Bob Shakespeare

Lucifer's True History of Everything

Sep 18, 06 05:48 PM

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The True Life of Jesus, cont.

The closest that God the Father, God the Son, God the holy Ghost, the Mother of God, and I ever came to a global reunion was in March, 28 CE (coincidentally, on the 4,028th anniversary of the Big Bang), when the four of us came together very briefly, beside the Jordan River, for a baptismal service led by John the Baptist.

First, let me say a few words in loving memory of John the Baptist. As I remember him, John was an odd fellow, and quite literally dirt-poor. He was not one of these evangelists who strut to the pulpit in a dry-cleaned powder-blue $3000 Armani suit and shiny $500 Gucci shoes, with an $80 calfskin Zondervan NIV Study Bible tucked under their arm. In physical appearance, John the Baptist's clothing and rhetoric better resembled that of the well-known American hermit, Theodore J. Kaczynski, than that of someone like Rev. Kenneth Copeland or the Rev. Billy Graham.

Even as a young man, John was not a flashy dresser. To cover himself he wore only a tattered camelskin and no underwear. Some people said that his raiment smelled worse than a dead camel, but that's what it was, a dead camel, and the holy Ghost will back me up on that (Matt. 3:4). The camel hair was terribly itchy, and hard to distinguish from his own. Also, quite dirty. There was an old joke among the Jews: "Why does John the Baptist have such dirty fingernails?" And the correct answer was: "From scratching himself."

I remember feeling very badly when Herod the Tetrarch arrested John, and then cut off his head and served it on a platter, just to please Queen Herodias. I never saw John's head after that. Saint Jerome – who never wrote anything about anybody that was not either kind, true, or necessary – reports that Herodias kept John's severed head in her bedchamber; and that she periodically lifted the silver lid, and stabbed a knife into John's open and rotting mouth, again and again, to satisfy her feminine fury. I'm not sure why Queen Herodias should do anything quite so weird; but perhaps she was still annoyed with John's hugely popular and widely quoted "Sex Sermon," which contained some edgy political criticism, as when the Baptist repeatedly referred to Queen Herodias as "Herod's filthy incestuous whore" (Mark 6:14-29).

Until the arrest, John the Baptist was a dynamic speaker, and well admired by everyone except by the particular people whom he condemned in his sermons, such as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, lawyers, scribes, women, priests, homosexuals, money-lenders, the Romans, Africans, Queen Herodias, Belial, and Beelzebub.

Okay, me too. Self-righteous Mr. Camelskin Man also had a few unkind words to say about yours truly. But strangely, I did not resent it. I could have sat there on the banks of the Jordan and listened to John the Baptist condemn me for hours on end – if I had wanted to. More often, I would arrive late and leave early; but when John was done railing against sin and had come to the final "Amen," I was often the first one in the audience to offer him a standing ovation. To this day, I wish I had John the Baptist's sermons on tape. For entertaining rant, the Baptist was hard to beat. I'd say he was right up there with the Rev. Billy Sunday, Anne Coulter, and Mussolini.

In terms of his overall viewing audience, John the Baptist was bigger than Jesus. For his time he was probably even bigger than the hit TV series, Fear Factor, and for one of the same reasons: John had a peculiar diet: locusts dipped in wild honey. Sometimes he ate live ones. People from all over Judaea came to see him do it. "Better to eat bugs and enter the kingdom of Heaven," he preached, "than to eat bacon and go to Hell, where the worms gnaw your flesh and where the fire is not quenched; for until Heaven and Earth pass away, no [Mosaic] Law shall perish" (Matt. 3:4-6). To prove his point, John would take a squirming locust, dip it in honey, bite off its head, and then pop the entire bug into his mouth, and chew it, and swallow. I once saw the Baptist perform this feat at least forty times in the course of a single sermon; and he said that every one of those bugs represented a Pharisee or a Sadducee, come Judgment Day.

John also handled live poisonous snakes, which he used for a popular sermon called "Ye Brood of Vipers!" (Matt. 3:7, Mark 16:18). He did not eat them, or even bite off their heads – but he would not have been afraid to do it. He bit the heads off the locusts and not from vipers because a locust is kosher and a snake is not.

Not until John the Baptist came along, seconded by Jesus, did the Trinity reveal to the Jews for the first time that there is a real place called Hell where all non-Christians will go, following the resurrection and the Last Judgment; nor did the Jews realise that most of them will go there, after death, to suffer for all eternity. The Jews knew that Yahveh is a just God, an angry God. They knew that Yahveh is entitled to hurt people who disobey His commandments. And they knew that whenever Yahveh needs to inflict human suffering, the Jews are usually His chosen people. But the curses in the Old Testament (on nearly every page) pertain to life here on Earth: "'Behold, I will pull your skirt up over your head, to shame you,' saith the LORD" (Nah. 3:6); or: "You shall eat the flesh of your own sons, and the flesh of your daughters" (Lev. 26:29); or: "Thus saith the LORD, 'Behold, I will corrupt your sperm and smear a turd on your faces'" (Mal. 2:3); or: "The LORD will afflict you with the botch of Egypt, and with hemorrhoids, and with festering scabs and the itch, from which you cannot be cured" (Deut. 28:27): you know, that sort of thing – scary, but not eternal. Then came John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah, with a new, updated gospel, saying: "Behold, you think it's bad now? Just wait until you're dead! Because your suffering in Hell will combine every curse in the Old Testament, for ever and ever!"

Needless to say, those first-century sermons about Hell took biblical theology down to a whole new level. Some Jews, who thought Yahveh had already been a little too hard on them, just could not accept it. Enough, already! That's what some of the Jews said when John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah spoke of eternal damnation, which was every day of the week. But that is exactly why Jesus came to Earth: so that he could give the Jews a get-out-of-Hell-free card, if they would only accept it.

Which, unfortunately, they didn't.

– L.

Lucifer's True History of Everything

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