We finally found John in the desert north of Jericho, preaching on the bank of the Jordan River. His hair was as wild as ever and now he had a beard that was just as out of control. He wore a rough tunic that was belted with a sash of unscraped camel skin. There was a crowd of perhaps five hundred people there, standing in sun so hot that you had to check road signs to make sure you hadn’t accidentally taken the turnoff to hell.

We couldn’t tell what John was talking about from a distance, but as we got closer we heard him say, “No, I’m not the one. I’m just getting things ready. There’s one that’s coming after me, and I’m not qualified to carry his jockstrap.”

“What’s a jockstrap?” Joshua asked.

“It’s an Essene thing,” Bartholomew answered. “They wear them on their manhood, very tightly, to control their sinful urges.”

Then John spotted us over the crowd (we were on camelback). “There!” said John, pointing. “You remember me telling you that one would come. Well, there he is, right there. I’m not kidding, that’s him on the camel. On the left. Behold the Lamb of God!”

The crowd looked back at Josh and me, then laughed politely as if to say, Oh right, he just happened along right when you were talking about him. What, we don’t know from a shill when we see one?

Joshua glanced nervously at me, then at Bart, then at me, then he grinned sheepishly (as one might expect from a lamb) at the crowd. Between gritted teeth he asked, “So am I supposed to give John my jockstrap, or something?”

“Just wave, and say, ‘Go with God,’” Bart said.

“Waving here—waving there,” Josh mumbled through a grin. “Go with God. Thank you very much. Go with God. Nice to see you. Waving—waving.”

“Louder, Josh. We’re the only ones who can hear you.”

Josh turned to us so the crowd couldn’t see his face. “I didn’t know I was going to need a jockstrap! Nobody told me. Jeez, you guys.”

Thus did begin the ministry of Joshua bar Joseph, ish Nazareth, the Lamb of God.

“So, who’s the big guy?” John asked, as we sat around the fire that evening. Night crawled across the desert sky like a black cat with phosphorus dandruff. Bartholomew rolled with his dogs down by the riverbank.

“That’s Bartholomew,” Joshua said. “He’s a Cynic.”

“And the village idiot of Nazareth for over thirty years,” I added. “He gave up his position to follow Joshua.”

“He’s a slut, and he’s the first one baptized in the morning. He stinks. More locusts, Biff?”

“No thanks, I’m full.” I stared down at my bowl of roasted locusts and honey. You were supposed to dip the locusts in the honey for a sweet and nutritious treat. It was all John ate.

“So this Divine Spark, all that time away, that’s what you found?”

“It’s the key to the kingdom, John,” Josh said. “That’s what I learned in the East that I’m supposed to bring to our people, that God is in all of us. We are all brothers in the Divine Spark. I just don’t know how to spread the word.”

“Well, first, you can’t call it the Divine Spark. The people won’t understand it. This thing, it’s in everyone, it’s permanent, it’s a part of God?”

“Not God the creator, my father, the part of God that’s spirit.”

“Holy Ghost,” John said with a shrug. “Call it the Holy Ghost. People understand that a ghost is in you, and they understand that it goes on after you, and you’ll just have to make them believe that it’s God.”

“That’s perfect,” Joshua said, smiling.

“So, this Holy Ghost,” John said, biting a locust in half, “it’s in every Jew, but gentiles don’t have it, right? I mean what’s the point, after the kingdom comes?”

“I was getting to that,” said Josh.

It took John the better part of the night to deal with the fact that Joshua was going to let gentiles into the kingdom, but finally the Baptist accepted it, although he kept looking for exceptions.

“Even sluts?”

“Even sluts,” Joshua said.

“Especially sluts,” I said.

“You’re the one who is cleansing people of their sins so they will be forgiven,” Joshua added.

“I know, but gentile sluts, in the kingdom.” He shook his head, assured now by the Messiah himself that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Which really shouldn’t have surprised him, since that had been his message for over ten years. That, and identifying sluts. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

Shortly after I had met him on the road to Jerusalem, John had joined the Essenes. You couldn’t be born an Essene, because they were all celibate, even in marriage. They also refrained from intoxicating drink, adhered strictly to Jewish dietary law, and were absolutely maniacal about cleansing themselves, physically, of sin, which had been the big selling point for John. They had a thriving community in the desert outside of Jericho called Qumran, a small city of stone and brick homes, a scriptorium for copying scrolls, and aqueducts that ran out of the mountains to fill their ritual baths. A few of them lived in the caves above the Dead Sea where they stored the jars that held their sacred scrolls, but the most zealous of the Essenes, which included John, didn’t even allow themselves the comfort of a cave. He showed us accommodations near his own.

“It’s a pit!” I screamed.

Three pits, to be exact. I suppose there’s something to be said for having a private pit. Bartholomew, with his many canine pals, was already settling into his new pit.

“Oh, John,” Josh said, “remind me to tell you about karma.”

So, for over a year, while Joshua was learning from John how to say the words that would make people follow him, I lived in a pit.

It makes sense, if you think about it. For seventeen years Joshua had spent his time either studying or sitting around being quiet, so what did he know about communicating? The last message he’d gotten from his father was two words, so he wasn’t getting his speaking skills from that side of the family. On the other hand, John had been preaching for those same seventeen years, and that squirrelly bastard could preach. Standing waist deep in the Jordan, he would wave his arms and roll his eyes and stir the air with a sermon that would make you believe the clouds were going to open and the hand of God Hisownself was going to reach down, grab you by the balls, and shake you till the evil rattled out of you like loose baby teeth. An hour of John’s preaching and you were not only lining up to be baptized, you’d jump right in the river and try to breathe the bottom muck just to be relieved of your own wretchedness.

Joshua watched, and listened, and learned. John was an absolute believer in who Joshua was and what he was going to do, as far as he understood, anyway, but the Baptist worried me. John was attracting the attention of Herod Antipas. Herod had married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodia, without her obtaining a divorce, which was forbidden by Jewish law, an absolute outrage by the more severe laws of the Essenes, and a subject that fit well into John’s pervasive “slut” theme. I was starting to notice soldiers from Herod’s personal guard hovering around the edge of John’s crowds when he preached.

I confronted the Baptist one evening when he came out of the wilderness in one of his evangelical rages to ambush me, Joshua, Bartholomew, and a new guy as we sat around eating our locusts.

“Slut!” John shouted with his “thunder of Elijah” voice, waving a finger under Bart’s nose.

“Yeah, John, Bartholomew’s been getting laid a lot,” I said, evangelizing for sarcasm.

“Almost,” said Bart.

“I mean with another human being, Bart.”

“Oh. Sorry. Never mind.”

John wheeled on the new guy, who put his hands up. “I’m new,” he said.

Thus rebuked, John spun to face Joshua.