LAMB

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, is A’s favorite contemporary novel and I’ve been promising to read it forever. Luckily for our household harmony, I loved it. You should really just read the book, instead of listening to me try to explain why I loved it, but here goes: It begins with an additional apostle named “Levi who is called Biff” being raised from the dead by an angel and locked in a hotel room in modern-day St. Louis to write his gospel, and it just gets better from there. Some of the humor is a little crude (really, I would have been fine with fewer bestiality jokes), but then, the narrator, Biff, is a pretty crude guy, which is kind of the point—that Jesus (or Joshua, as he’s called) needs an average Joe to look out for him in the human world and keep him grounded. What’s so great is that the book walks a fine line very well—it’s awfully funny and irreverent and sometimes downright dirty, but not offensive. There’s never any doubt in it that Josh is the Messiah, son of God, performing miracles, etc. He’s just got a little more of a sense of humor (my favorite part is when he walks on water and then convinces Peter to do it too, and Peter walks out from the boat and is like, “Hey guys, look at me—” and then promptly falls in, and Josh cracks up and says, “Man, I can’t believe you fell for that!” And then he says, “Peter, you’re as dumb as a box of rocks. But you have a lot of faith. On this box of rocks I will build my church.”). It’s a very smart and well-researched book—like all good satire, the more you know about the original source, the funnier it is. (In that respect, it reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which combines ridiculous jokes with more detail about the sociopolitical conditions of Jesus’s life than you get in most Sunday School classes and actual good points about the nature of organized religion.) It’s also surprisingly heartfelt and poignant in parts; you care about the characters, and the story, of course, does have its drama. But still, mainly comedy, nothing too deep. After all, in the afterword the author says he wrote the book to answer the all-important question, “What if Jesus knew kung fu?”