Just finished Christopher Moore's
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.
It's a humorous account of the 'missing thirty years' of Jesus' (Joshua in this novel) life told by Joshua's childhood buddy 'Levi who was called Biff.'
The story recounts Joshua's efforts to discover himself and to learn what his role the Messiah really is. A good portion of the book follows Joshua and Biff on their sojourns as they seek the three Magi in the Far East, before their inevitable return to Judea.
Pretty well written and amusing - I laughed out a loud several times - the humor is somewhere between Monty Python's Life of Brian and a Dave Barry piece; that is, there is a lot of fairly off-color Pythonesque lampooning of Christianity and Judaism, but sometimes the jokes were a bit
too cute - e.g. Biff's invention of the martial art "Jew-do" during his and Joshua's stay in a monastery.
A couple quick examples of the humor:
Lamb:The Gospel According to Biff writes:
"Josh, faking demonic possession is like a mustard seed." I said.
"How is it like a mustard seed?"
"You don't know, do you? Doesn't seem at all like a mustard seed, does it? Now you see how we all feel when you liken things unto a mustard seed? Huh?"
and
ibid writes:
"Well most of what we learned from the rabbis is not exactly accurate. For instance, you know that part right after Lot's wife gets turned to stone and then his daughters get drunk and fornicate with him?"
"Right," said Joshua, "after Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed."
"Well, that's not as bad as it sounds."
"But fornication is a sin, and fornication with your daughters, well, that's a, I don't know, that's a double-dog sin."
"Yeah, but if you put that aside for a second, and you just focus on the two young girls aspect of it, it's not nearly as bad as it sounds initially."
But possibly my favorite part was when Joshua heals two blind men, Abel and Crustus, on the outskirts of the Judean desert:
ibid writes:
The old guys sort of looked around, saying nothing.
"Tell me what you see," Joshua said.
The blind men looked at each other.
"Something wrong?" Joshua asked. "You can see can't you?"
"Well yeah," said Abel, "but I thought there'd be more color."
"Yeah," said Crustus, "it's kind of dull."
I stepped up. "You're on the edge of the Judean desert, one of the most lifeless, desolate, hostile places on earth, what did you expect?"
"I don't know." Crustus shrugged. "More."
"Yeah, more," said Abel. "What's color is that?"
"That's brown."
"How about that one?"
"That would be brown as well."
"That color over there? Right there?"
"Brown."
"You're sure that's not mauve?"
"Nope, brown."
"And-"
"Brown," I said.
This message has been edited by custard, 02-26-2005 02:55 AM
This message has been edited by custard, 02-26-2005 02:58 AM
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