steve howard's update of the new testament
BARBARALBA BIBLE

THE NEW NEW TESTAMENT

The Gospel According to Jesus H. Christ

 

chapter 04

We were sitting around with little interest in doing anything when Mikie suggested we go and see if we could pick up some loose gentile girls at the low rentals. Divorced mothers and tax collectors. Though we had been taught differently, what and who they were didn’t matter to us. It just meant it was asking for trouble at home if anyone should find out.

When we got to their little pleasant ghetto, our mission was obvious to them. Our intention went out before us. Luckily, no one minded. Even the boys were glad to see us. The Jew boys from families that lived in houses in the Jewish quarter. Slumming it.

We stayed all afternoon and into the night.

After a few visits, James and Andrew didn’t come back with us. I was surprised to find I was the boyfriend of Dinah and really enjoyed kissing Rachel and Clara. Clara was Timothy’s girl and she liked to flirt with me and kiss me to see if Timothy would do anything.

He didn’t. When Timothy wasn’t there, I played with Clara’s breasts. They were so fresh and firm. I could fondle them and forget the rest of the world. And she liked it.

It was all over after a few moons but it was a real good experience to have so much fun with all the gentiles.

I met Mary Helene a short while after that. She went to Synagogue with her family. Our families were distantly related. Which should have disturbed me. I was determined not to fall in love with a Jew. Stupid really. I was angry at the religion, not the people in it.

Mary Helene made that clear to me when she looked at me. She was still 12 and I thought maybe a bit too young. So we didn’t talk in the Synagogue. I pretended I was not interested in her. I was too involved with the elders, trying to get them to admit they were full of shit.

About a year later, I finally talked to her at a goat roast. Sin offering.

“Hi Jesus.”

“You show me love with your eyes.”

“Everyone shows you love.”

“Not like you do. Can you tell me your name.”

“My parents always call me Mary Helene. My friends call me Helene.”

“Have they arranged a marriage for you yet.”

Helene’s leg was touching mine. She smiled and kissed my cheeks and went to sit with her family. I went to mine.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she.”

“Who’s pretty.”

“Mary Helene. Her father has a very good job.”

“I don’t want to know about her father, Mother. I said hello to the girl because she said hello to me.”

Mom didn’t buy it. She laughed and found someone else to talk to. Mom wanted her boys to marry Jewish girls. And her girls to marry Jewish boys. Our ancestors could never make up their minds. And with Romans and Arabs and all other kinds of gentiles all around us, it just wasn’t working again with sticking to cousins.

After the old people had a few glasses of wine, the goat roast became a nice party. And even though I was amid so many self proclaimed Torah experts, I seldom left looking into Helene’s beauty. Her movements were natural like a beast of prey with a full stomach. Relaxed and beautiful. And relaxed in a way that made me feel as relaxed even though a part of me was anything else.

We danced together near the end of the feast. And I smelled her. I breathed in her hair and her hands told me she was confident in her love for me and I fell into her and married her to my heart.

I kept getting a hard on when we danced and had to relieve myself that night before I could sleep.

The next day, we went out of Nazareth and found a place to ourselves.

We talked along the way about our lack of faith in the laws of Moses.

“What I think, Helene, is that as long as our people are defenders of the sacred scriptures of bloody laws and bloody wars, there will be war. It is a book made to make fools think that dying in war at the age of 14 or 18 is honourable. It gives the soldier a good place in heaven. If he wins and doesn’t die in a war, he can rape and plunder.”

“It’s not a very nice picture.”

“No. No it’s worse than that, Helene. The priests and their warlords are making our lives hell. And instead of getting killed at 18, a man could do anything else. The Warlords, with all their various titles and their Priests and Sadducees are the only winners of war. Helene, when one opens their eyes and sees it, it doesn’t go away. It is like being awake in someone’s dream. It is very frustrating. It seems so wrong and impossible to change.”

“I don’t know, my sweet Jesus. But I believe if anyone can make a difference, you can. I see how people love you. I have seen you and John conspiring. It is a pretty thing to watch.”

“No one will believe us though. They are still asleep and they think we are just crazy teenagers.”

“I believe you. Your friends do. And I think, even though most people won’t admit it, they know things could be better here. We are not so blind as to not know that we are slaves. Even if we are fortunate slaves.”

“I love you, Helene.”

“I know you do.”

She didn’t let me think about anything after that but her. I felt ageless, as if I had come from forever and had always longed for love. That I would always feel at home in Helene’s touch.

It was forbidden what we did. By dead ancestors who had no understanding for the magic in the life that was ours. To embrace and to commune.

Then evening came and I had to take Helene home.

I didn’t wash that night. I wanted to smell the scents of her that lingered and mixed with my own not at all modest sent.

I felt like an animal. I imagined I could understand my world. The canine souls and feline souls showed themselves to me. They expected something from me.

Everyone showed me love and even my dreams told me I must fight. Even impressions of moths attacking me when my faith in my own capability faltered reminded me that I was not to give in to the authority.

My Jewish family believed I was supposed to be a King of a tribe I was only related to through my raped mother. I knew that even if my father Joseph had been my real father it was still a big illusion. The king game was just a mean game. A myopic ego trip. It was like they never got out of the sand box. Before the God that John and I wanted to propagate, I could not play the ruling king of a kingdom of servants game.

“There will be synagogues long after you’re dead.”

One of the Sadducees told me that. And I knew he was right. John had told me the same thing. It was next to impossible to stop such a camel caravan.

But I had the strangest feeling that the rest of life would help me if I just walked through my fears and let the animal in me help me listen and hear. It wasn’t a war that John and I had to fight. There were all the animals that did not believe in the holy kingdoms of mad kings.

Though some days it seemed like my punishment for being a bastard son, I was really happy to be awake. I could see that the life around me was real.

What I couldn’t understand was why the man made world around me seemed to persist in a dream.


chapter 05

“Humans are like a big zit. The common poor people are the puss. The priests and Sadducees are the dirt that the puss is trying to push away from the skin. The skin is God. Kings are just part of the dirt.”

“Not bad, Jesus. But zits are a little like ass holes. We don’t talk about them. Not when speaking publicly.”

“Why not.”

“Moses probably said don’t talk about zits or assholes.”

“I like assholes.”

“They certainly are practical for excreting the food our bodies didn’t metabolize.”

“I’d like to go to university, John. I don’t think my father will pay for me to go to Baghdad. How the hell did you get accepted there.”

“Since the opening of the university, I had the highest score on the entrance exam.”

“Bloody hell, I am impressed. Why have you told no one.”

“No one asked.”

“You modesty is shocking. I’m a lucky guy to have you as a brother.”

“You underestimate yourself, Jesus. You will bloom into a king of kings. It is already in you.”

“I don’t feel it.”

“You don’t know what it is not to be you. You can only know what it is for others to know you.”

“Thanks, John.”

“I’ve read many book, Jesus. If you are serious about taking on the system you need to know as many sides of it as you can. Books don’t tell us everything but they tell us much and they are great training for the mind.”

“I know, and I will catch up to you in a few years.”

“I’m sure you will blow by me. Just keep reading.”

I would have loved to go to Baghdad with John but I simply wasn’t ready. And it was far away from Galilee. Dad had many connections in Cairo. After I had brought my reading up to speed, I passed the entrance exam and was accepted for a two-year course. My major was theology. Know you enemy. Legend and Myth and Eastern Religion made up the balance.

It was a shock to my system, being away from home, seeing very little of Helene. I had had it too easy in school and had to still learn how to learn and concentrate when reading and studying. It was a new dimension of my mind.

It didn’t take too long. There were more brilliant thinkers than I had imagined in my sheltered Torah life. I was soon reading because I loved venturing into the minds of the great writers.

After my two years in Cairo, I received a scholarship and a part time teaching position at the University of Istanbul. Helene moved to Istanbul to study as well. She concentrated on the arts. Dancing was her favorite course. She studied theater. We acted out many of the plays in our apartment.

After two years of studies, I worked full time as a teacher for two years. And took a few courses in architecture and music history. It was hard work but I felt like I was on a permanent vacation. It was great not being in Israel with all my oppressed relatives. Rome oppressed them less than their old silly religion. Being away from that was very good for me. It gave me my wings.

“Helene, I think I am in heaven.”

“You are. And we are going to take a few days off.”

“Off what.”

“No university the next few days.”

“Is there life outside the university.”

“Most of life never gets to see a university.”

“That’s a shame, at least for the human part of life.”

“You don’t need to go to university to plow a field and that is something that always has to be done.”

We decided to go up to Sinnap’s house on the lake. She had invited us several times and drawn us a map and told us where to get a boat and how long it took. And just do it and don’t plan it. Whenever she wasn’t at the university she was there.

We took a boat along the Küre Daglart coast and came to the large yet modest estate. Sinnap saw us walking along the water and came running out to meet us.

“Jesus, Helene, what a wonderful surprise. And what luck that you come today. My husband and parents are in Athina till next week.”

Sinnap’s family was very conservative but Sinnap wasn’t and enjoyed being naked and especially enjoyed sharing her bed with us. It wasn’t the first time. She had come to our apartment under the pretence of studying with me or working on a project. And not left till the next morning. We didn’t always have sex but we always slept together. Enjoying the tough of one another like any other pack of monkeys would.

If my mother knew, she would lay an egg.

We decided to stay the week. It was too beautiful to only spend a few days. It was heaven to wake up slowly in the morning. Not care how much time before the next event. Go for a swim before breakfast on the terrace.

On the third day, we got up early and sailed with Sinnap’s boat to Sinop. Helene and I pretended to be her personal servants and she was someone important. Which really she was.

Personal servants were preferred over slaves. It showed more dignity.

We had a wonderful meal with many local vegetables and local chickens. With imported spices and local spices. They were known around the lake for their chicken.

Helene had the fish. Local as well. From the brother, the other brother of the owner of the Inn.

We stayed the night in a small room overlooking the lake. We made love under the laughing moon.

“You know, sometimes I think almost anything could be possible. We just haven’t seen it yet.”

“From what I know of you, Jesus, we will see it soon.”


chapter 06

Then we took the boat that changed our lives. Rome wanted me in their university. Helene didn’t get out of bed for 40 days. I thought her soul had left her. Or stayed behind.

My contract was for a minimum of three years. I thought about sending Helene back to Galilee. I thought about going with her to Galilee even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. Other than go straight to hell.

I couldn’t go to Galilee and Helene knew that if I wanted to make a difference in the world of the blind, I would not pass up a chance to be in the heart of the ruling Empire.

The magistrate told me to take Helene to his sister’s place in the Toscana. I could use the time to study and prepare for my Latin course and Helene, he assured me, would come back to life in the quiet gentle hills. Far away from the noise of the city.

And she did. She opened up like a flower.

We were back in heaven and Helene was no longer having monthly periods. We weren’t so ignorant as to not understand how it had happened but it still came as a surprise. We had stopped being careful since I had a teaching job in Istanbul and we weren’t certain if I couldn’t bare children or she couldn’t. Both beliefs had turned out to be false. Like it so often is with beliefs.

Our hosts in the Toscana were John Camus and Mary. They had two children: Paulo, who was 6 and Malinda, who was seven and a half but would soon be 12. There were 2 really big dogs, Rolax and Borus. They both moved very slowly. John Camus had been a lawyer for the Roman senate until he couldn’t take Rome anymore. He moved with his girlfriend and their two children to an old stone house with a stall where they kept a few goats and sheep. They had a fenced off area with chickens.

I felt at home.

“My ancestors where almost all sheep herders or soldiers.”

“I come from a family of city and village folk.”

“I was born in Bethlehem but we moved to Cairo shortly after my birth. After Cairo we were in Nazareth. After a few more brothers and sisters were born, dad set up his dream business in Nazareth.”

“What’s your dad do.”

“Furniture. He has a company in Cairo that does a very large volume. In Nazareth he does personal designs and room concepts and makes almost as much money working half as much. It was the best thing to happen to our family. He slowed down a little every year.”

“So he sent you to university to become a professor.”

“He paid my first two years in Cairo. In Istanbul I worked part time and had a full scholarship.”

“And now you are a professor in the most important university in the world.”

“It certainly has that reputation.”

It was good. Rome had stolen most of their culture and unlike my ancestors they didn’t burn all of it. They mixed it into what they had.

Much of it was from the Greeks and there they plundered the beginning of a direction in thinking. The more I learned, the more I realized there was much too much we didn’t know. The sum of what we didn’t know overwhelmed the sum of all the great minds that ever were and as far as I could tell, it would be like that a long time.

It was almost terrifying. Without the confinements of God and Law there simply seemed to be no limits to uncertainty.

John Camus looked at me as if he had come to a conclusion.

“What do you think, Jesus.”

“That the road ahead of us is longer than the road behind us.”

“Well, I say we better eat to prepare for the big journey. And we gotta feed the little one. Do you have a name yet.”

“No, we want to see if it comes to us.”

“You sound like a farmer. Let me show you my shop before we prepare dinner.”

John Camus took me to his glass shop. Doors and windows and lamps in stained glass and lead.

“I don’t make much money but I’m also not dead from working too hard. The sooner you learn to slow down and enjoy life, the more rewards life gives you. The best thing I ever did, besides having kids with Mary, was drop my life in Rome and come out here.”

“It certainly is beautiful.”

“Stay for a while. We’ll play a game of chess and talk about Rome and it’s madness.”

“I’d love to John Camus, but I have a Latin exam in four days and a seminar to give in six and someone is taking my classes as long as I’m here. And I’ve just started my job. Otherwise, I’d stay here with Helene and help you make windows till the baby comes.”

“Jesus, Jesus. You must learn to relax.”

“When I’m 36, I’ll relax. For a few days at least.”

“Let Helene stay for a few moons.”

I thought about the idea for a second to see if I could find any reason that was not too selfish to decline the offer.

“It is a good idea. It may be good for me to miss her and get settled into the university.”

I left the next morning, the sixth day, and left Helene in paradise and went back to a place with heaven and hell beating at one another. I went out the first few nights until I got used to my rooms, our rooms, without Helene.

Rome bored me. It was like a circus all the time. Always loud. Sometimes horrible smells attacked me in the streets. There was much going on but nothing happening. It was destined to go the way of the Empires before it.

After having seen a little of Rome on my own, the magistrate took me to an afternoon event at the coliseum. To take in a little culture. See something of the grandeur of Rome. We had good seats. We could see the high-ranking officials in all their royal garb. They, of course, couldn’t see me, the unsung King of the Jews. Though, really, if it were to be a Jewish King that was to be King of the Jews, it would have to be my brother James, the first son of my dad. I was just another bastard child of a not so high-ranking small time dictator. Technically, I was in line for nothing. Which was fine with me. I had no intention to be a Jew. Or their King. Kings were a curse as was religion.

I watched and saw apes with metal and leather instead of fur. Apes that looked like humans, all dressed up in different armor. All with weapons of steel. And they killed each other while 40,000 sun-drunk Romans cheered along. I sat dumbfounded wondering about the question of civilization. I saw a mad species of animal and I was sitting among them and could not see how it had come to such a state of madness. What had gone wrong for us to end up in such an obvious travesty. If their had been a God responsible for our mad theater, that God was insane.

“You don’t like it too much.”

“What. Sorry, no. In fact, I was just thinking that if it was a God that created us, I would like to have a word or two with him.”

“The only gods responsible for this are sitting there in their finery grinning like they have something hidden in their asses. Jesus, don’t ever be sorry. We will simply get up and leave. I am pleased that you don’t like it. You are the first I have brought here that has told me so. They call us civilized. And this is our entertainment. They cleared an area of housing holding over a thousand people, and don’t ask me how much stolen wealth they threw at the monster structure to hold 40,000 fools. It’s bloody frightening.”

“Well, shit, I’m glad to hear you think so.”

We got up and left in the middle of one of the bloody games. No one took notice of us.

We found a cafe and talked a mix of politics, philosophy, theology, sex and astronomy.

“You are a God send, Jesus Christ. I have been waiting for someone like you since I started teaching in the university.”

“For someone like me.”

“I’ve been watching you. I can see how you look at the world.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about but a friend of mine told me the same thing.”

“Are you Jewish or Palestinian.”

“If you promise to try to not tell anyone, I’m half Roman.”

“Many people are Roman.”

“He was as Roman as they get.”

“Oh, you are a first son.”

“Of a small minded tyrant.”

It seemed like an eternity before I finally traveled back north to the Toscana to be with Helene.

“Helene. You are an angel.”

She put her arms around me and kissed me and I knew I wanted her back in Rome. We would have to get out to the Middle Sea on my days off. And I would have to take them. I was about to be a dad. I’d work like a sensible man. As little as possible.


jesus chapters 07 - 09