True Life of Jesus (cont.)
As far as I could see, the Son of God actually enjoyed his Earth years pretty well, save for that one painfully unnecessary, incredibly masochistic, last weekend in Jerusalem. He accomplished his main objective, which was to save people from their sins; and he should be praised for that.
What Jesus didn't totally realise, of course, until maybe near the end, is that other people's sins are usually the ones you need to be saved from. I would rather be saved from the sins of a neighbour – or from those of a criminal or a politician – than from my own sins, any day of the week. My own sins rarely give me any trouble.
Here, however, is a statistic that may surprise you: Jesus during his thirty-year sojourn on Earth made 33% more friends than has been widely reported. As documented in the Gospels, Jesus accumulated not twelve, but sixteen, male disciples – most of whom were self-motivated, spiritually-curious Jewish tradesmen; and all of whom called Jesus by the affectionate nickname, "Rabboni" (Aramaic for Teacher); eleven of whom eventually graduated from "disciple" school to become full-fledged "apostles" (John 6:66).
For the edification of my readers, I have searched Scripture and early Christian literature for marriage and burial records, travel journals, work history, and what-have-you, for each of the sixteen original disciples. I am now prepared to share with you the fruits of my research concerning these sixteen spiritual giants. (If we have time, I may even throw in a few true anecdotes from my own First-Century CE diary. But if I should need to stray from holy Scripture, I'll give you a heads-up first.)
The Sixteen Disciples
(1, 2.) Simon Peter and Andrew Bar-Jona, of Bethsaida. Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew, sons of Jona the Fishmonger, were the first men whom Jesus invited to become disciples: "Follow me," he said to them, "and I will make you fishers for men."
Thunk! The two brothers dropped their nets (and— thunk!—their father). They chose to follow Jesus (Matt 4:14-20).
Old Jona the Fishmonger protested that he could not spare his two sons, that their departure would kill him;
Jesus said, "Woe unto you!" (Matt. 8:21). A week later, the man was dead.
Now, as you may remember, until Jesus came along and said, “Leave home, and follow me!” Simon and Andrew had a complicated family situation (although it was actually quite biblical).
Simon was just 17 years old when his mother died, and Andrew, 14. Only a few weeks after their mother was buried, their father, Jona the Fishmonger, married Joanna. That old Bar-Jonas should marry Joanna (his wife's younger sister) was not, in itself, a problem—this marriage of a woman to her brother-in-law was a union blessed by God, let Prince Hamlet say what he may—but it left Andrew feeling depressed and asking himself some pretty difficult questions (Deut. 25:5-10).
Thus it came to pass that Aunt Joanna and Cousin Mary—it's hard to keep all of those New Testament Marys straight, so let's call this one “Maria”—joined the three Bar-Jona men in their cramped, one-room stone house in the little fishing village of Bethsaida (Mark 1:29-31).
After that, Simon and Maria became quite close: so close, that Peter, at age 18, married her, and conceived a child by her, although not in that order.
It may surprise you that Simon married his stepsister. That’s because you don’t read the Bible. God has commanded Bible heroes ever since Creation—from Abel through Zacharias, plus the Twelve disciples—to wed "consanguineously," or not at all – which is a fancy biblical way of saying, "Thou shalt take to wife at least one woman from the same precise gene pool as thyself." In the generations after Adam and Eve (whose sons and daughters were virtuous, though not perfect—the parties those kids used to have!), the best-case scenario was that of the righteous man who married his half-sister (q.v., Abraham); or, if a half-sister was unavailable, a cousin (q.v., Isaac, Jacob, Esau), niece (q.v., Nahor), or widowed daughter-in-law (q.v., Judah).
Peter had no half-sisters, which is why he settled for his step-sister, Maria, who was also his first cousin. And it seemed, at first, a good match, a marriage made in heaven—except, of course, that Peter and Maria took that little jumpstart on conjugal relations, which was not so totally good; although Peter, while in the throes of those first few, reprehensible, acts of fornication, thought to himself, "Wow! this is good"
(Forgive him: in those days, he was just a teenager, and not a Christian one. Christianity came several years later.)
Joanna was now Simon Peter's aunt / mother / mother-in-law. Maria was his cousin / sister / wife. Andrew was no longer just “little brother,” but a brother-in-law, and a nephew to Simon’s own mother—all of which (although it made perfectly good sense, Scripturally speaking), left poor Andrew speechless.
Five months after the wedding, Maria gave birth to Simon Peter's firstborn son, a babe whom old Grandpa Jona the Fishmonger named "John Mark," and whom the Bethsaida neighbours called "Tsaphaphtsaphar bar-Simon" ("Simon’s Earlybird") (1 Peter 5:13, Acts 12:12).
Now when Jesus began his ministry, he told Andrew and Simon to forsake their father, and their aunt-mother, and Simon’s sister-cousin-wife, and the child (John-Mark), and to become disciples (Luke 14:26). So Peter and Andrew left home, and followed Christ—which made Christ happy, but it killed the heart of their old dad. Fine. Jesus then forbade the Bar-Jona boys to attend their father's funeral (Luke 9:59-62).
Maria was furious with Simon for having quit his day job in order to run around with an itinerant preacher. But when Simon left her with the chore of burying the old fishmonger his father, that was the last straw: Maria packed her bags and moved down to Tiberias, on the south shore, taking baby John Mark with her.
It was not an isolated incident: one reason that the Pharisees disliked Jesus is that, everywhere the Rabboni went, the Jewish nuclear family just kind of fell apart.
Simon had no regrets. And that’s because Maria, after John Mark was born, had turned into quite the little Galilaean shrew. She was furious about something or other, almost all of the time; which is why Simon Peter—a humble fisherman who was destined to become the world’s first Pope—used to spend so much of time out on the lake, on his fishingboat (Prov. 21:9, 25:24, 27:15).
(Simon Bar-Jona’s Bethsaida neighbours had a joke about that: they called him, "Barjonim" – the outdoorsman. And I won’t even tell you what they called Maria, but if you’ve read about Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, or about Martha Stuart, you can probably guess.)
One big plus of Maria's trial separation was that her absence, and the old man's death, gave Jesus a place to stay when he visited Bethsaida. The tiny stone bungalo had in it four cots: one for the Rabboni (Jesus); one for Simon’s aunt / mother / mother-in-law (Joanna); one for Simon himself; and one for Andrew– the only problem being, that when Jesus first returned to Bethsaida, lazy Aunt Joanna languished on her cot till noon, contentedly reading Ovid's Art of Love. (Joanna had got hooked on erotic poetry after a too-close reading of the Song of Solomon.) But when Jesus found out what was going on, he commanded the widow Joanna to put down the book, and to get out of bed, and cook dinner (Mark 1:29-39).
That evening, while Joanna did up the dishes, Jesus led Andrew and Simon Peter down to the dock, where he asked them one of his famously incrutable Aramaic riddles (recorded, some years later, by St. Jerome) about “Ovid bar-Jona” (How is Ovid verily the child of Jonah?). When Simon and Andrew could not guess the right answer, Jesus pulled Joanna’s Ovid from out of his toga, and tossed it into the Sea of Galilee, and said: “Fish food!” (Matt. 8:14-15)—which shows that Jesus really did have a sense of humor, if you caught him at the right moment.
Jesus also said to Joanna, “Woe unto you!”—and I'll say this for her, the took the message to heart: Joanna that very day renounced The Art of Love and became a female disciple. As a reward, Jesus introduced her to Mr. Chuza, a steward in the palace of Herod the tetrarch. Chuza asked the widow to marry him. She accepted. And Joanna thereafter became one of the Lord's most generous financial backers (Luke 8:3).
Here is something they don't tell you in church, but it's right there in your Bible, and it’s true: Jesus throughout his ministry depended for his financial support on the generosity of women, not just from Joanna Chuza but from the two famous prostitutes, Susanna (Luke's mother), and Mary Magdalene (whom you already know about); with additional support coming from "various other women whom Jesus had cured of unclean spirits and other such infirmities" (Luke 4:10)—“other infirmities” here denoting such work-related injuries as the crabs, or gonorrhea, or your common fever blister.
("In the kingdom of Heaven," said Jesus to the Twelve, "my women supporters will not work outside the home.”
“Yes, but in the meantime," said Judas—he was the Lord’s treasurer, and a lazy skunk—“someone must pay the bills.”)
Three years later, after Jesus died on the cross, Peter's estranged wife, Maria (with their child, John Mark), moved back into the Bethsaida homestead. Luckily, she and Simon Peter never resumed conjugal relations (The Lord had only one inviolable law for his apostles: no two-person sex) – so that now, with four residents (Maria, Simon Peter, John Mark; and Andrew), the little house still had the exact right number of beds in it (four), and there was still no sex going on in any one of them (1 Cor. 9:5). And if that's not proof of God's providential design for a Christian household, then I don't know what is.
– L.
(Tomorrow: more on the life of Saint Peter, the world’s first Pope!)
