Jesus: The Wonder Years

LAMB: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

By Christopher Moore

444 pages

It’s never easy growing up. Most especially when you are the Savior, and your friend is a doofus named Biff. That’s kind of the premise behind Christopher Moore’s highly entertaining (and certainly not blasphemous) 2002 novel, Lamb.

We begin in Nazareth, where Biff (so nicknamed because of the sound his mother’s hand makes when smacking him across the head) spots Jesus (called Joshua here, after the Hebrew Yeshua) playing with his younger brother, James.

The first time I saw the man who would save the world he was sitting near the central wall in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth.

The young Joshua is practicing a newfound talent for resurrection — his younger brother bashes the lizard to death on the ground with a rock, and Joshua calmly inserts the crushed reptile in his mouth until it springs to life again. Presto! Arise! Repeat as necessary, or until bored.

This display does not exactly convert Biff, a bit of a ne’er-do-well, instantly. “Unclean! Unclean!” he yells to his mother, pointing a finger at Young Jesus. She swats Biff on the head for his trouble.

Naturally, Joshua and Biff become boyhood friends, role-playing parts of the Old Testament (Joshua, with his precocious skills, gets to play God and Moses most of the time), having adventures with bullies and each coming to love the girl known as Mary of Magdalena in their own separate ways.

This is not the type of book that will win over hard-core Catholics. It supposes Biff as a smart-alecky kid who develops a crush on Mary, mother of Joshua (“I think that when I’m a man, and your father dies, I will take your mother as my wife,” he tells Joshua. He gets a smack on the head — one of several — from The Messiah for his impertinence.)

You could call Lamb irreverent at times, but it’s a testimony to the power of Our Hero’s story (“The Greatest Story Ever Told,” after all) that you approach the crude humor with an undercurrent of wistful sadness, knowing too well the outcome — even as Biff, recently raised from the dead by an angel named Raziel to tell his version of the “missing gospel”— does not.

Raziel, like a lot of angels in Lamb, is a pretty boy: a flunky of God who arrives late with crucial information, enjoys destroying cities full of humans “like in the old days” and lately, transplanted to the 21st century where he resurrects Biff from the dead, seems to have developed an addiction to TV soap operas. An angelic airhead, if you will.

Raziel is visiting Earth on a mission: he must persuade Biff to fill in the crucial years of Joshua’s adolescent development, from the time at age 12 when he is first quizzed by relentless Pharisees in the Temple through his journey to the far ends of Asia, where he seeks wisdom from the Three Wise Men — Balthasar, Gaspar and Melchior — who first visited him in the manger.

As we know, those growing-up years are never tackled in the existing gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are completely skipped over, in fact. Thirty years vanish due to editing. But Biff, speaking in the same rapid-fire voice that Moore would later bring to his satirical novel about vampires (You Suck: A Love Story) and demons (Practical Demonkeeping), keeps the story moving along even as it takes turns more resembling Harry Potter or Indiana Jones than the Gospels.

Joshua, it seems, is not quite sure how to be The Messiah, or whether he really is the Son of God. But as the story unfolds, he seeks knowledge of his mission from the three men who were convinced of his holiness from birth.

Balthasar, it turns out, is a 260-year-old prankster with a palace full of Chinese concubines. While Biff enjoys the attentions of the ladies, Joshua learns all he can about his mission on earth. You may think that chapters devoted to Biff getting his knob polished, after which Joshua asks for detailed expositions on the complexities of sin, verge on the blasphemous. Well, actually they do. Moore has it both ways, portraying the Christ as a virtuous, patient and forgiving young man with healing powers — while Biff, the boyhood pal, gets to live out his pre-A.D. adolescent fantasies.

But throughout Lamb, Joshua is never portrayed as other than he is: the Son of God, with typically human qualities coming to terms with his superhuman qualities. His search for meaning is poignant — sifting through Confucian and Buddhist principles, rejecting some, adopting others, ultimately understanding that God resides within each man — a “Divine Spark,” as Joshua calls it, though John the Baptist has another name for it: “Holy Ghost.” (“These people believe in ghosts.”)

A scholarly book? Oh, no. Moore has too much fun mixing action, sex, violence and sarcasm to present any danger that this will be mistaken for a textbook or a true Gospel (though Moore cites many scholarly sources in his afterword, and you will certainly pick up a few tidbits about the history of what is now the Middle East while reading Lamb).

Moore has a great time with the witty repartee, as when Biff first notices the golden aura surrounding Raziel (“Are you sure that’s not stupidity leaking out of you?”), and he never passes up an opportunity to throw in an anachronistic gag line (Joshua to Joseph, after he is forbidden to go to the Temple: “You’re not the boss of me.”).

In parts, Moore mimics the comic rhythms of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which followed not Jesus, but an underachiever named Brian born a few blocks away who also gets swept up in the prophetic times. In others, it seems like an ongoing Abbott and Costello routine, with both Biff and Joshua taking turns playing the straight man.

All of this is what makes Lamb fun, and a wild ride; but it’s the attention to detail and true spirit of the Gospels that make it a moving book. The apostles are given their individual personality quirks (was John really gay? and was Thomas really schizophrenic?), but despite the comic upheavals, all goes pretty much as it has it has been written before — well, except for Biff trying to give Joshua a paralysis potion that he learned about in the mountains of China to fake his death up on the cross, and accidentally hanging Judas. And the part about Jesus knowing kung fu. But, hey: you’ve got to allow a novelist some artistic license.