The idea of coming in contact with blood clearly terrified Joshua, as it would any Jewish boy. “Give them James, Abba, he is your first son.”

Joseph shot a glance my way, to see if I had reacted. I had, but it was because I was considering my own status as a first son, hoping that my father wasn’t thinking along the same lines. “James is a second son. The priests don’t want second sons. It will have to be you.”

Joshua looked at me before he answered, then back at his father. Then he smiled. “But Abba, if you should die, who will take care of Mother if I am at the Temple?”

“Someone will look after her,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“I will not die for a long time.” Joseph tugged at his gray beard. “My beard goes white, but there’s a lot of life in me yet.”

“Don’t be so sure, Abba,” Joshua said.

Joseph dropped the bowl he was working on and stared into his hands. “Run along and play, you two,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Joshua stood and walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around the old man, for I had never seen a grown man afraid before and it frightened me too. “Can I help?” I said, pointing to the half-finished bowl that lay in Joseph’s lap.

“You go with Joshua. He needs a friend to teach him to be human. Then I can teach him to be a man.”

The angel wants me to convey more of Joshua’s grace. Grace? I’m trying to write about a six-year-old, for Christ’s sakes, how much grace could he have? It’s not like Joshua walked around professing that he was the Son of God every day of the week. He was a pretty normal kid, for the most part. There was the trick he did with the lizards, and once we found a dead meadowlark and he brought it back to life, and there was the time, when we were eight, when he healed his brother Judah’s fractured skull after a game of “stone the adulteress” got out of hand. (Judah could never get the knack of being an adulteress. He’d stand there stiff as Lot’s wife. You can’t do that. An adulteress has to be wily and nimble-footed.) The miracles Joshua performed were small and quiet, as miracles tend to be, once you get used to them. But trouble came from the miracles that happened around him, without his volition, as it were. Bread and serpents come to mind.

It was a few days before the Passover feast, and many of the families of Nazareth were not making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that year. There had been little rain through our winter season, so it was going to be a hard year. Many farmers could not afford the time away from their fields to travel to and from the holy city. My father and Joshua’s were both working in Sepphoris, and the Romans wouldn’t give them time off work beyond the actual feast days. My mother had been making the unleavened bread when I came in from playing in the square.

She held a dozen sheets of the flatbread before her and she looked as if she was going to dash it to the floor any second. “Biff, where is your friend Joshua?” My little brothers grinned at me from behind her skirts.

“At home, I suppose. I just left him.”

“What have you boys been doing?”

“Nothing.” I tried to remember if I had done anything that should make her this angry, but nothing came to mind. It was a rare day and I’d made no trouble. Both my little brothers were unscathed as far as I knew.

“What have you done to cause this?” She held out a sheet of the flatbread, and there, in crispy brown relief on the golden crust, was the image of my friend Joshua’s face. She snatched up another sheet of bread, and there, again, was my friend Josh. Graven images—big sin. Josh was smiling. Mother frowned on smiling. “Well? Do I need to go to Joshua’s house and ask his poor, insane mother?”

“I did this. I put Joshua’s face on the bread.” I just hoped that she didn’t ask me how I had done it.

“Your father will punish you when he comes home this evening. Now go, get out of here.”

I could hear my little brother’s giggling as I slunk out the door, but once outside, things worsened. Women were coming away from their baking stones, and each held a sheet of unleavened bread, and each was muttering some variation of “Hey, there’s a kid on my bread.”

I ran to Joshua’s house and stormed in without knocking. Joshua and his brothers were at the table eating. Mary was nursing Joshua’s newest little sister, Miriam.

“You are in big trouble,” I whispered in Josh’s ear with enough force to blow out an eardrum.

Joshua held up the flatbread he was eating and grinned, just like the face on his bread. “It’s a miracle.”

“Tastes good too,” said James, crunching a corner off of his brother’s head.

“It’s all over town, Joshua. Not just your house. Everyone’s bread has your face on it.”

“He is truly the Son of God,” Mary said with a beatific smile.

“Oh, jeez, Mother,” James said.

“Yeah, jeez Mom,” said Judah.

“His mug is all over the Passover feast. We have to do something.” They didn’t seem to get the gravity of the situation. I was already in trouble, and my mother didn’t even suspect anything supernatural. “We have to cut your hair.”

“What?”

“We cannot cut his hair,” Mary said. She had always let Joshua wear his hair long, like an Essene, saying that he was a Nazarite like Samson. It was just another reason why many of the townspeople thought her mad. The rest of us wore our hair cut short, like the Greeks who had ruled our country since the time of Alexander, and the Romans after them.

“If we cut his hair he looks like the rest of us. We can say it’s someone else on the bread.”

“Moses,” Mary said. “Young Moses.”

“Yes!”

“I’ll get a knife.”

“James, Judah, come with me,” I said. “We have to tell the town that the face of Moses has come to visit us for the Passover feast.”

Mary pulled Miriam from her breast, bent, and kissed me on the forehead. “You are a good friend, Biff.”

I almost melted in my sandals, but I caught Joshua frowning at me. “It’s not the truth,” he said.

“It will keep the Pharisees from judging you.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” said the nine-year-old. “I didn’t do this to the bread.”

“Then why take the blame and the punishment for it?”

“I don’t know, seems like I should, doesn’t it?”

“Sit still so your mother can cut your hair.” I dashed out the door, Judah and James on my heels, the three of us bleating like spring lambs.

“Behold! Moses has put his face on the bread for Passover! Behold!”

Miracles. She kissed me. Holy Moses on a matzo! She kissed me.

The miracle of the serpent? It was an omen, in a way, although I can only say that because of what happened between Joshua and the Pharisees later on. At the time, Joshua thought it was the fulfillment of a prophecy, or that’s how we tried to sell it to his mother and father.

It was late summer and we were playing in a wheat field outside of town when Joshua found the nest of vipers.

“A nest of vipers,” Joshua shouted. The wheat was so tall I couldn’t see where he was calling from.

“A pox on your family,” I replied.

“No, there’s a nest of vipers over here. Really.”

“Oh, I thought you were taunting me. Sorry, a pox off of your family.”

“Come, see.”

I crashed through the wheat to find Joshua standing by a pile of stones a farmer had used to mark the boundary of his field. I screamed and backpedaled so quickly that I lost my balance and fell. A knot of snakes writhed at Joshua’s feet, skating over his sandals and wrapping themselves around his ankles. “Joshua, get away from there.”

“They won’t hurt me. It says so in Isaiah.”

“Just in case they haven’t read the Prophets…”

Joshua stepped aside, sending the snakes scattering, and there, behind him, was the biggest cobra I had ever seen. It reared up until it was taller than my friend, spreading a hood like a cloak.