Eddie H. Christ
A Sibling Rivalry Story of Biblical Proportions
By Gerard DiLeo
Eddie H. Christ
A Sibling Rivalry Story of Biblical Proportions
© 2002-2010 Gerard M. DiLeo All rights reserved.
Imprimatur applied for; Nihil Obstat pending.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Who made you?
God made me.
Who is God?
God is the Supreme Being Who made all things.
Why did God make you?
God made me to share in His infinite glory and happiness.
--from the Baltimore Catechism
Who are you?
I really wanna know.
--Pete Townsend
The Big Gap for Jesus, the Leper Colony for Me
Sex in the City and the River of Life
Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other
Mountain Visions and Barbecues
Stump the Pharisees, Stump the Romans, Stump the Jews, Stump the World
The Sign of the Cross--the Rest of the Story, or…Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum
The Dead and the Doppelgangers
For Linda
The Fork in Time
"That's a joke, right?" Pontius Pilate laughed, but it seemed to me to be a nervous laugh because he was not a joking man. He could neither make a joke nor get a joke. And he certainly couldn't take a joke.
Just ask us Jews.
When things didn’t make sense to Pilate, as often happened in his governorship, he would get nervous because then unpredictable things would happen—things that Rome would notice, and he was already on thin ice. There then would follow the nervous laugh. And then when he laughed the nervous laugh, we Jews would get nervous ourselves, because when things didn’t make sense to Pilate, bad things happened to Jews. Many a stipes, the vertical piece of wood that awaited its patibulum, or crosspiece, littered the way to Calvary like a haunted, uneven picket fence which divided a future as ghastly as its past.
Here was my big brother, Jesus, perched one tier below Pilate, Pilate’s wife, and Caiaphas. There, cloaked in royal purple Roman sarcasm, scourged nearly to death and I would hope ready to admit he had learned his lesson, he contrasted with Barabbas, the barbaric ne'er-do-well—opportunistic killer—guiltless and following the agenda of anyone smarter than him, which was pretty much anyone else.
When it came to which one to release—who it would serve the Jews better to release—it seemed to Pilate there was no contest. He had just offered the angry mob the release of a pacifist healer instead of a Neanderthal murderer and, as he understood it, they wanted the murderer loose among them. He heard it with his own ears.
“Barabbas!” he heard again and again. Pilate turned to his wife, Claudia.
“I’ll wager your dream didn’t end like this,” he said to her sarcastically. “Oy,” he added. “Oh, sorry, but there just isn’t a Roman word for how I feel right now.”
“How do you feel,” Claudia asked.
“I feel so…so…Oy!”
“Oy, indeed,” she responded.
For me, survival has always been a no-brainer: murder is murder no matter who's doing it—desert robbers, mountain lions, or the stupid blood-sucking Romans. One more murderer loose was never a good idea. Pilate and I were certainly on the same page here, so to his amazement, this mob just didn't get it. They repeated their choice to him.
"Really! Really?” He looked at Caiaphas, who had nothing more to clarify and seemed pleased with the choice. Well, not entirely pleased, as it was a choice between two bad choices, but pleased somewhat, like he had just won a tie. The priest silently pushed down a frown, which was his custom when he had nothing to add.
How in the hell had it come to this? Good Jew gone bad? Bad Jew gone crazy? Or just a Jew in the Roman system who stood out just a little. Stood out enough to get scourged.
“And crucified?” Pilate asked with surprise. He was fascinated with the amount of bad luck for Jesus. “If I had known you’d be crucified, I certainly wouldn’t have had you scourged, too.” It was as comforting as Pilate ever was. “There’s a long line of Jews waiting for scourging,” he muttered to Primus Pilus, his chief centurion. “We wasted a slot.”
“We’ll make up time, Governor. We can do two at the same time—tough on the soldiers, but doable.”
“And the scourge would be a quality scourge?” Pilate asked sternly.
“Oh, you won’t tell the difference,” the centurion promised.
“Are you sure?” Pilate challenged him.
“Haven’t been able to tell the difference before,” the Centurion added, settling the matter.
I was in the mob, but I didn’t consider myself to be part of it. Idiots, all of them. We Jews were supposed to be a smart bunch of people, as evidenced by the collective wisdom of whacking off foreskin, but a mob is only as smart as any other mob that can form, be it a mob of Atticus Finch’s neighbors, Nobel Laureates, Morlocks, or a bunch of foreskinned infidels. Regardless of its membership, IQ is always indirectly proportional to the number in the mob. What did they expect, confusing everyone—especially Pilate—with their choice? And although this mob represented no evolutionary leap in mob intelligence, the great cataclysmic historical irony is that Pilate had misunderstood them.
Again I asked myself, how had it come to this?
Christ!
Eddie Christ, that is. Verily I say to you, it’s nice to meet you.
Anachronism is forgivable when you’re outside of time. Christ, a name that came around long after I was dead, was a Greek word for the liberator of the Jews from…well, anyone who was putting the screws to ‘em. I guess that would mean everyone. Christ—the Christ—was to be a gift from God. Who would know it was to be a gift with a lot of wrapping to get through before you got to it. And then of course with all the pretty wrapping laying tattered and torn in pieces all over the floor, your first impression is that you weren’t all that impressed. Like a pair of socks for Christmas, useful but mundane, basic but ignored till needed.
My proper name was Edrachus, son of Joseph—Edrachus bar-Joseph. Edrachus, Ed, Little Brother—I answer to most everything, except Little Brother. I like EC, but this wasn’t technically correct.
Call me Eddie.
That’s what my big brother, Jesus, called me. He said, “Don’t worry, one day it’s really going to be popular.” For the rest of my longer-than-expected life I never met another Eddie, from Bethlehem all the way to Rome. Even all those places I tagged along with Paul later, no sir, not a single one. There were a few other guys named Edrachus—but not a single one would be caught dead being called Eddie. Of course now I know it’s kind of a suburban name, not at all appropriate for the Middle East at the time. Yea, the name Eddie did get popular a couple of thousand years later—He was right—well, of course He was right—He was Jesus. Nowadays the name Eddie is on a mug in every Stuckey’s you pass on the Interstate. But Jesus’ prediction of the name’s popularity was like the predictions of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which you thought would be right around the corner or next Thursday the way everyone talked about it. Long after Jesus was gone, I had a running bet with myself over which would come true first, the popularity of Eddie the name or the coming of the Kingdom of God. I took steps to hedge my bet by calling myself Eddie H. Christ for awhile. As I understand it, the popularity of Eddie came and went even before the Kingdom of God. All of the Eddie mugs are long gone and replaced with Jarred, Ryan, Dylan, and Connor. Oh well.
As long as you’re falling for this whole suspension of disbelief stuff, you’re also going to have to accept that Jesus had a brother at all. Some Biblical scholars (they call themselves scholars) have said that James the Apostle might have been the brother of Jesus, but no way. James was a step-brother—from Joseph’s first marriage. And that’s only what he himself said, because I never saw any evidence. Joseph never talked about it, like any stuff that happened a wife ago was always a mistake. James—if he was a son of Joseph—wasn’t even around for me and Jesus. We didn’t even meet the guy till Jesus became a man and we left home. I would have thought Jesus would have trouble buying it, too, even when this guy came up to him and held out his arms—a glorious gesture.
“Jesus! My brother, at last I found you.” Didn’t look anything like him. Well, I suppose he wouldn’t have—different fathers, if you know what I mean. I’ll say definitely different mothers, too, no matter what he claimed, because he didn’t look anything like me, either.
Jesus bought it right off the bat—just looked at him and said, “O.K., my brother, then I guess you can be an Apostle.”
I said, “He can? You’re kidding, right? You’re making a parable? What’s the lesson here?”
“No, Eddie,” Jesus said back, “why would I be kidding?” Contrary to popular belief, Jesus was a great kidder. He wasn’t kidding me here, though. During this whole exchange, I turned it over and over in my mind, at times raising an eyebrow, at times twisting my mouth in thought.
“Well,” I argued, trying to make Jesus reconsider, “for one thing, we don’t know this guy from Adam, and--”
“You knew Adam?” Jesus asked me.
“Yea, wise guy, I knew Adam. And Eve, too, O.K.? And Cain and Abel, too. And I’m the one who gave Cain the idea to brain Abel, because Abel was such a pain in the ass. And this guy reminds me a lot of Abel.”
James should have been looking a little nervous about all of this, but he just gazed at Jesus with that devout look and said, “I put my faith in you, brother.”
“And another thing,” I continued.
“Oh, I see, you have a whole list.”
“Yea, and number two, I was going to be your first Apostle, remember?”
“I said, ‘We’ll see,’ remember?” he said, a little cop-out phrase he learned from Mom, like I was some child or something. Big brothers, ya gotta love ‘em, the bastards.
Yea, I had a whole list. Jesus stopped me at number seven.
So there was James. Personally, I say he was a nut case. He would say he came from different places—we’d catch him in lies all the time, until we realized that he had this problem with his identity. The truth is Jesus could never have lived with the likes of this guy during all of those teenage years with puberty and hormones and things like that. Jesus had a time putting up with him as an Apostle, as it turned out. Well actually, Jesus was patient—it was me who had the problem.
God (like I need to tell You.), James was so obnoxious!
The point is that Jesus had only one brother, and his name was Eddie and that’s me. And the only one who lived with Jesus when he was a boy was me. Couldn’t ask Joseph when James showed up a good twenty years after Joseph had died—which was a pretty bad day for me. So who knows? Maybe he was lying. There’s a commandment for lying, and if you lie to the Messiah, there’s a special subcategory for that type of lie. I would remind James of that all of the time, but he’d just say, “Love your brother,” with a wink toward Jesus, like I was having trouble doing that. I would have never admitted it to James, but there was some truth in that wink. My trouble accepting James, at times, mind you, paled next to my accepting and loving my brother. “As yourself,” James would add.
As myself.
Sibling rivalry with the Son o’God—you could only imagine.
Now I know that any Bible you pick up is noticeably ignorant of the fact that I existed. You can’t find an Eddie anywhere. Ever wonder why that is? Probably because I wasn’t the most admirable character during the life of Jesus. Or maybe the Bible wasn’t the kind of book that called for a lot of comic relief. Certainly I would have just gotten in the way of the story. Which really pisses me off since James has so much press. Of course there were three James’, and you never knew which one the Bible was talking about at any one time. There was James the “brother” of Jesus, and you know how I feel about that. There was James the Greater—John’s brother and son of Zebedee and Salome (an old fish woman, not to be confused with that slut in Herod’s palace); and there was James the Lesser, son of Alpheus and Mary, a first cousin of my Mom. All three James’ were aggravating. And Jesus liked me better than any of the James’. He told me. I think.
Maybe I dreamed it.
Well, he didn’t really tell me—he was Jesus. You just knew with the Son o’God.
The Son of God! I don’t know, you just can’t let a phrase like “Son of God,” roll out of the mouth as easily as “top of the charts” or “best in class,” right?
Did you know that James’ Mom, Salome—the old fish woman— once asked Jesus to keep her James and John in line for special spots in Heaven next to God once this Messiah business was all over? Once the Christ-ing happened. You don’t have to wonder where that James got it from. Putting in a request for top spots for her boys, Salome was the patron saint of stage Moms.
“Prospects look good,” Jesus had told her, which is a phrase that would figure importantly in an oracle shaped like an eight-ball one day.
“Yes, but where? On your right side? On your left?” she had asked. For the record, right side was always better than the left side. She wanted to know which one was going to be which side. She was even playing favorites with her sons with her ridiculous request.
“They’ll probably be seated in the obstructed view section,” I had answered.
She was a horrible little thing, seething at me through her tooth. A wiry, short, grey-haired hag who yelled every time she spoke, from all of her years as a fish woman on the wharf. She had the middle finger of her right hand missing—some ancient trauma which had me wondering what would she be doing to lose one middle finger.
“Eliminate the middleman!” she would shout from the wharf. “Buy it here!”
She turned back to Jesus for the answer that would place her sons on this side of him or the other, but Jesus just told her that she should pray very hard about it, which was like telling her to call Customer Service and be patient while on hold. In fact, all praying is like being on hold in the Customer Service telephone queue.
Your prayer is very important to me, and will be answered in the order that it was offered.
The Bible. An inspirational work. I guess I shouldn’t be too upset about being left out of the greatest best seller in history. Look at Jesus’ mother, Mary. Our Mom. I mean, she’s the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Prompt Succor, Our Lady of Unfortunate Experiences…I think, Our Lady of This, Our Lady of That, and Our Lady of a lot of other things. There’s even an Our Lady of the Iceberg. Gotta be a Lady of the Thaw, right? She’s so famous for being Our Lady of all kinds of things that you could open up a Webster’s and put your finger in it with your eyes closed and whatever word you picked, there’s probably an Our Lady of that. Our Lady of All Nouns. Our Lady of A, E, I, O, and U. And sometimes our Lady of Y. She’s everywhere, and yet she only got mentioned five or six times in the Bible, tops.
I was almost mentioned. Almost mentioned a few times I might add.
You might remember in John’s Gospel, when Peter the Rock, Thomas the Doubter, Bartholomew the Stand Up Comic, and Zebe’s two boys—John himself and James—James the Greater—were fishing after Jesus had died, and they weren’t catching anything, and the resurrected Jesus told them where to put their nets…Read it. It says, “Peter, Thomas, Bartholomew, John, James, and two others.”
I was one of the two others. The other guy was the boat owner, but he was drunk knocked out, which is why we used his boat—just kind of took him for the ride. Anyway, I was one of the others. We got back with so much fish, even unloaded it, docked at the same spot we had left, and the owner never woke up during all of this commotion. The guy finally did, in that same boat in that same spot, none the wiser, like nothing happened.
“My boat sure stinks like fish,” he muttered, rousing. Like it never ever stunk like fish any other time. He climbed out of his boat onto the wharf where we had stacked all our catch.
“Hey, where’d all the fish come from?” he wondered out loud. Then he looked at the risen Jesus and exclaimed, “The fish of the sea walk onto my dock now and stack themselves. Truly you are the Messiah.” In a fisherman’s world, this was better than rising from the dead.
“Some of those fish, I caught,” I corrected him.
“Yea, sure,” he said, “come back when you feed five thousand. Uh, any more loaves of bread? I am just famished!” And in the distance could be heard a nine-fingered woman maligning the middleman.
Anyway, the fact that such a lowly character as me was almost mentioned a few times is pretty generous. When you look at Mary’s status in Christianity, I should have been mentioned not zero times, not almost once, but negative times. Ten to the minus twenty-third times. Of course someone somewhere made that decision, and I suppose I better not argue, since the Bible was, as they say, inspired. Actually, I think it was a conspiracy against me by the four evangelists, or as I like to call them, the only guys we knew who knew how to write.
Oh, and I was almost mentioned again that time after Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemani. In John, Chapter 18, verses 15 and 16:
Simon Peter, in company with another disciple, kept following Jesus closely. This disciple, who was known to the high priest, stayed with Jesus as far as the high priests’ courtyard, while Peter was left standing at the gate.
“…in company of another disciple.” “This disciple…” Me, thank you. And I stayed with him a lot longer than the courtyard. But I won’t tempt you with that right now.
So what was the item in old business? Right, that Jesus had a brother. Why on Earth was that necessary? Maybe it was a twist on the good vs. evil thing or the opposites attract thing or the Jesus needed a little brother to wail on so he’d be well-balanced thing. And if he did have a brother, shouldn’t it have been a big brother—you know, to show him the ropes. I’m his little brother. Two years younger. Always behind him in the pecking order, always getting his hand-me-downs. Even in the respect and admiration department—could make a guy jealous. After all, I had my pride.
But I was such the little brother. And he had his way of always letting me know it. He would always tell me, “Take away me, and that leaves just you,” whatever that meant. That left just the dregs of the family? The base and the crude and the foibles?
Did he really need a brother?
So much care went into Jesus coming at all that it seems trivial to have included a little brother in the nuclear Holy Family. Folks, I can’t explain that. Except that maybe it was to make Jesus look even better, because of the stark contrast. Who knows? You’re going to have to have a little faith in the man upstairs for why I was necessary. I mean, who are we to question things like that? Certainly not me. I’m just Eddie—but I can tell you I’m glad I was here. I would like to think I was in Jesus’ childhood for a reason. Maybe it was some training for him, to train him to act in such a way that people would choose him over all else. But was it fair to poison my whole childhood for his training? It seems now that of those who would choose between me and Jesus, the ones who chose me just didn’t seem to do as well. Was it because they chose me to play with, a mortal whose deficiencies were measured by the glories of the big brother, or because the ones who chose him backed the winner from the start? Being only two years apart widened our cross section of friends, so it wasn’t the age. Of course it wasn’t the age!
From my point of view, it cracks me up for anyone to question that the Messiah had a brother. Shouldn’t most people look at it the other way around—they should say you were crazy if you thought you had a Messiah for a brother, not that the Messiah had a brother. Am I right? Even back then, everyone used to question me on whether I thought there really was a Messiah in my family. So this whole thing is backwards now. But I can tell you that growing up with it, it all seemed so normal. What did I know? Naturally, for a while, just being a stupid little kid, I thought every family had a Messiah, and Jesus was ours. I remember asking a neighborhood kid, Barabbas, just who the Messiah was in his family.
“Gotta be me,” he said, “I’m an only child.”
Later I learned that there was only one Messiah—that our family was the ecclesial lottery winner for some reason. I know Michael thought he was the Messiah in the Jackson family and Marsha thought she was divine in the Brady’s, but apparently this thing was only needed once. I think only once. They say he’s coming back one more time.
Sometime after the name Eddie becomes popular.
Thank goodness we were the only family with a Messiah, because I wouldn’t wish that on any other family. You’d think it would have been sweet, but amen I say to you I had it rough with a big brother like Jesus. Consider what a sibling had to live up to. Boy did that suck! All of you little brothers have heard it so many times, right? “Why can’t you be like your big brother, Steve?” “Why can’t you be like Michael, Jr.?” “Why can’t you be more like Bubba?” Well maybe not Bubba. But how do you think it was hearing, “Why can’t you be like Jesus?” I can tell you how it was. It was lousy. And Jesus knew it. He’d just give me that little wry smile like he did, knowing I couldn’t put together that chair like he and his Dad could. His other Dad--I mean Joseph of course. Joseph wasn’t his real Dad for real, ‘cause Jesus was, that’s right, the Son o’God.
But I have to hand it to ol’ Joseph, it wasn’t easy for him, either. He was like the stepfather trying to live up to Jesus’ real father. Sucked for him, too. That’s why Joseph—my real Dad—like me best. Well, he didn’t actually tell me that. You just knew with a guy like Joseph. We were kind of in the same boat, Joseph and me, and that gave me more feeling toward him than just being his son. I felt it with him and he knew it. It was an unspoken conversation we had many times, sometimes every minute.
Poor Joseph. I really shouldn’t say he liked me best. It’s just that there was a certain distance between Jesus and Dad, as you might expect. If there were any unspoken conversation between them, it was nothing like the one I had with Dad. Jesus loved him, respected him, honored him and all that, but it was a little too proper if you ask me. Joseph knew that, too. Lemme give you an example. One time Joseph got sick—I don’t know—droopy, turning a little yellow—liver problem or something. Probably inhaled too much varnish. So he’s all flopped on the linens in the sleeping room, thinking his time is near, and he calls us in one at a time. I was first.
“Son,” he told me, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid,” I consoled him. “You’re gonna get better. I know it. I know it for sure. I promise.” He clutched me to him and we cried together. After that cry said everything between a father and a son that could be said, it was Jesus’ turn. Dad didn’t ask me to leave, so I stuck around.
“Son,” Dad told Jesus, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus told him. Joseph smiled, anticipating a validation of what I had just said. “You’ve always known your time here was brief compared to the rest of your life in the hereafter.” I swear, I thought I saw him turn yellower right there.
See the difference? I was clutching the ol’ man, holding him tight, like that could keep him from slipping away; and Jesus was, like, no big deal if the guy who’s raising you croaks. Just a phase, just this deal. Nice knowing you—see you in the afterlife. Here, lemme give you a shove. Bon voyage. Like nothing you did here was important.
So why the hell would you even want to try?
“Eddie promised me I would get better,” Joseph said to Jesus.
“It was a promise?” Jesus asked.
“It was a most excellent promise, pledged on the graves of all our ancestors from the line of David,” I shouted.
“Wow,” said Jesus. “Well, Joseph—” he never called him Dad—“then I guess I promise, too.” Joseph sighed relief and smiled at Jesus.
“Thank you, son,” he said. “Now I know I’ll be better in no time.”
“I guess my promise is shit!” I scoffed. “Can’t compete with Jesus,” I complained to Joseph. Joseph just slouched back on the linens. “He cheated, Dad. I promised because I love you. He promised because he could.”
“Eddie,” Joseph spoke in a weak voice, “it doesn’t matter, does it, as long as I get better?”
“Yea,” Jesus said, “what’s the difference?”
“The difference,” I said sternly, “is that you were born a man for a reason, but you can’t even feel what it’s like for a man to lose something.”
“We haven’t lost anyone yet,” Jesus corrected me, “so calm it down.”
“Say, boys, ya wanna talk like I’m in the room with you here?” Joseph objected.
“You should be feeling better already, Joseph,” Jesus told him. “Sleep.”
Joseph caught a break there. Within a week his yellow complexion had gone and he was back with his wood. What’s the difference, indeed! I think I’ve made clear the difference. I don’t know what I’d do without Joseph, being so “otherly” together with me, compared with Jesus. Even Mary—Mom—couldn’t feel that chill of “otherliness,” having been dipped into that Immaculate Conception as the start of her life.
Now Mom was a good Mom. She kneaded dough and rolled it and baked it as best she could with the only heat source 93 million miles away. Only folks with a big place could light a fire inside. She washed our clothing, which was easy since we each had only one outfit, which consisted of just an undergarment and an outer garment.
She did all kinds of mother things, like saying she liked us both the same. I kept score a lot, I guess. And even though you just knew with a woman like Mom, she did actually say that to me. But saying things like that was a Mom thing to do. She’d ask me right back who I loved more, her or Dad. And of course I’d say I loved them both the same. A kid learns this mind game pretty fast. When she’d ask Jesus whom he loved more, he would feel compelled to explain things far beyond just loving people the same.
“Mother,” he would say, “I render to you the love that is yours, and I render the love that is Joseph’s to Joseph. And of course there’s the Father.”
“Don’t forget Caesar,” I chimed in.
“Jesus,” she asked, “can’t you just say you love us both the same?”
“What’s the difference?” he asked her back. I could have slapped him.
“But we’re two different people,” she said to him. “That’s the difference.”
“No, you’re not,” he said back to her. Then he gestured toward me.
“Oh,” she said, as if that explained everything.
I was lost on all of this, but I think it had something to do with this one begetting this one and that one begetting that one, and everyone’s all joined together who make children all the way back…to who? To David? Hmmm…to Adam and Eve? Hmmm…back to God the Father Himself? And when did the belly button come in?
Jesus always had an answer that was right I guess, but do you see what I mean? He was a part of our family, yet he was separate, too, a bit. Joseph felt it and I really felt it. Jesus was the son of God and I was as far removed from God as anyone, except even farther since you had to throw in a few more miles distance due to sibling rivalry.
I often wondered if Mom really did love us exactly the same. Sometimes I suspected she loved Jesus more, because little brothers would wonder such things, but I had to go with her Mom answer. Jesus acted like he knew different—of course he would if there was something different to know, ‘cause he was Jesus. And God the Father? Well, you know Jesus was His favorite. I wasn’t anything else to Him more than any other guy hanging around. Well that’s not exactly true, because after all I was a Jew. But I wasn’t anything else to Him more than any other Jew hanging around.
“Just another Jew,” I’d say.
“That’s not true, Eddie,” Jesus argued one day after I worried out loud to him. “He doesn’t think of you as just any other Jew hanging around.”
“Oh, so he loves me more than everyone else?” I challenged him.
“No, of course not. He’s your Father in Heaven—He loves everyone the same.”
“But we’re all different people,” I replied. I wasn’t going to let him get away with this after what He had told Mom.
“Love is the same in both directions,” Jesus explained. “All the love is the same. It’s either love or it isn’t, and if it is, then He loves everyone the same.”
“So, like I said, he thinks of me just like any other Jew hanging around.”
“At least you’re Jewish,” Jesus finally said, exasperated.
He would always argue that I was loved by God the Father as much as he was, but then he’s the one who got all the miracle powers. I waited for mine for a long time, and it’s a good thing I didn’t hold my breath. I admit it, I was jealous. I had pride. And that was painful, because look what I had to work with.
And there’s another thing that always bothered me about him. I swear it was like being on Bewitched. Here’s Jesus, God made man, with all of these powers, and we’re still fetching water every day. I’d rag him, but he said that it wasn’t his time, wasn’t his time. Like living with that prick, Darren Stevens, married to Samantha.
“Make the water come to us for once,” I’d suggest, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. No dice. “Think how much more you could do for people if we got our chores over with faster,” I’d tempt him. No way. Hard-headed, I swear. Must have been that golden light all around his head you see in holy pictures that made his head so hard. Probably brass. When I think back on it, there wouldn’t have been a chance that day on the mountain, Jesus being tempted with what he could have if he would just take a dive for a little hard-earned pomp and self-indulgence.
Jesus did everything better than me. He slept all night long the very first night after he was born. Me, I squawked for months with colic. You’d think Jesus could fire up just a little biddy big brother miracle to break up my gas. Or at least turn water into simethicone. I know he was only two, but he was Jesus. And later on I had to hear all the time—and I do mean all of the goddamned time—what a terrible baby I was. Up all night, every night; then after that, having bad dreams and trying to get onto Mom and Dad’s bed mat, which is probably why there weren’t any more kids after me. In truth, there was only one bed mat anyway, if you can call it that, so if a dream woke someone up, it woke everyone up.
Listen, dreams were a big deal back then. Dreams told Mom she was pregnant, but didn’t tell her how, which was O.K., because her Mom didn’t tell her how girls got pregnant anyway; dreams told Elizabeth John was coming, but didn’t tell her he’d be a weirdo with a water fixation; a dream sent the wise men; a dream sent Joseph packing his family off to Egypt.
And these were the good dreams.
For me, bad dreams would come and I’d have to give my parents a terrible night’s sleep for sure. Once I dreamed that an angel came to me and told me to watch my step. Had a sword drawn and everything. Might even have been an archangel. That made me feel special. Watch my step indeed! I guess when you’re the brother of Jesus you’re held to a higher standard.
Oh I was trouble. Of course there was my throwing up all the time—have you ever seen what people back then had to eat? It wasn’t Stouffer’s, for sure. Yea, I’d like to see how any modern Gerber baby would do on that shit. And it was shit. All we had was salt. A lot of it—too much on everything. Of course no one worried about things like hypertension, because who cared when the life expectancy back then was forty anyway?
I wasn’t breast fed. No, Jesus was breast fed. When I came along, Mom said, “No, I’m not breast feeding—I did that once.” You probably don’t know that Mom, among many other titles, is called Nuestra Senora de la Leche y Buen Parto, Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk—that’s how the Le Leche League got its name. Jesus was the happy delivery and got the plentiful milk. I was the accident and got the village wet nurse, Mrs. Noah, who was like the village granny who pitch-hits for your Mom’s breasts. She also doubled, though, as the village idiot. She was named after Noah’s wife, but since no one knows what Noah’s wife’s name really was, she was just called Mrs. Noah. She really wasn’t that old, but someone in their early thirties was often a grandma. To be honest, as I got older, I realized that grandma age was definitely an age that was still “doable” from a B.C. man’s point of view, well, a horny B.C. man’s. Wet nurses did “Girls Gone Wild” for a living, dangerously flashing them in a land where a man, who was inclined to do anything he wanted to do, might get the wrong idea. Gotta get past the lactation, right? In that mindset, maybe this just wasn’t that much of a problem. For protection, some shepherd or fisherman or some any type of guy would always escort her to each assignment. Maybe they played the “I never was breastfed,” card and sought succor themselves, pun intended.
The mouth is an infant’s first portal to the world, and my door was the village idiot. I must have been wise to the whole old, hanging, granny breast thing ‘cause I never would latch on to the old thirty-something-year-old hag. Can you blame me? Of course, this is what I was told. Over and over and over. She packed formula, though, for babies like me—babies that just aren’t important enough for the real Mom to give a breast to. Flour and water and honey. And they would ruin it with salt, too. And the cups were often shaken with sand to beat off the crusted gruel, so add to the taste a dash of granulated silicon. Lucky I didn’t make a pearl by the time that sludge got down to my ass.
Boy could Jesus get the grades. Next to him I guess I did look pretty stupid. That’s what happens when you suckle from the village idiot. He didn’t flaunt it too much, but he probably knew the proof for the Grand Unification Theory, so counting with sticks was a piece of cake to him. Yea, Jesus got straight As in stick counting and ass-measuring and hammer hitting. I got Bs—low Bs. Except water hauling—I just couldn’t get the knack of carrying that bucket on my head. I got a D-. Probably could have gotten a letter grade better if it hadn’t been for my attitude. So call me an underachiever. Don’t hire me for water hauling. Women’s work anyway.
Although he didn’t flaunt it, when asked he always had an answer for everything. He knew how everything worked. I mean everything. One time I asked him how it was that tides rose and fell. He told me it had to do with sponges in the ocean—that they inhaled and exhaled really slow.
“Really?” I said excitedly, all giggly that I had an answer man for all of life’s mysteries right in my own family.
“Naaa, not really,” he laughed, “I was just playing you.”
“Oh.” I felt so stupid next to him.
“Actually, it’s the moon. It wants the water, too, so it pulls on it differently depending on how far away it is. But the Earth is so much stronger and won’t let it go, so all the moon is able to do is tug a little.”
“Yea, right, Jesus,” I said. “I think I’ll go with the sponges, thank you.”
Jesus had a dog. I wanted one, but Mom and Dad said one dog was enough, so the little brother got cut out again. I was used to it. Most little brothers are.
Jesus got to do this but I couldn’t because I wasn’t old enough; Jesus got to have that but I couldn’t because I wasn’t responsible enough. And on and on. Of course, if you were a middle child, you got doubly screwed, because the oldest got, say, the dog, the middle couldn’t for all of the above reasons, and the youngest got one anyway because he wouldn’t care what the old folks said or as usually is the case, just wore ‘em down.
“But you can share Jesus’ dog,” Mom said.
Yea, right. What part would I get, anyway? I didn’t want Jesus’ stupid dog.
Thing was, though, that Jesus’ dog wasn’t stupid. His dog, wouldn’t you know, was special. Once I brought him outside after letting him have some scraps from dinner, and we were just outside there, him and me, except he was on his mission to unload. I was just there to make sure he did it. He sniffed around in that prerequisite ritual until his ass started driving so as to stop over that perfect site that would cover up some other dog’s scent. He assumed the position and gave me that look all dogs give—that ashamed yet demanding privacy look. And then he spoke.
“Would you mind not looking at me when I take a shit?”
I’ll give you a moment to think about that, because it’s not the sort of thing that you can accept without pause.
It’s true. Rex could talk. He and Jesus would have conversations—O.K.—simple conversations—he was a dog. He only seldom talked to me. Share the dog indeed!
Jesus found him as a puppy. He was a stray, and Jesus was Mr. Humane. A slop-pile of leftovers from dinner one night guaranteed we had the pup for life. Jesus stayed with this dog day and night, and here’s the part about the talking. You know how dogs shake themselves dry? Well, that’s the problem, they all have shaken child syndrome, or I guess, shaken puppy syndrome. Jesus would always stop the dog from doing that. That dog never shook its head one single time, which gave him the best dog brain in the world. And that’s enough to get a dog talking. I can’t imagine anything a dog had to say was interesting—smelling other dog butts, places to pee, things like that. But this dog really looked up to Jesus. Well sure he did—it was Jesus. The only reason he looked up to me was because he was down there and I was up here.
The dog’s name was Rex—Jesus had named him after Herod.
Rex really liked being a dog. In fact, this is one of the things he would say out loud. He’d roll on his back and wiggle around, just basking in dogdom.
“I just dig being a dog,” he’d say, doing his break dance. “At-cha-cha-cha! Man! Smell that!” Rex added splendidly to our domestic scene, and I say it was a good thing for the Son o’God to experience a dog.
But the talking Rex, being a good spy, sometimes gave Jesus a little too much information from the neighborhood. He would tell Jesus what the other kids were saying about him. About how they always called him a little bastard behind his back. You know—this is all of that virgin birth thing. Oh sure, everybody believes in it now, because it’s in the Bible and it happened 2000 years ago. No one would buy it if they said it happened to someone last year in Lubbock, Texas, though, and that’s how everyone took it back in our town. They just nodded that nod after we’d pass in the marketplace. That nod. That “Oh, sure, I could believe that--as if” nod.
“Couldn’t you just slap those people?” I’d ask Jesus.
“They’ve already been slapped with stupidity,” he answered, but I knew it hurt him. And this was such a weird thing, because here he was—the Savior, and I outranked him in the social register. Regarded higher than him—by these idiots.
Of course it was a set up for a fall. When I think about the virgin birth of Jesus, I wonder—How else could it have been pulled off? How else do you deliver the Messiah? God couldn’t come down, date Mary, buy her flowers, take her dancing, go steady, marry her, and have a little place of their own—where people would walk by and say, “Oh, there’s God’s place. Let’s hang out. Maybe He’ll show himself—come out in his robe to pick up the paper.” Can you imagine God asking Joachim for his daughter’s hand?
“Sure, God, you can marry her…you made her, after all.”
“So, Joachim, you don’t mind? You approve of me?”
“That would be wise, wouldn’t it, Lord Almighty?”
“Yes, that would be very wise. Remind me to tell you a little story about a selfish little fig tree one day, Joachim.”
Certainly God couldn’t just appear and conceive a child with her—the whole place lighting up like a sodium burner. The stupid blood-sucking Romans had a story like that—Zeus appearing to Semele in all his glory. It was such a glory that she blew up. Blew up good. Bacchus came flying out of her, so Zeus stuck him in his thigh for the rest of gestation. Oh sure, I could believe that—as if.
Stupid blood-sucking Romans.
Y’know, it’s terrible to even be thinking along human lines with this—God and sex and stuff. Jesus wasn’t made with sex! This was God. He’s the one who gave us sex—that’s His gift. Sex was a gift from God! But He’s way above all of that. And if sex is just a glimmer of what real love is—I mean Godly love—then John and Yoko weren’t even close.
No, the way I figure it, Mary must have been born pregnant. I don’t mean with a big belly, just a little holy seed in her, the product of things God set in motion eons ago, from the atoms of our world, falling together such that Mary would bring it all together alongside another human being within her, without the need for a man.
Isn’t God amazing!
A lot of people think the virgin birth meant the Immaculate Conception, but that’s wrong because the Immaculate Conception means conceived without Original Sin. And if all of the atoms were started in such a way that Mary would be born pregnant, then the conception started, I suppose, with the Big Bang. Of course she was conceived without Original Sin! It was billions of years and light years, too, away from Eve, who—alledgedly, now—I’m not pointing any fingers—took the first bite of that apple. So the mother of Christ was conceived without Original Sin, that one-way ticket out of Paradise that bought us the gnashing of teeth and the sweat of our brows.
I guess it’s easier to accept the Immaculate Conception than the virgin conception, because being conceived without Original Sin is more of an ethereal concept, taken right out of the mundane day-to-day activities of sex and reproduction. Virgin conception, on the other hand, if we’re trying to make sense of the regular living we do every day, is harder to buy for most people.
When you’re satisfied with the explanation of the Big Bang, though, you can come at me challenging the virgin birth of Jesus, because the Big Bang was a virgin birth, too. The whole universe popping out of nothing? Stephen Hawking has asked for equally challenging leaps of faith.
The way Jesus explained his conception to me made sense.
One day Jesus and I were walking to fetch some grain in the town center. It was always understood in our family that Jesus was born by way of a virgin birth. It was just a given, like hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts. I knew that my Pop, Joseph, ultimately had relations with Mom, because there was me. But he didn’t have any relations with her till long after Jesus was born. In today’s religions, such a delay in consummating a marriage would be grounds for an annulment.
What a sport Joseph was.
It would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been so ridiculous, because even though she was pregnant when they married, the family still had to have this whole hymen fixation thing. Back then it was important for the nosy family and in-laws to see if there were any blood on the bed after the wedding night from, you know, the traumatic tearing of the hymen with first penetration. It proved a bride’s virginity. Man, I hate talking about this stuff.
Anyway, there wasn’t any in their bed, and everyone freaked out again. Either they didn’t do anything on their wedding night—“Oh, yea, right,” was the skepticism over breakfast; or she wasn’t a virgin —“Well, she is pregnant, y’know,” was the catchphrase by suppertime. This added even more pressure on Joseph. Folks, there wasn’t any blood because they didn’t do anything. Just went to sleep. And thank God—and I mean that literally—that they each had their dreams that night. Mary’s dream reassured her that the plan was still the plan; Joseph’s dream was an angel that took him drinking all night.
The unborn Jesus also had a dream—he even remembered it, but wouldn’t tell me. Not yet, anyway.
“Maybe one day,” he said.
“Well, then, I won’t tell you what I dreamed about,” I rebutted.
“Don’t really care,” he said, ending the matter. Big brothers—tell me about ‘em.
The whole thing of virginity is so crazy. It’s not so much the state of an intact membrane serving to guard what everyone says is sacred and holy…and quite a good time. The hymen—and I’ve never seen one, mind you—is just a physical reminder of something else altogether. I guess it’s like the tamper-proof factory seal that says a woman is "saving herself" for the man of her life.
Men don’t have a tamper-proof seal, because if they did, it would be self-tampered with a million times before they lost their virginity. Of course, men don’t have to save themselves for anything. We’re pigs and proud of it. If a man gets laid, he can still be upright, but if an upright woman goes down, she stays down. She has the stigma that men don’t have to worry about. Virginity in women has an expiration date, and it’s the day the tamper-proof seal is broken.
I guess it’s ironic, really. It’s so unfair that a woman losing her virginity is such a tragedy when men are allowed to lah-dee-dah their way into any orifice that seems to be vacant. When I asked Jesus about this hypocrisy that Judaism seemed to accept, his answer made the most sense.
“In the hypocrites’ defense,” he explained, “it’s just a little way of revering women more than men. What’s wrong with that? It’s not a big deal—just a little thing. But virginity is beauty, whether you’re a man or a woman.”
“So,” I tried to understand, “it’s a way of admiring women more than men when assessing the ‘book value’ on the bodies God gave them?” Jesus just looked at me.
“For the hypocrites,” he answered. “Like you.” Jesus had me pegged. Here I am, trying to grasp a beautiful concept, and he slips in a put-down.
“O.K.,” I said, “It’s too late for me. Too bad. I’m not losing any tears over it.”
“What’s too late for you?” he asked. “Are you telling me you’ve lost your virginity already?” We were twelve and ten at the time.
“Kinda,” I answered.
“Kind of? You’re kind of a virgin?”
“O.K., never mind. I’m still a virgin. O.K.? You caught me.”
Jesus just smiled. “Good,” he said, although I was determined to not be good about this if I ever got the chance. But Jesus taught me a wonderful thing that day. By taught me, I mean he showed me the way to look at virginity. Doesn’t mean I condoned it, but I understood it. Dare I say it? Virginity may be a beautiful thing, even for men. Jesus thought so.
“Mutual sexual consent between a man and a woman—what a gift to each other,” he said. And submission to each other, too. Think about the sex act,” he offered.
“Easily done,” I accepted. “I think about it all of the time.”
“The usual sex act,” he added, “not the kind you might want.”
“You mean the Missionary position, not the Chinese basket or that Scandinavian inverted helicopter ride technique.”
“Right,” he said. “We put our backs into our work. Combatants throw their backs into the competition. Our backs ward off the world. A man will turn around to face away from oncoming danger. His back is more padded and more protected than his front, so he feels more vulnerable presenting his soft belly and face to any exposure than he does when he turns his back to the world.”
“Also keeps the man anonymous, which isn’t a bad idea during a Roman occupation,” I added.
“That’s a good insight, Eddie. Our backs do keep us anonymous.”
“Yea, when I was a little kid—remember?—I slept on my belly, and my back kept the monsters away.”
“Like a shell,” Jesus said. “If you slept on your back, with your ‘soft’ side up, vulnerable to the world, you would have your nightmares.”
“Back to sex,” I reminded him.
“Back to sex,” he repeated.
“Never want to stop getting back to that,” I added.
“People get to be intimate front to front. Soft side to soft side. We get to face each other in physical love, offering each other our vulnerable sides. Physically, we give it up to each other and this submission is total. There’s no better way to translate a loving of the soul into a physical process.”
“Wow,” I said. “So you’re saying that if sex is such a gift to each other, because the submission to each other is such a gift, then virginity must be even more so.”
“A gift from God. And saving this total submission for the right person,” Jesus concluded, “brings back into focus the special beauty of waiting for ‘Mr. Right’ or ‘Miss Right.’”
Although my brain was breathless over the beauty of virginity, I knew my body would always want heavy breathing. “So where did God and Mom and you fit into all of this?” I asked. “Was God Mr. Right for Mom?”
“It was only fitting that the mother of the Son--” and he said Son like it wasn’t just someone’s kid—“this special mother of Man--” same emphasis, “totally submit, on behalf of all of us, to her special role. The beauty of using a virgin to give us a Redeemer is missed unless one thinks about the concept of virginity as it relates to the rest of us.”
“Oh,” I said, but he was losing me.
“Virginity is indeed valuable. And it is not sacred because of this particular commandment or that particular rule of morality.
“I’m thankful for that,” I said.
“It is sacred because totally submitting yourself to another is the greatest gift one can give. God did it for us. He showed us His soft side and He will continue to do it with my teachings and my life.”
“What teachings? What life?” I asked, this being long before Jesus had gone public. “You mean your carreer?”
“My life,” he said again. “You’ll see.” He paused for a moment, as if this sounded strange to him, too. “How the Father accomplished virgin birth,” he continued, “is not as important as why. The why is typical of the beauty He offers us in this gift we call life. How he created me is not as important as why. The why is typical of our being a part of Him.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“By the way, Eddie, what’s the Scandinavian inverted helicopter ride technique?”
“I made that up,” I answered.
“Oh, so it doesn’t exist,” he said.
“Not yet,” I promised. “But I think I’d like it to involve about four people.” He put his fingers into a couple of interlocking attempts, then laughed.
“Like you’re going to be able to get two women to hook up with you and another guy.”
“Who said anything about any other guys?”
One day, when Rex had gotten outside of his little fence of sticks around the yard, Jesus told me that it was time for Rex to be about his business, which I assumed was the usual little doggie business. But he never came back, and Jesus wasn’t even upset. I guess why he never came back was more important than how he got out through the fence. Rex, king of the dogs, right? I wondered if Rex would remain a virgin. Nah, he dug being a dog too much, and a dog’s life had a lot to offer. And if you dig smelling butts, virginity’s not going to be in the formula. You can quote me on that.
At younger ages than is typical today, sex was always a topic. Unlike today, we couldn’t get on the Internet and see real teens bearing it all. We could only imagine what lay under those heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps of cloth that women wore. All the kids were fixated on sex, but Jesus wouldn’t talk about it to anyone but me. Often he’d just let me rattle on, getting it all wrong.
Yea, we started early, but you have to remember that by the time I was fifteen, I was expected to be married. Did marrying a girl by fifteen mean heavy petting by nine? Not in ancient Palestine. We got French kissing, heavy petting, and penetration all at the same time. The good kids, anyway. I was intent on spreading out that continuum, except backwards, of course.
Once we were walking with a neighborhood kid, talking about—of all things—sex. We often just kind of went walking around, because there wasn’t much to do, actually. Nazareth was not exactly a desert town. There was a lot of green around, so we’d catch snakes and eat berries—stuff like that. And of course we’d walk everywhere fetchin’ stuff and doing errands.
And we’d talk about sex.
So there we were, walking and talking with this neighborhood kid. His name was Barabbas. Actually, it was bar-Abba, which meant son of his father, or—put another way—Junior. His family called him Junior. You can combine bar and Abba and call him Barabbas, but we knew him as Junior, too, which is what Barabbas meant.
He was this short kid, but really muscled and buff. He worked out a lot by hauling stuff, which was not an unusual chore back in those times. And he worked out a lot more probably because he was worried about his penis, and after listening to the type of stuff I would tell him about sex, it was no wonder.
But the guy was a big sissy. The other kids would taunt him because he was so short. He was the same age as Jesus, but even I was a head taller. No one knew how strong he was because the sleeves on our robes were so loose. So this one time, Junior, Jesus, and I were walking back from the market with a heavy load of flour, when this other kid—a cousin—we were all kind of cousins around town—came up to us and knocked a sack of flour out of Junior’s arms. The scoundrel’s name was Nicoret, son of Uncle Nicodemus. He was the town bully for everyone under the age of twelve and we didn’t much care for him.