Lucifer's True History of Everything
Jan 19, 07 02:43 PM
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True Life of Jesus, cont.
"He is risen!" (1 April, 31 CE): Easter Sunday.
No sooner had Gabriel spoken the words, "He is risen," than the entire holy land was hit with a "violent earthquake," bigger than Good Friday's – something like 8.6 on the Richter scale (Matt. 28:2). The two women sat down, to ride it out. Jesus' mother was not amused. As the ground jiggled beneath her, she kept saying, "Son, Son, please stop!"
From Galilee to the Sinai Peninsula, for the second time in two days, stone buildings collapsed in rubble.
Everyone who had been following Jesus' career knew about the Crucifixion. Everyone in Judaea felt the Friday afternoon and the Sunday morning earthquakes. But very few people put two and two together, to realise that God might be ticked off about something.
Unluckily, Jesus' tomb during the earthquake failed to snap open like a walnut. The stone door of the crypt remained stubbornly unmoved. That is because Caiaphas's people had really overdone it with the tar and bitumen, which had the effect of cushioning the tomb and its door from the seismic activity.
Rather than send another shaker, Gabriel out of consideration for the two Marys ripped open the sealed door himself, with his own two hands, and sat down on it (Matt. 28:3).
"Oh, my!" said Mary Magdalene. "What strength!" Mary uncorked her bottle of nard.
Gabriel saw it coming. He suddenly rose fifteen feet in the air, and hovered. Magdalene dropped the alabaster to her side. She pouted.
So did Gabriel. His sudden ascent – this incident is not in the gospels, but it's true – tore a rip in his white raiment, which had gotten partly stuck to the tar on the stone, right where he was sitting. Still hovering, Gabriel reached around and pulled at the cloth. He noticed the tar stains, and the torn fabric, and scowled.
I had to laugh: my old friend Gabriel has never uttered any word worse than "Golly" in his entire life. But for that one moment, Gabriel the archangel – Yahveh's own errand-boy, Mr. Goody Two-Shoes – came that close to blurting out the p-word ("Peresh!" Hebrew for shit). The p-word was right on the tip of Gabriel's tongue, I swear to God. Maybe even the z-word. But he caught himself.
Regaining his composure, Gabriel invited the women to peek inside. So they did that. What they saw, however, surprised them even more than the earthquake had done: the tomb was already vacant. Jesus was not even in there! The women were puzzled.
"How did his body, like, escape before you unsealed the door?" asked Mary Magdalene of the archangel. "Do we have the correct address?" She looked again at the slip of paper on which Joe had written the directions (Matt. 28:4).
Gabriel rolled his eyes toward Heaven, amazed that Earth women, even these two, could be so dim in their understanding of organic chemistry. "It's a spiritual mystery," he said, somewhat impatiently.
Meanwhile, the superstitious Temple guards had dropped their swords and run away, helter-skelter, not just because of the violent earthquake, but because they thought they had just seen a hovering angel in mostly snow-white raiment, and a reformed prostitute, and a very happy middle-aged virgin – which were three marvels you almost never saw in Israel, in those days.
Now when the Jewish priests heard this story of the archangel and the missing corpse, they summoned the guards to appear before Caiaphas, who paid the guards "a lot of money" to go around saying that Jesus' body was actually "removed during the night, as they slept, or maybe even the night before." Which was not strictly a lie if they said it in that exact way, using the passive voice (because it was Jesus, of course, who removed himself during the night, unassisted). Caiaphas further commanded the soldiers to keep the earthquake a secret. So the guards did as the Chief Priest commanded, which is how that whole "someone came by night and carried away the body" story got going (Matt. 28:11-15).
Gabriel, meanwhile, told the two women to hurry back to Bethany and inform the Eleven disciples that the tomb was empty. So Jesus' mother hurried off to do that, but then got sidetracked (Matt. 28:5-7).
Half an hour later, Magdalene returned to the tomb with Salome and Mary Alphaeus, whom she met on the way, coming the other direction. Mary Alphaeus (the widowed mother of the three Ben-Alphaeus boys) had moved to Bethlehem after Jesus cursed her own hometown of Capernaum; where she became friends with Salome, the Virgin Mary's older sister, a Bethlehem midwife (Matt. 11:21). So Magdalene turned around, and returned with these two to the cemetery; but she did not tell the other two women that Jesus' tomb was now guarded by a man in shining white raiment who was not Jesus. She wanted it to be a surprise (Mark 16:1).
They were surprised, all right. When the three women arrived at the tomb, about a quarter to eight, the sun was coming up and the stone door was, of course, moved aside. The guards were gone. The women saw no one. Gabriel was inside the vault, quietly waiting for more visitors, no longer hovering but sitting, to conceal the tar-stains and the rip.
The widow Alphaeus and Jesus' Aunt Salome poked their heads inside the crypt, somewhat tentatively. Holding hands, they stepped over the tar, and tiptoed inside. Gabriel then smiled gently and said, "Hark – "
As soon as the two women realised that there was a living, breathing man inside the tomb, a phantom in shining white raiment who was not Jesus, and when Gabriel said "Hark..." – well, let me tell you a little secret. Those two gals did not just hark. They screamed! and ran! They ran out of that tomb and away from Gabriel like two grandmas on the run from a large Italian purse-snatcher, and they did not slow down until they were out the cemetery gate and had turned left, and I lost sight of them (Mark 16:2-7).
That frightful experience is why Salome and the widow, Mary Alphaeus, could never talk about the Resurrection after that – it was just too spooky.
Mark's gospel ends there:
Trembling and bewildered, the two women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Amen. (Mark 16:8)
But the three later Gospels (CE 70-90), pick up the narrative where John Mark left off, which is how we know that Mary Magdalene just laughed and laughed, till the tears were streaming down her cheeks. Then she tiptoed inside the tomb, to have a personal chat with Gabriel.
– L.
Posted by Lucifer at 02:43 PM
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