,

¹⁹
And the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw my Spirit descending like a dove, and lighting upon him,

²⁰
And he turned to me, with instant and total recollection, and I said to him, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; and Jesus smiled, and embraced me.

²¹
But I only said that because Ruth was there.

²²
I still thought the whole thing was a stupid idea.

CHAPTER 11

¹
T
he next episode in Jesus’s story was his testing in the wilderness by the devil; and here I must digress.

2 Forgive me, Reader; trust me, I will forgive thee in turn.

3 When my publisher first approached me about writing this book, I said unto him, “Happily would I merge the House of the L
ORD
with the noble House of Simon, and the decent one of Schuster; but know this from the getteth-go:

⁴
There are two, and possibly three, subjects I will not discuss in my memoirs: heaven, hell, and limbo.

⁵
I will not divulge any information on them; neither where they are, nor what they are like, nor who inhabits them, nor how to reserve a spot in them; nor which if any is the eternal resting place of righteous nonbelievers, or deathbed converts, or Chinese people.

⁶
I will give no revelation regarding any aspect of man’s posthumous destiny; for such a revelation would be like unto the spoiler of all spoilers, draining life of all its mystery and suspense;

⁷
And moreover, such enlightenment would furnish today’s readers with a moral shortcut that would be unfair to those already departed souls who earned their eternal salvations and damnations strictly on merit.”

⁸
That is what I said, and that is what I meant; I have given thee brief glimpses of the goings-on in heaven, and may offer a few more before this book is through; but otherwise that which lies beyond the portals of death must remain forever shrouded to the eyes of man.

⁹
Sorry.

¹⁰
Knowing this, thou canst see why the devil, too, is a subject of whom I would speak very little; for to talk of him and his activities would be to expose highly classified information regarding the afterlife.