“Yep,” I said. I shoved him backward over the cliff and caught the end of the sash as it tightened around the branch. The sash twanged when it took his weight and his neck snapped with the sound of a knuckle cracking. I let go of the sash and Judas’ body fell into the darkness. The boom of thunder concealed the sound of impact.

The anger ran out of me then, leaving me feeling as if my very bones were losing their structure. I looked forward, straight over the Ben Hinnon valley, into a sheet of lightning-bleached rain. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I stepped off the cliff. I felt a bolt of pain, and then nothing.

That’s all I remember.

The angel took the book from him, then went out the door and across the hall, where he knocked on the door. “He’s finished,” the angel said to someone in the room.

“What, you’re leaving? I can just go?” asked Levi who was called Biff.

The door across the hall opened, and there stood another angel, this one seeming to have more a female aspect than Raziel. She too held a book. She stepped into the hall to reveal a woman standing behind her, wearing jeans and a green cotton blouse. Her hair was long and straight, dark with reddish highlights, and her eyes were crystal blue and seemed to glow in contrast to her dark skin.

“Maggie,” said Levi.

“Hi, Biff.”

“Maggie finished her Gospel weeks ago,” said Raziel.

“Really?”

The Magdalene smiled. “Well, I didn’t have as much to write as you did. I didn’t see you guys for sixteen years.”

“Oh, right.”

“It is the will of the Son that you two go out together into this new world,” said the female angel.

Levi went across the hall and took her in his arms. They kissed for a long time until the angels began to clear their throats and murmur “Get a room” under their breaths.

They held each other at arm’s length. Levi said, “Maggie, is this going to be like it always was? You know, you’re with me, and you love me and everything, but it’s only because you can’t have Josh?”

“Of course.”

“That’s so pathetic.”

“You don’t want to be together?”

“No, I want to, it’s just pathetic.”

“I have money,” she said. “They gave me money.”

“That’s good.”

“Go,” said Raziel, losing his patience. “Go, go, go. Go away.” He pointed down the hallway.

They started walking down the hallway, arm in arm, tentatively, looking back at the angels every few steps, until at last they looked back and the angels were gone.

“You should have stuck around,” the Magdalene said.

“I couldn’t. It hurt too much.”

“He came back.”

“I know, I read about it.”

“He was sad because of what you had done.”

“Yeah, so was I.”

“The others were angry with you. They said that you had the greatest reason to believe.”

“That why they edited me out of their Gospels?”

“Good guess,” she said.

They stepped into the elevator and the Magdalene pushed the button for the lobby. “By the way, it was Hallowed,” she said.

“What was Hallowed?”

“The H. His middle name. It was Hallowed. It’s a family name, remember, ‘Our father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’”

“Damn, I would have guessed Harvey,” Biff said.

Can you really teach yoga to an elephant? Well no, you can’t, but we’re talking about Jesus here. Nobody knows what he could do.

The book you’ve just read is a story. I made it up. It is not designed to change anyone’s beliefs or worldview, unless after reading it you’ve decided to be kinder to your fellow humans (which is okay), or you decide you really would like to try to teach yoga to an elephant, in which case, please get videotape.

I researched Lamb, I really did, but there is no doubt I could have spent decades researching and still managed to be inaccurate. (It’s a talent, what can I say?) While I’ve made some attempt to paint an accurate picture of the world in which Christ lived, I changed things for my own convenience, and sometimes, obviously, there was no way of knowing what conditions really existed in the years 1 through 33.

The available written history about the peasant class, society, and the practice of Judaism in the first century in Galilee degenerates quickly into theory. The role of the Pharisees in peasant society, the Hellenistic influence, the influence of an international city like Joppa nearby: who knows how these things would have affected Christ as a boy? Some historians postulate that Yeshua of Nazareth would have been little more than an ignorant hillbilly, while others say that because of the proximity of Sepphoris and Joppa, he could have been exposed to Greek and Roman culture from an early age. I chose the latter because it makes for a more interesting story.

The historical life of Jesus, beyond a couple of references by Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, and the odd mention by Roman historians, is again mostly speculation. What we can know today of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is included in the four slim Gospels found in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For those readers who know the Gospels (bear with me), you know that Matthew and Luke are the only two to mention Christ’s birth, while Mark and John cover only the ministry part of Jesus’ life. The wise men are mentioned only in one short passage in Matthew, and the shepherds are mentioned only in Luke. The slaughter of the innocents and the fleeing into Egypt are mentioned only in Matthew. In short, Jesus’ infancy is a jumble, but the chronicle of his childhood is worse. Of the time from Jesus’ birth to when he began his ministry in his thirties, the Bible gives us only one scene: Luke tells us of Jesus teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem at age twelve. Other than that, we have a thirty-year hole in the life of the most influential human being to ever walk the face of the earth. With Lamb, in my own goofy way, I attempted to fill that hole in history, but again, I am not trying to present history as it might really have been, I’m simply telling stories.

Some of the historical elements of Lamb are uncomfortable to work the modern mind around. The precocious sexuality comes to mind. That Maggie would have been betrothed by twelve and married by thirteen is almost certain from what we know of Jewish society in the first century, as are the facts that a Jewish boy of the time would have been learning his trade by age ten, would be betrothed at thirteen, and would be married by fourteen. Trying to create empathy for the adult roles of those whom we, today, would consider children, was of no small concern to me when I was writing that section of the book, but it may be the one section where the sexuality of the characters is not historically out of place. The average peasant in Galilee would have been lucky to live to the age of forty, so perhaps the children, by necessity, reached sexual maturity earlier than they would under less harsh conditions.

Although there are, I’m sure, many historical inaccuracies and improbabilities in this book, the most blatant that I have knowingly indulged is in the section where Biff and Joshua visit Gaspar in the mountains of China. While Gautama Buddha did indeed live and teach some five hundred years before the birth of Christ, and while his teachings were widespread in India by the time our heroes could have made it to the East, Buddhism didn’t make it into China for almost five hundred years after Christ’s death. The martial arts would not be developed by Buddhist monks until after that, but to remain historically accurate, I would have had to leave out an important question that I felt needed to be addressed, which is, “What if Jesus had known kung fu?”